The New "Stellar Phenomenon" - A Week Within

[Qohen Leth]

I understand that it may be very early to raise the matter, but since the Elite community has always been extremely quick to uncover the new stuff after a release, the last few days have me slightly concerned.

My question is: has anyone seen an actual stellar phenomenon?

We have been told about "new stellar phenomenon" (plural?) for a while but so far, coloured clouds and fantasy 3D assets that shine or buzz don't really qualify.

On top of that, a quick look at the Codex and I see reports in various regions, however all coming from the same nebula/planetary nebula within that region. I'm currently scouting in the Normal Expanse, and after 30 systems or so in a different nebula, I found nothing. I'm visiting a few PNs right now, nothing yet. What gives? Does the Codex list only the first location reported for each kind in each region, or have these phenomena actually only been found in a single location in each region so far?

And finally, I'm not sure I understand the point of this apparent rarity. Since the discoveries are shared in the Codex, anybody can go visit them, which --to me-- undermines the search for rares. It only leaves most players with a location to travel to, and we're mostly back to tourism. It also seems that these phenomena spawn in nebulae/PNs and real catalogue stars, which were already POIs in their own right. I was hoping for the new content to fill the very empty space in between, and not add another layer to our known POIs...

Again, it's probably way too early to draw trends, but after 15kly of nothing this weekend, I'm a bit dubious. This new content looks like a bust for explorers who --like me-- hoped for actual stellar and astronomical phenomenon.

Please tell me I'm overreacting

 

[Edelgard von Rhein]

The Codex only seems to list the first location a particular object of any type was found in a particular region, rather than giving you a list of them. It does add your own first finding to that but no more. The total number of reported and confirmed sightings for each object are given on a per-region basis in the picture for the object type (no rumoured findings anywhere yet). This means you can go and visit one site of interest in a region but you will be missing out on potentially very many more and will have to look yourself, so it does not reveal everything to everyone - you cannot look up Earth-like Worlds and get a list of them in a region, for example. So I'll continue to make notes on what I find rather than relying on the Codex to store it all.

 

[Erimus Kamzel]

My question is: has anyone seen an actual stellar phenomenon?

Not seen any actual stellar phenomena. I'm not sure if FDs labeling is off a bit here, as one would think "stellar phenomena" would be more akin to new star types or environmental behaviors (like massive CMA's, accretion disks, radiation belts to navigate through etc)? Stellar phenomena so far has been about finding stuff like metallic crystal POIs, one of which i found in an asteroid belt, so not really 'stellar' phenomena, more like planetary phenomena.

My issue so far is not having the ability to harvest anything from these new discoveries - at least the ones I've found (Anemones and Metallic Crystals... maybe I'm doing something wrong?). But if there's no gameplay involved once you find something - except a quick scan for a Codex entry, then I think the novelty will soon wear off. Would've been far more interesting if the new resource extraction gameplay like we have for asteroid mining was incorporated into breaking open some of these metallic crystals, mineral spheres, or lattice spheres (for example) and extracting ultra rare elements that could be taken to a materials trader who will trade them for engineers components. I've heard some of the content can be hazardous to your ship, so maybe there is something there that can be collected or harvested? (risk vs reward etc...).

 

[dognosh]

The Codex only seems to list the first location a particular object of any type was found in a particular region, rather than giving you a list of them. It does add your own first finding to that but no more. The total number of reported and confirmed sightings for each object are given on a per-region basis in the picture for the object type (no rumoured findings anywhere yet). This means you can go and visit one site of interest in a region but you will be missing out on potentially very many more and will have to look yourself, so it does not reveal everything to everyone - you cannot look up Earth-like Worlds and get a list of them in a region, for example. So I'll continue to make notes on what I find rather than relying on the Codex to store it all.

So the Codex is a pointless records log ?

 

[marx]

I don't think you're overreacting. Content-wise, the update seems to be quite lacking: most of what we can find is what was already there. For me, it's especially a pity, because before the update, I said that whether or not I'll retire from exploration will depend on if the added stuff is worth it to offset the worse tools. So far, it doesn't look like it is.

Well, yes: "stellar phenomenon" seems to cover everything, even non-stellar stuff. One could argue that the Lagrangian clouds are technically stellar phenomena, but it's much harder to defend POIs found within rings as being stellar phenomena. I liked the lifeform stuff, not so much the ball lightning anomalies, which inch towards "space magic" territory just a bit too close for my liking. But I digress.

