How much should Exobiology be worth?

[DemiserofD]

Exobiology is a new addition to exploration, and a pretty neat one at that. The question is, is it worth doing? And if not, how much should it pay to be worth doing?

First off, lets calculate the average profit per exobiology scan. Adding up all the values for exobios and averaging them, you get an average value of 273,369.

Now, how long does it take, on average, to acquire one of these? We'll ignore the cases of planets that aren't otherwise worth visiting, and assume the travel time to the planet is zero, just to be as generous as possible. Next, you need to account for travel from orbit to the ground. Referencing this video, it takes about 120 seconds to get from orbit to the surface. Then, you need to locate the exos. Once you're good at this, lets assume it takes maybe 10 minutes to locate them for the first time, on average, and after that, another 3 minutes to locate scans 2 and 3.

So far, we have 2 minutes of orbital cruise and 16 minutes of searching. This creates an average income per minute of 15k.

Now, how does this stack up to more standard exploration? In my voyages, I found that I would find, on average, about 1 terraformable planet per jump. Not each time, but on average, over a long period of time, that was fairly consistent. It took about 60 seconds per jump, plus about 3 minutes of travel per planet Detail Surface Scanned, for a payout of around 2m. That translates to about 500k/minute.

It should be fairly clear that these figures don't add up. It's okay for something interesting to offer a little less than the alternatives, but if you offer TOO much less, it becomes like Piracy, where the complexity, frustration, and low pay all combine to make something nobody ever actually does.

In order to be a more reasonable payout, the average value of an Exo should be closer to 9 million. This would give payouts slightly lower than standard exploration, but not so low as to not be worth doing at all.

 

[DøømHåmstër]

It should be worth my time.

 

[Brimston]

In fact I guess most will agree with you, and thus, you have 2 options, post this in suggestions, and/or create a ticket for "anomaly" as this isn't sustainable, and extremely unefficient...

 

[Darth Wonko]

Exobiology is a new addition to exploration, and a pretty neat one at that. The question is, is it worth doing? And if not, how much should it pay to be worth doing?

First off, lets calculate the average profit per exobiology scan. Adding up all the values for exobios and averaging them, you get an average value of 273,369.

Now, how long does it take, on average, to acquire one of these? We'll ignore the cases of planets that aren't otherwise worth visiting, and assume the travel time to the planet is zero, just to be as generous as possible. Next, you need to account for travel from orbit to the ground. Referencing this video, it takes about 120 seconds to get from orbit to the surface. Then, you need to locate the exos. Once you're good at this, lets assume it takes maybe 10 minutes to locate them for the first time, on average, and after that, another 3 minutes to locate scans 2 and 3.

So far, we have 2 minutes of orbital cruise and 16 minutes of searching. This creates an average income per minute of 15k.

Now, how does this stack up to more standard exploration? In my voyages, I found that I would find, on average, about 1 terraformable planet per jump. Not each time, but on average, over a long period of time, that was fairly consistent. It took about 60 seconds per jump, plus about 3 minutes of travel per planet Detail Surface Scanned, for a payout of around 2m. That translates to about 500k/minute.

It should be fairly clear that these figures don't add up. It's okay for something interesting to offer a little less than the alternatives, but if you offer TOO much less, it becomes like Piracy, where the complexity, frustration, and low pay all combine to make something nobody ever actually does.

In order to be a more reasonable payout, the average value of an Exo should be closer to 9 million. This would give payouts slightly lower than standard exploration, but not so low as to not be worth doing at all.

I always appreciate it when people use the maths.

I guess I look at exobiology as not an actual thing by itself, but as a supplement to exploration in general.

So, using your numbers with no real effort on my part (read: I'm being lazy and just trying to make a point), Exobiology is giving you an additional 15k per minute added to your 500k because you're doing the Exobiology thing in addition to everything else during your exploration. So, it's giving you a 3% increase to your bottom line.

 

[Brimston]

So, it's giving you a 3% increase to your bottom line.

not really as you can get 500k each 5min if lucky with Exploration, but for 16min (if you are lucky) you get half of it.

Not really efficient. needs a buff, maybe not as much as he's asking, but still.

 

[alexzk]

So far, we have 2 minutes of orbital cruise and 16 minutes of searching. This creates an average income per minute of 15k.

