How much of the Galaxy has been explored?

Frankymole

Frankymole
Even if EDSM (which not everyone uses) underestimates by a factor of (say) ten, humans have still visited less than 0.0075% of the Galaxy. At this rate it will take over 53,000 years to finish the job.

And that's just visiting systems - actually probing and mapping all the bodies will take even longer, as even less of it has been done so far.

[video=youtube_share;dADpZZWhQz8]https://youtu.be/dADpZZWhQz8[/video]
 

Captain Thea Kreutzer

Captain Thea Kreutzer
It will take a long time yes but I doubt it will take that long. Just think of how many systems you have jumped into and multiply that by every explorer. I doubt we will explore every system before the next game but we will get quite a few.
 

Han Zulu

Han Zulu
Captain Thea Kreutzer said:
It will take a long time yes but I doubt it will take that long. Just think of how many systems you have jumped into and multiply that by every explorer. I doubt we will explore every system before the next game but we will get quite a few.
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Actually, it will take a long time. Just by looking at the numbers, you can see it.

4 billion stars in the Elite galaxy, that's 4,000,000,000. So far about 30,000,000 have been recorded on EDSM, and about 1,000,000 new ones each month. With about 3,970,000,000 stars to still go, and only doing 1 million a month, That's 3,970 months right there.

But maybe i'm missing something, so let me know if I did.
 
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iain666

iain666
Captain Thea Kreutzer said:
Just think of how many systems you have jumped into and multiply that by every explorer
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I've jumped into nearly 60,000. That's more than most. Compared to 400,000,000,000 it's nothing. A rounding error. Ten million people as prolific as me, with no duplication at all (a feat in itself) would only be a seventh of the way to visiting every system. At my current rate it would take me 27 million years to do it single handed.

Four hundred billion might be bigger than you think it is.

Han Zulu said:
But maybe i'm missing something, so let me know if I did.
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Two orders of magnitude, it's four hundred billion. Not just four.
 
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Captain Thea Kreutzer

Captain Thea Kreutzer
Han Zulu said:
Actually, it will take a long time. Just by looking at the numbers, you can see it.

4 billion stars in the Elite galaxy, that's 4,000,000,000. So far about 30,000,000 have been recorded on EDSM, and about 1,000,000 new ones each month. With about 3,970,000,000 stars to still go, and only doing 1 million a month, That's 3,970 months right there.

But maybe i'm missing something, so let me know if I did.
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If your calculations are correct thats only 330 years :p alot less then what op said
 

Micha

Micha
Captain Thea Kreutzer said:
It will take a long time yes but I doubt it will take that long. Just think of how many systems you have jumped into and multiply that by every explorer. I doubt we will explore every system before the next game but we will get quite a few.
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You seriously underestimate the numbers.

Say you manage one jump every minute on average (that's just "honk-and-jump" with the occasional longer jump for fuel scooping, not even checking the FSS for anything "interesting").

Say you actively play 4 hours every day on average, doing nothing else. In that time you will visit 240 Systems.

Say you play 300 days a year, that's 72,000 Systems.

Play for 10 years, that's 720,000 Systems.

Now let's say 10,000 Commanders do nothing else. I doubt we have more than a couple of hundred dedicated and active explorers in reality outside of some expeditions.

We've now visited, not explored, 7.2 billion Systems. The Galaxy contains 400 billion. So yeah, we've got 1.8% of all Systems visited under these assumptions and that's assuming that every single one of those jumps is into a never-before-visited system.

In reality, most Commanders aren't explorers and thus won't be visiting new systems. Even of the ones that venture out of the Bubble, I daresay the majority either go to well-established places (Guardian Ruins, Pleiades, perhaps as far as Colonia or SagA* or a nebula) instead of blazing fresh trails.

Of the explorers, most spend much longer on average in each system - unless travelling at speed, most will at least check the FSS and possibly scan the system. They will also need to plot routes etc.

----

Having said that, the "interesting places" of the Galaxy have, if not fully explored, at least been visited. I doubt you will find any untagged nebula and unless jump-ranges get a bump again at some point, all the extremes (highest/lowest/furthest) places have been tagged.