I'm fairly certain I recall that on a couple of livestreams, Frontier promised that they have seeded the galaxy with megaships and deep space installations to find. Those aren't listed on the Codex, but five days in, I've yet to hear of any being found. It's difficult enough to tell how many - and where - Lagrangian clouds have been found so far, what with the Codex listing only the first per region, but it seems that in general, outside of nebulae and plot-designated areas, they are very rare - and only seem to be proto-Lagrangian clouds.

I can't say I didn't expect this, because I said I did: seeing how minimal content the previous two minor content updates had, it was entirely a possibility. Shame it turned out this way so far though. I hope it's just a case of Frontier forgetting to turn them on. (I heard a conspiracy theory that they're leaving some stuff out until DW2 gets underway, but honestly, I really hope that's not going to be true.) Then there's also that the Codex might also not be registering some types of finds. With all the confirmed bugs around, it wouldn't surprise me.


Also:

I've heard some of the content can be hazardous to your ship, so maybe there is something there that can be collected or harvested? (risk vs reward etc...).

The space balls can't be scooped up, and research limpets can't latch onto them either. Maybe they can be shot, I didn't have weapons to try that with.

 

[Orvidius]

Yeah, I've noticed the trend too. I think by "stellar phenomena" they just mean that it's in space, rather than on a planet's surface. A confusing label, to be sure. But I too would love to have seen accretion discs, and other notable astronomical phenomena. Maybe they'll still add that later.

I have found (so far) one system with lagrange clouds that was in the middle of nowhere, away from nebulae. It was early on, so I didn't take note of where it was, but the codex might have recorded where I confirmed that find. I think it was a proto-lagrange cloud, with crystals but no other lifeforms.

I haven't stumbled on any surface biology yet, but I'm not specifically hunting for it right now, and not always waiting for the POI scans to complete anyway, since they're all geological so far. The exception being when I want to land anyway, so I'll wait until I do find some interesting geology.

Since I've been doing travel-exploration (mainly to get some map coordinates for region boundary intersections), and not an exhaustive search, I don't know how representative my sample is yet.

The codex strikes me as a sort of "bucket list" for explorers who want to know what's out there to see, and then go see it. It could also be a method to roll out new phenomena in the future, but we have no idea what may be added down the line.

 

[Erimus Kamzel]

The space balls can't be scooped up, and research limpets can't latch onto them either. Maybe they can be shot, I didn't have weapons to try that with.

This is what worries me then, if there's no interaction other than a shiny screenshot and Codex scan, then I honestly feel the whole thing will become a short-lived novelty. Unless of course FD have thrown us a curve ball and have seeded ungodly amounts of unique stuff out there that has far more practical relevance going for it.

 

[marx]

Oh, one more thing I forgot. Personally, I'm bothered that we can't see the new clouds in supercruise, they only pop into being when you drop down to them. Sure, it's a small thing, but it's yet another clue that the exploration update was rushed.

Speaking of which, the icy planet revamp could have been the best part of the update, what with adding new proc. gen. environments to the galaxy. Guess which exploration part had to be postponed?

 

[Orvidius]

I think the L-clouds are small enough that I'm OK with them not rendering in SC. It's easy to forget just how vast the distances are, and how even at "zero throttle" we're still moving at 30 km/s. They probably should be visible at minimum speed, for a few seconds, if you flew right to it. I'm assuming this has been attempted?

I did try weapons on the Q-Type anomalies. Mining laser and rail guns. No effect. A friend was in multicrew and tried the SLF. Also no effect.

