I'm about 2500LY from sol and still seeing a lot of wrecks and distress beacons despite being in undiscovered/unmapped systems. Once I saw 7 distress beacons on a planet...
I thought they fixed distress beacons/minor wreckages appearing in undiscovered systems?
- Thread starter ktechmidas
- Start date
At some distance from the Bubble they stop appearing, but until then, they are everywhere.
I guess those wrecks and crashed beacons are traces of not so lucky explorers who never made it back. At least that's what I'm telling myself to not get irritated too much. But I find it quite annoying.
I guess those wrecks and crashed beacons are traces of not so lucky explorers who never made it back. At least that's what I'm telling myself to not get irritated too much. But I find it quite annoying.
Yeah exactly, if there were less... like one every few systems I visit it would fit into my headcannon a bit better.
You need to be well over 3kly away for them to stop altogether. Also keep in mind, undiscovered/unmapped doesn't necessarily mean unvisited, a wrecked ship in a previously unvisited system can be assumed to have crashed there and never returned to civilisation to report their findings. In fact I have been in a few systems where none of the planets and the star were tagged as discovered or mapped, and yet were already in EDSM. So the CMDR who originally visited them was killed in a crash and never got to sell his data to UC, so they were in fact visited, but not officially discovered or mapped.
So we can assume a number of cases of system with wrecks that are otherwise undiscovered, but this;
Is an entirely reasonable desire. But at 2500ly out even many systems that are not tagged have actually been visited by CMDR's who never got back to report.
There are also some further out in a few places, notably Hawking's Gap
I keep getting distracted by shiny planets and exobiology2500 LY?
Part of it is that you can actually detect them from orbit now.
In Horizons there was always a small chance of finding a wreck no matter where you were in the galaxy. But you could drive around for hours and not see a single one, once you got a little way clear of inhabited space.
In Odyssey, the two or three wrecks on each planet is probably actually less dense than the amount that would be generated in a complete SRV survey in Horizons ... but you can see them instantly from orbit, so it looks like there's suddenly millions of times more of them. And in practice, there is.
In Horizons there was always a small chance of finding a wreck no matter where you were in the galaxy. But you could drive around for hours and not see a single one, once you got a little way clear of inhabited space.
In Odyssey, the two or three wrecks on each planet is probably actually less dense than the amount that would be generated in a complete SRV survey in Horizons ... but you can see them instantly from orbit, so it looks like there's suddenly millions of times more of them. And in practice, there is.
That's the point: the joy of discovery is completely gone for this aspect.
Finding one in Horizons was actually exciting, now it's like peeking the ending of a book, knowing the punchline of a bad joke, or watching a poorly made magic trick that you know very well.
I'd buy that if they were actually worth getting excited about. Being able to pinpoint from orbit where the wreckage is (which will contain 2 cannisters of consumer electronics and one occupied escape pod) isn't any less "exciting" than driving an SRV for 30 minutes in a straight line waiting for the game procgen RNG to roll the number required in order spawn a wreckage for you to "discover" one of the same.
Something I've not seen a clear answer to, maybe you know - does Odyssey still generate those RNG salvage sites that you find by driving around in an SRV, or are the signals detected from space the ONLY such sites on a given planet now?
If it's the latter, I'm inclined to think that there are too few sites in and near the Bubble, though possibly also too many in more distant locations.
Well, to each their own, I guess.
Not looking for signals systematically* but picking up an uncommon, faint artificial signal while gathering some materials somewhere out in the black is something I find interesting, as it is not in the normal exploration routine.
I would go and investigate, possibly finding a couple of escape pods or a few inconsequential canisters that I would leave there, but I would leave the site wondering what could have happened there, which unfortunate circumstances caused that, etc.
It's mostly in my head, yes, but I prefer that to a game that holds my hand at all times.
Would I like to find something more revolutionary, like abandoned ruins, or something not seen before? Absolutely!
But I can find joy even in these little incidents.
Should I go full cynic, then all of this is just me staring at millions of little coloured lights activated by endless sequences of electrically powered ones and zeros that respond to the movement of my hands. Mind blowing stuff for sure!
*Edit: just to clarify, knowing that there would always be signals, and willingly looking for them in an SRV is something that I would find as dull as seeing the signals from orbit, but with a component of masochism. It's the incidental finding that makes them intriguing to me.