That's not to say we won't still find some cool stuff in-between, but it's getting more and more difficult to make a name for yourself in exploration.

It's really a shame it was made too easy. Apart from sheer endurance, there's no real skill involved to go the distance.
 

Han Zulu

Han Zulu
Captain Thea Kreutzer said:
If your calculations are correct thats only 330 years :p alot less then what op said
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I just got corrected, it's not 4 billion as I said, but 400 billions. 100 times more, which makes 33,000 years. That's close enough. They're just estimates anyway.

Actually, let's make the calculations again.

400,000,000,000 - 33,000,000 (so far) = 399,967,000,000 (still undocumented)
399,967,000,000 / 1,000,000 (avg new discoveries / month ) = 399,967 months = 33,330 years

Or, let's say we should to discover them all within 10 years, we have to discover 3 billion a month. That's step up of 3000 times faster than we do it today.

Let's say there's 1 million players, they have to find 3000 each per month. That's 100 new systems per day. And on top of that, consider diminishing returns of the fact that the more systems are found, the harder it is to find the ones inside. They become smaller and smaller needles in an ever growing stack.

(Disclaimer, maybe I screwed up numbers again. Just let me know. :))
 
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Captain Thea Kreutzer

Captain Thea Kreutzer
Micha said:
You seriously underestimate the numbers.

Say you manage one jump every minute on average (that's just "honk-and-jump" with the occasional longer jump for fuel scooping, not even checking the FSS for anything "interesting").

Say you actively play 4 hours every day on average, doing nothing else. In that time you will visit 240 Systems.

Say you play 300 days a year, that's 72,000 Systems.

Play for 10 years, that's 720,000 Systems.

Now let's say 10,000 Commanders do nothing else. I doubt we have more than a couple of hundred dedicated and active explorers in reality outside of some expeditions.

We've now visited, not explored, 7.2 billion Systems. The Galaxy contains 400 billion. So yeah, we've got 1.8% of all Systems visited under these assumptions and that's assuming that every single one of those jumps is into a never-before-visited system.

In reality, most Commanders aren't explorers and thus won't be visiting new systems. Even of the ones that venture out of the Bubble, I daresay the majority either go to well-established places (Guardian Ruins, Pleiades, perhaps as far as Colonia or SagA* or a nebula) instead of blazing fresh trails.

Of the explorers, most spend much longer on average in each system - unless travelling at speed, most will at least check the FSS and possibly scan the system. They will also need to plot routes etc.

----

Having said that, the "interesting places" of the Galaxy have, if not fully explored, at least been visited. I doubt you will find any untagged nebula and unless jump-ranges get a bump again at some point, all the extremes (highest/lowest/furthest) places have been tagged.

That's not to say we won't still find some cool stuff in-between, but it's getting more and more difficult to make a name for yourself in exploration.

It's really a shame it was made too easy. Apart from sheer endurance, there's no real skill involved to go the distance.
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Pretty much all i do when playing this game is exploration so i understand how much easier it is. But thats part of the reason I think it will go by much quicker. The most amount of systems Ive gotten on one save before resetting is around 20,000 systems. On my current save which i started a month before chapter 4 is at 6,000 systems. If more CMDRs start exploring which they have since DW2 then that number will go down rather quickly.

Old save
25jcvbc.png


Current save
30mr0uf.png


That said I know it will take a long time but it definetly wont take as long as op said.
 
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Cmdr Beteran

Cmdr Beteran
How many of those systems are technically unreachable at the moment, roughly? (due to being over jumping capacities or behind permit locks)
 

Marco Santos

Marco Santos
im new to the game but ive been more inclined to the exploration part of it than the other stuff and i gotta say, it is kinda frustating and makes u wonder when u see everything tagged already by another player and nothing new for u to get, unless u have the ship and patience to really go the distance and spend the time needed to reach the places where no one has gone before u.
But i do see an issue with the way its done today, fine u pass threw a system u get the tag from 1st discovery but u didnt actually explored that system, kinda makes me think that those tags should only be apllied if the exploration was really done, but that is just a personal tought...