 

[Edelgard von Rhein]

There have been huge numbers of installations and megaships added - most populated systems have at least one or two around and the more populated a system is, the more it seems to get. I have not yet investigated them, as I'm not sure if they are all about the attack/defend scenarios that I have not wanted to get into yet (been exploring and other things). The fact that they have been procedurally generated, (since there are just so many of them, they must have been) also discourages me from investigating at random, as they are now 'routine' rather then unusual findings and I do not expect them to further any plot lines. I do still keep an eye out for any with odd names or in odd places, especially just beyond the frontier, as I expect Generation Ships might appear in that way.
.
I encountered a pair of proto-Lagrange Clouds in the Blanco 1 cluster (about 1 KLY away from the Bubble, with some systems with unusual names, e.g. Odin's Wisdom, McBurney's Point) and also found biological life on the surface of several planets and moons in one system (despite the temperature being over 1700K in one case). It's not just nebulae that harbour the new content, at least. I tried using a research limpet on some Gourd Molluscs but they just bounce off and I tried scooping one but failed. I did not have a Xeno Scanner; something else to try. That said, they did seem to respond to my movement: if I approached one slowly, it would move closer to me, even follow me a little if I backed away. If I collided with it, it would squirt out something and speed off. I think the nature of our interactions with some of these new life forms are not going to be very straightforward - it may not just be a case of having the right equipment. (No, I didn't have the heart to shoot at any of them!)

 

[Qohen Leth]

But if there's no gameplay involved once you find something - except a quick scan for a Codex entry, then I think the novelty will soon wear off.

My fear and thoughts as well. Open Reddit, look at screenies, leave the ship in the hangar.

I liked the lifeform stuff, not so much the ball lightning anomalies, which inch towards "space magic" territory just a bit too close for my liking. But I digress.

Yeah, it's amusing, but it feels like the intrusion of fantasy alien stuff in an otherwise 'realistic' (as possible) and accurate Galaxy. I don't mind the Thargoid and Guardian stuff, cause they are clearly their own universe, added in the Galaxy, but these anomalies are a sort of in-between that make the galaxy slightly creep towards something like a cartoon. And there are no somewhat scientific phenomena to counterbalance those gimmicks.

I'm fairly certain I recall that on a couple of livestreams, Frontier promised that they have seeded the galaxy with megaships and deep space installations to find. Those aren't listed on the Codex, but five days in, I've yet to hear of any being found. It's difficult enough to tell how many - and where - Lagrangian clouds have been found so far, what with the Codex listing only the first per region, but it seems that in general, outside of nebulae and plot-designated areas, they are very rare - and only seem to be proto-Lagrangian clouds.

Hmmm. What with the Codex being its own problem, I guess these "Rumours" will be rolled out later on, if ever (maybe they're still fixing bugs?). I tend to not trust FD's promises at this point

I'm sure if we had had a few explorers invited over at FD HQ instead of only marketable people, maybe some aspects of this release wouldn't have been overlooked as they seem to be presently...

EDIT: I've visted 2 more PNs, nothing. I reached another nebula, will scout until the evening...

 

[Qohen Leth]

It's pointless as a records log, if you mean that. Or it has a point that has yet to be discovered...

As I understand it currently, it's the tip of a Codex, failing both on a global/shared level and on a personal/Cmdr level. In a few weeks it'll probably be as filled as it'll ever be and only the numbers of occurences will change.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Personally, I'm bothered that we can't see the new clouds in supercruise, they only pop into being when you drop down to them.

They're pretty small, but they can be seen from supercruise if you get close enough - the skybox gets tinted their colour as you pass near/through them.

Most people will have dropped out of SC long before then to take a look in real-space, of course. I noticed this one when a supercruise drop took rather longer than it should have...

This is what worries me then, if there's no interaction other than a shiny screenshot and Codex scan, then I honestly feel the whole thing will become a short-lived novelty. Unless of course FD have thrown us a curve ball and have seeded ungodly amounts of unique stuff out there that has far more practical relevance going for it.

There's trait discovery. That potentially adds a lot of levels beyond "seen it, scanned it, bored now". Very much like the early analysis of UA behaviour, except that the game actually recognises it internally - and tells other people about the discovery, too, by adding it to their codex.

For example, the local umbrella molluscs appear to have three traits, which can be discovered by getting them to do something and scanning them again while they do it. So far as I can tell most exploration ships should be able to discover two of these traits ... while more specialist equipment (which I happened to have with me) is needed for the third.

Looking through the codex, most deep space life has exactly zero traits discovered so far. Well, fine, we're probably still in the "ooh, new shiny" stage, and not at the "can I get it to do a trick?" stage yet.

Less interactive, but still science, the more examples of a type of space life are found, the more information accumulates about its habitat - where is it found, where is it *not* found, etc. That's something you won't get added to just by going to the ones someone else has already found.

