It's not strange for devs to hide things from dataminers, it's been done before and in other games. Let's face it, data mining as well as being low effort (and pathetic imo), is not really set in stone when there's a server involved.
Please sprinkle a few surprises around the Galaxy in Odyssey (E:D too please if poss!), don’t tell anybody:let us just discover them for ourselves.
- Thread starter FatFreddysCoat
- Start date
Ah yes, same as finding multiplayer on NMS release!
This is not a surpriseSURPRISE!
the galaxy is full of them
Where does this "only explored .02%" come from?
Is this the amount of level 3 scans completed on everything in the game... planets, moons ect?
Is it the amount of bodies discovered vs total in the game?
Does this figure include poi and biologics?
It just seems like as far as star systems go, way more than .02% have been visited...
what exactly is the metric used for the often repeated ".02%"
Is this the amount of level 3 scans completed on everything in the game... planets, moons ect?
Is it the amount of bodies discovered vs total in the game?
Does this figure include poi and biologics?
It just seems like as far as star systems go, way more than .02% have been visited...
what exactly is the metric used for the often repeated ".02%"
The figure they give out is "visited systems". So I assume not including scans or maps. At least if you're talking about this one.
Have you seen the star density as you get closer to the core?
You know that the Codex is the LAST place to look right? It only records a fraction of the finds in the galaxy!
Given the size of said galaxy - any 'finds' would be by pure WILD CHANCE!
Unexpected outcomes, such as a 20mil reward at the end of a cargo haul of 500k LS, or hitting an NPC with a one shot kill after it loses shields, you bring in an occupied escape pod and it contains the "famous' lost Duke of Narnia and you collect a reward of 100mil.
How about tip-offs that are actually worth bothering with? You scavenge a wreck and find some highly valuable and critical intel that has a limited life span and on the way to cash in on the find, you're are beset by waves of hunter killer ships bent on destroying you and the data.
I'm not holding my breath on the above or similar occurring.
How about tip-offs that are actually worth bothering with? You scavenge a wreck and find some highly valuable and critical intel that has a limited life span and on the way to cash in on the find, you're are beset by waves of hunter killer ships bent on destroying you and the data.
I'm not holding my breath on the above or similar occurring.
I have only seen it in screenshots / videos (my only trip outside the bubble so far was a short 5k hop to unlock an engineer and I went straight up)
@FDev
I am a new player but I have already been lost in awe just zooming around the star map more than once. It's truly awesome in the real sense of the word.
But the ability to sort the galaxy map by which star systems have been turned in at stellar cartography (the stars people have their names on) vs. the ones that have not is a feature I would greatly enjoy. Please add my +1 to with the others who have stated this wish before. It would be the kick I need to get out of the bubble and make my own mark out there.
As it is now - no ability to visually see how much is out there that has never been seen before - the call of the black isn't that strong at all. The idea of traveling a month in real time to explore a nebula only to get there and find out its already been done is a major risk/reward factor preventing me from even attempting. But if I could visually see where the "unknown" was I would point my bow in that direction and plan at least a few trips.
You are a little late for claiming a nebula, they've all been explored - and it was done before I started playing. That said, have a look at: https://edastro.com/mapcharts/galaxy.html and you'll see that striking out in most directions will net you plenty of undiscovered systems. Only about 0.2% of the galaxy has been explored. Just don't head for a tourist spot like Sagittarius A* via direct route from the Bubble and you should find new things.. I managed to find a route from Colonia to Sag A* that was undiscovered for all but the start and end 50-100ly.
Actually, I've found quite a few nebula don't have their non-KGBFOAM stars explored.
Thanks for the laughs, perfectly timed Ian 
CMDR Taoa discovered these for the first time just this morning, a mere 2000 LY from Colonia
I seem to have found a new type of organic structure: Globe Molluscs
I have looked at every region in the codex and couldn't find any reference to this kind of Mollusc. Is this really new? In a desperate quest to find the last entry in my codex in the Inner Scutum-Centaurus Arm region, the Proto-Lagrange Cloud, I resorted to use EDSM to list PLCs around Colonia...forums.frontier.co.uk
It seems highly unlikely that this was the final undiscovered thing in the game, either.
...and sure, now the globe molluscs are in the codex for future visitors to find more easily... but yesterday and for the last two years they'd been hidden away with no clue to their existence waiting for an explorer to find them.
How can all the nebula be explored if only .02% of the galaxy has been?