As a new player interested in exploration i went for what the videos say, get the best ship with the biggest jump range u can get, go for the guardian sites, engenieers, and such so u can jump further and faster... But...

Well ive been exploring in the bubble, and perhaps in some i actually left the bubble, i dont know, sometimes is confusing to understand where it ends...
But after i went for get and use the ship i like most atm and jump range isnt the main goal, i actually started to get "1st to map" tags! because jumping less distance leads me to take routes that other players didnt in a certain direction, ence i get to find systems that are knowned, that ppl actually been there before but since there is nothing really interesting in terms of profitwise and distances were kinda high they didnt bother mapping... And a new player can get its tag that way, getting some satisfation and trive to continue.

I gotta say, ive tried some ships so far in the price range i can afford atm, and some really stand out to me, the DBX is a little wonderfull ship, but atm im using a Python, yes i got alot less jump range, but i do have it setup with more bells and wisles than i could ever have in the DBX, and my goal is to rack 1st enough credits to get me a anaconda, and them start on the outfitting of it for exploration the way i see it as... I have around 100 + hours play so far.

I currently have cargo racks, i got 1 SRV bays with 2 SRVs, i got automated repairs, best FSD i can fit 5A (modified to level 1 for now, lack the resources), scanner for planets (probes), and all systems D, but some A´s so i can boost too, no weapons, and off course i fitted the biggest fuel scoop i could without breaking the bank (B rated).

Let me give u a rundown of what i think exploration should be, at least how i wanna do it:

1- Find a system
2- Use "donk"
3- Use FSS (find everything, leave nothing to explore, even radio signals, alien contacts are to be investigated, distress calls too, biologicals off course!)
4- Go to all bodies and use probes
5- If anything interesting is at a planet, land on it and use SRV
6- When all is done, repeat process in another system

And i plan on going for long periods of time out of the bubble and do that to every single system i find, dont care if it takes long, long time... I will do it, that is my "endgame", but i wanna start that in a serious way when i get the anaconda ready, for now i cant afford it, so i keep close and get money mostly by jumping around and finding the earthlike planets, probe then and selling the data afterwards, or if i see a cargo run that gives good money (close or over a million) i do those.

I know it was a big post, so tks for bearing with me.
 
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Alec Turner

Alec Turner
I played around with the figures in the hope of making what we'd explored so far seem really tiny but instead I discovered how huge the Earth is!

The surface area of the Earth is around 196,900,000 square miles. So 0.001% of that is about 1,969 square miles.

I was expecting to discover that we'd explored the Earth equivalent of something like the size of Central Park but it turns out we've already explored Trinidad and Tobago! (https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Geography/Land-area/Square-miles)

Note: you'll need Chrome to use this next link:

https://earth.app.goo.gl/?apn=com.g...38,137.83808831a,364188.5848337d,35y,0h,0t,0r

Gosh the Earth is a big place!
 

marx

marx
Micha said:
Now let's say 10,000 Commanders do nothing else. I doubt we have more than a couple of hundred dedicated and active explorers in reality outside of some expeditions.
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You know, I was just wondering about that the other day, looking at the EDSM traffic reports and Orvidius' decaying heatmaps. When it comes to exploring outside the triangle (bubble - Colonia - Sag. A*), I think one could manually count how many people are exploring out there. Even if we assume there are five times as many explorers out there as visible on the EDSM data (based on Frontier's earlier tweet), that's still the case.

DW2 has a bit over 13,000 participants signed up, but it appears only a third of those who are registered on EDSM (which would be half the roster) are active, so that's roughly 2,300 explorers out there on that expedition. Not a lot of other expeditions also active right now, and none of them come close to DW2's size. So, with them and the lone scouts deep in the galaxy, there might be around 2,500 we know of? Of course, if there are four - five times as many in total, then that estimate of 10,000 Commanders is pretty good.

Mind you, Frontier's tweet was about people having discovered five times as many systems as there were on EDSM at the time, not there being five times as many explorers.
 
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