It wouldn't completely surprise me either if there's additional types of information which aren't in the Codex at all yet, because no-one's done the right thing to discover them.



Now, if explorers have been trained by versions 1.0 to 3.2 to expect no interaction between a screenshot and codex voucher ... well, that would be a shame, since Frontier seem to have implemented rather more than that. And if most explorers have been trained by those versions to leave all the science equipment in the hangar as "too much weight", that would also be a shame. But perhaps a new group of xenobiologists and xenogeologists will take their place at discovering things.

 

[Qohen Leth]

Now, if explorers have been trained by versions 1.0 to 3.2 to expect no interaction between a screenshot and codex voucher ... well, that would be a shame, since Frontier seem to have implemented rather more than that. And if most explorers have been trained by those versions to leave all the science equipment in the hangar as "too much weight", that would also be a shame. But perhaps a new group of xenobiologists and xenogeologists will take their place at discovering things.

Since the first Lagrange Clouds discovered in beta explorers have tried to interact with thses things -- with weapons, by poking, by blasting the headlights on them (that's what makes the pods fart away) -- so I'm confident such tricks would be quickly found.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Since the first Lagrange Clouds discovered in beta explorers have tried to interact with thses things -- with weapons, by poking, by blasting the headlights on them (that's what makes the pods fart away) -- so I'm confident such tricks would be quickly found.

They haven't been yet, though - and I think a lot of the beta interactions with them were broken (intentionally or otherwise), since you couldn't composition-scan them then.

 

[Qohen Leth]

They haven't been yet, though - and I think a lot of the beta interactions with them were broken (intentionally or otherwise), since you couldn't composition-scan them then.

True. I'm just not confident at all in the whole 'we haven't uncovered everything yet'.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

True. I'm just not confident at all in the whole 'we haven't uncovered everything yet'.

I'm dead certain, based on what's currently in the Codex - and also what isn't in the Codex when other things are - that we haven't uncovered everything yet.

It's always going to be tricky for Frontier to produce content faster than thousands of explorers can consume it, but I think there's probably at least a few months here before everything gets found and fully analysed, especially in the less-travelled regions.

 

[Spaceman Si]

Yeah, it's amusing, but it feels like the intrusion of fantasy alien stuff in an otherwise 'realistic' (as possible) and accurate Galaxy. I don't mind the Thargoid and Guardian stuff, cause they are clearly their own universe, added in the Galaxy, but these anomalies are a sort of in-between that make the galaxy slightly creep towards something like a cartoon. And there are no somewhat scientific phenomena to counterbalance those gimmicks.



Hmmm. What with the Codex being its own problem, I guess these "Rumours" will be rolled out later on, if ever (maybe they're still fixing bugs?). I tend to not trust FD's promises at this point .

I'm not keen on the fantasy alien life either. The fact that they all look like sea-life makes me wonder if there was an attempt to appeal to the sub-nautica crowd. Thankfully, they are locked up inside those Lagrange clouds, so I can choose to ignore them if I wish, and get on with enjoying the other more realistic aspects of the wonderful galaxy model.

"Stellar phenomena" appears to be Frontier's catch-all title for "Things in Space", which is highly misleading, as I was expecting proplyds, contact accretation disks, etc for example.

I'm not sure if it is just me, but the Codex seems more like a catalogue of stuff to find rather than anything else. I actually can't see a list of the things I've found in it, though it claims that I have found a certain number of items, I've no idea how to make it show me the list of where and what those things are! The things I have "confirmed" rarely tie up with the locations I have actually found them in, and it only seems to list a single location for confirmation. I'm willing to accept that I just don't know how to use it, but it doesn't make itself obvious!

 

[Qohen Leth]

I checked in my journals and the stellar phen... I'll just call them notable phenomena now, are there. So our cherished third-party apps devs will probably have web databases of those soon enough.

 

[Allitnil]

I'm not keen on the fantasy alien life either.

Nor me. Is there any scientific basis for any of it? The whole idea of complex life (ie anything much over molecular level) in vacuum seems pure fantasy.

I'm not sure if it is just me, but the Codex seems more like a catalogue of stuff to find rather than anything else.

FDev certainly seems to equate "exploration" with "sight seeing". It all appears to be about encouraging people to post screenshots to entice more people to buy the game.