This is the exact reason why players should be able to filter stars on the route plotter by which ones have been visited already and which ones have not. Technically, from a coding perspective, I just don't see any real issues - it would be an easy addition to make. From the game logic perspective, it makes zero sense that your navigation computer has been updated with information from stellar cartography that displays the name of who discovered a star without having the ability to show you before you get there if it has been visited already. The lack of this feature confuses me; No downside to having it as a feature and no upside to it being left out.
This is the exact reason why players should be able to filter stars on the route plotter by which ones have been visited already and which ones have not. Technically, from a coding perspective, I just don't see any real issues - it would be an easy addition to make. From the game logic perspective, it makes zero sense that your navigation computer has been updated with information from stellar cartography that displays the name of who discovered a star without having the ability to show you before you get there if it has been visited already. The lack of this feature confuses me; No downside to having it as a feature and no upside to it being left out.
It was light-hearted sarcasm, so a little subtle
My main is on the way back to Colonia (had a nice bubble holiday) and I have a 'little jaunt' planned to take in the time between Christmas and whenever the Odyssey 'alpha' makes it onto the launcher... On a quest for a WD class that may not even exist, but I'll enjoy all of those close-packed stars immensely!
I could take you outside of the 5KLy 'exploration bubble' around the bubble and suggest you jump 1KLy on economy and be pretty certain that very few, if any, of the stars you jumped to would already be explored...
To 'explore new lands' first one must get away from the crowds - and that means spending some time walking in another's tracks.
There are approximately 400,000,000,000 stars in our game galaxy - (or possibly 400,000,000,000,000 as it depends on which 'billion' has been adopted) which would explain why such a small number is being quoted as 'discovered' to date.
I was basing my comment on the fact that I've not found an unexplored nebula and comments I've read about them here and other places..
Because nebulae are gigantic beacons, attracting explorers like moths to a searchlight. You can see them both in the skybox and on the galaxy map from a long way away.
Check out any of the EDAstro maps of where players have been in the galaxy. This one, for example. Look particularly at the eastern half of the galaxy. There are very few nebulae out there, compared to the western half of the galaxy, and no known bases or colonies to visit. Do you see all the "hubs", where multiple lines radiate out from? Most of those hubs are going to be nebulae.
Teeny, tiny nebulae - "supernova remnant" class, less than 1 LY across, with a large bright star, neutron star or black hole inside - are hard to spot, and there are probably still plenty of those out there that are Unexplored. But not as many as you might think because people are actively looking for them.
The 99.96% of the galaxy that's still Unexplored is all in "Boring Space", nowhere near nebulae or known human settlements. Most of that's in the Galactic Core, where even the well-travelled routes are still largely Untagged, as the star density is simply so high that hitting an already-explored system is improbable.
This is an easy one: FD simply don't want to make it easy for explorers to know which systems have been explored and which haven't. You're supposed to go out there and look for yourself. It's much the same logic as trade data: if you've never been there, you don't know what prices they're offering. You have to travel there yourself and look - even though in a real-universe situation, a rarely-visited star system would be shouting its buy/sell prices across the galaxy, in order to attract customers.
Evidence for it being a deliberate policy: back when I started playing the game, inhabited star systems were divided into two categories: Explored and Unexplored. Explored systems were those that had a population over 1 million. With Explored systems, you could open up the System Map and look at the stars and planets present, even if you'd never been there. Then they introduced Mapping, and players could suddenly acquire new Tags all over inhabited space, even in Explored systems. What did FD do? They withdrew system map viewing privileges for Explored systems you had not yet visited. This means that you can't "armchair explore", from the safety of your docked spaceship, to find planets in nearby systems that are not Mapped yet - you had to launch your spaceship, travel there and look. FD did not want to make it that easy for players to find Unmapped planets within the Bubble. The result: until a few months ago, there were still a few rarely-visited star systems within the Bubble with Unmapped planets in them. I found and mapped several of them, less than a year ago; the Guo Zi system was an example I posted here on the forum back in April 2020, as an experiment (those planets were Mapped within a day of my making the post). A systematic effort by a group of players to Map the entire Bubble is still finding about a dozen Unmapped moons per week.
If FD had an at-your-fingertips map of Unmapped worlds, all those worlds would have been Mapped within an hour of Mapping going live, and the nearest Unmapped world would probably be 6000 LY away.
It's the smaller one, the "short-form" or the "American billion". It's the same "billion" that we use when we say, "There are 7.6 billion people on Earth in 2020".
I generally go by the rule, if you can see it on the galaxy map or from sitting in space it has been visited, although once you get a long way away, as already said, nebula do have unvisited stars and some even in the OBAFGKM category. Mind you that doesn't stop me visiting, and there are a few small nebula I am keeping my eye on that are outside current FC jump range so if we do get a jump extension I will be right on to them!