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I've not found any RNG salvage sites even on fairly extended drives - if they do exist, they're considerably less common than they used to be.
They were a little ridiculous in Horizons, with pretty much every few square kilometres of every planet in the tiniest inhabited system having crashed probes, skimmers with cargo, the occasional mining base, etc. But none at all is also a problem, agreed.
To explain myself, rather than just blurting out a negative post and moving on...
When I started playing the game (after Horizons launch) I spent a lot of time driving the SRV around in no particular direction, stumbling across escape pods and such, and loading them into my newbie Sidewinder to go sell them.
I like how it is now, in Odyssey, because I feel like it legitimizes or expands Search and Rescue and Salvage oriented gameplay a bit. I enjoy the idea of both search-and-rescue and salvage gameplay and wish that they were both a more viable career path.
in 1200 years I would assume that, along with our spaceships that have sensors that can discern planet composition and properties from hundreds of thousands of LS away, that we would also have some sort of advanced SOS beacons that could direct rescuers to our would-be crash sites. I can't imagine us, with the technology we have, simply relying on driving a buggy in no particular direction on a random planet for hours hoping we find lost explorers.
So, with being able to see these crashes/distress beacons from orbit, it just makes more sense to me and opens the door to a more organized form of search-and-rescue gameplay if you're into it (now if only it paid well enough to be worthwhile...)
When I started playing the game (after Horizons launch) I spent a lot of time driving the SRV around in no particular direction, stumbling across escape pods and such, and loading them into my newbie Sidewinder to go sell them.
I like how it is now, in Odyssey, because I feel like it legitimizes or expands Search and Rescue and Salvage oriented gameplay a bit. I enjoy the idea of both search-and-rescue and salvage gameplay and wish that they were both a more viable career path.
in 1200 years I would assume that, along with our spaceships that have sensors that can discern planet composition and properties from hundreds of thousands of LS away, that we would also have some sort of advanced SOS beacons that could direct rescuers to our would-be crash sites. I can't imagine us, with the technology we have, simply relying on driving a buggy in no particular direction on a random planet for hours hoping we find lost explorers.
So, with being able to see these crashes/distress beacons from orbit, it just makes more sense to me and opens the door to a more organized form of search-and-rescue gameplay if you're into it (now if only it paid well enough to be worthwhile...)
I've been exploring many hundreds of landable planets within 2kly of Sol. There seems to be very little RNG involved.
Based on quesswork and intuition I worked out the following algorithm:
if number_of_mapping_probes <= 4 then
number_of_crash_sites = 2
else
number_of_crash_sites = 6
endif
Imo random accidents should be modelled as a poisson process where zero occurrences is the most likely outcome.
I tried collecting a large sample of data to substantiate the above rules, but gave up because I decided the best method
of dealing with this monumental distortion of statistics was to ignore it.
So I also ignore the thousands of occupied escape pods because I don't have time to help them nor the space to carry them.
Based on quesswork and intuition I worked out the following algorithm:
if number_of_mapping_probes <= 4 then
number_of_crash_sites = 2
else
number_of_crash_sites = 6
endif
Imo random accidents should be modelled as a poisson process where zero occurrences is the most likely outcome.
I tried collecting a large sample of data to substantiate the above rules, but gave up because I decided the best method
of dealing with this monumental distortion of statistics was to ignore it.
So I also ignore the thousands of occupied escape pods because I don't have time to help them nor the space to carry them.
When Odyssey released, before they addressed the issue, you could find signals on every single planet (I was out in the black, thousands of lys away from Colonia, back then) and there were always 6 sites on bigger planets, and 4 on smaller ones, with very few exceptions (less than 4): your algorithm matches my observations.
Yes, there is an outer condition now which is
if distance from sol > 2500 then
number_of_crash_sites =0
else
if number_of_mapping_probes <= 4 then
number_of_crash_sites = 2
else
number_of_crash_sites = 6
endif
endif
So, no sense of the number of crash sites tapering off, just hard and fast rules.
TBH, I thought FD would know more about RNG than this.
I heard that they didn't "fix it" just because they wanted to annoy you, and have been waiting for your thread about it for weeks.
There's a similar bubble around Colonia. Haven't checked how big yet.