That is very rare case.
Usual is 2 - 8 hours per 1 planet.
16 mins is something to be lucky, and get everything on single field. And still, if you do that on long range Anaconda - it will be 30 mins as she don't fly fast in normal space.

Yeh well, current my best was 1.5 mil + 1.5mil bonus for 7 hours on planet ... I don't feel like it is fair reward

 

[DemiserofD]

I always appreciate it when people use the maths.

I guess I look at exobiology as not an actual thing by itself, but as a supplement to exploration in general.

So, using your numbers with no real effort on my part (read: I'm being lazy and just trying to make a point), Exobiology is giving you an additional 15k per minute added to your 500k because you're doing the Exobiology thing in addition to everything else during your exploration. So, it's giving you a 3% increase to your bottom line.

Don't forget opportunity cost. In the 18 minutes you spent getting 280k, you could have gotten ~10m worth of exploration data, and you can't really do both at the same time.

 

[Danieros]

Totally agree, the payout is terrible. Especially when you consider the enormous curve towards "getting good" at finding the species instead of spending 30+ minutes looking until you give up.

I wish any massive buffs went towards the first discovery values only, though. For already discovered species it could be simply be QoL - letting the DSS reveal species already discovered and/or only requiring 1 sample for these.

 

[alexzk]

curve towards "getting good"

That is not real problem being bad.
Problem is hardware. Sometimes things do not draw fast or disappear once you're out of ship. I found that because I made bookmarks. Bookmarked position from ship, then came to that coordinates on foot - and - nothing there. Then after 10 mins jumping around things appeared again.
Such glitches slow down whole process. You never know is it bad place or glitch.

 

[Rat Catcher]

In order to be a more reasonable payout, the average value of an Exo should be closer to 9 million

If one is credit driven, doing exploration is not worthwhile, surely?

For the time it takes to scan a system of 50+ bodies, visit the 5 or 6 that have bio greater than 1, find them, scan them, then move on to the next system, probably hundreds of millions could have been 'earned' doing something else!

ETA: I'll be interested in seeing the value of the 50 or so species I have scanned on my alt 2 when they arrive in a system with Genomics, I don't expect too much

 

[alexzk]

I don't expect too much

When you travel with carrier you expect something above minimal (for me it is above 20 mil/week). I went from Colonia back to bubble during 2 weeks, that was negative income. Because spent too much of gameplay hours on scanning bios.
Sure I can afford that to do, but, it's not real fun for my brain to play with negative balance, even if it is 1cr.

 

[Darth Ender]

It should be worth my time.

and no amount of credit balancing is going to do that with the current "gameplay" for sure.

Even if it had actual gameplay involved, exo biology suffers from the same root problem that ship exploration suffers from, the game doesn't care about it.

The BGS and overall game doesn't respond to what you find exploring, and doesn't respond to what you find sampling. The stuff you discover or sample has no functional purpose to the player or to the game...no unique impact and no role in how any other aspect of the game works.

Exploration could be a driver of expansion, but it's not. Sampling could be a driver to some new organic ship tech tree of crafting etc, but it's not. Or maybe sampling could drive the bgs because of a massive outbreak of diseases problem (would be topical) ...or some drive to find the next mycoid virus against the thargoids... but it's not.

Instead, your efforts are just converted to credits and fdev has to find some way to balance what you're doing with just that metric ...and with most other things effectively converted into just that same currency ...it's become impossible to balance different things in a meaningful way and so we've seen credit inflation run rampant to try and deal with scaling reward in one activity while still making other activities viable despite drastically different levels of effort to participate.

 

[Rat Catcher]

When you travel with carrier you expect something above minimal (for me it is above 20 mil/week). I went from Colonia back to bubble during 2 weeks, that was negative income. Because spent too much of gameplay hours on scanning bios.
Sure I can afford that to do, but, it's not real fun for my brain to play with negative balance, even if it is 1cr.

Alt 2 is journeying from around 5KLy from the bubble to Colonia, in a 50LY jump DBX (minimal engineering) so should be picking up enough to equip another ship when he arrives.

My 2 FC accounts just make sufficient to take care of the FC for a few months then play around doing whatever I think fun at the time. Paying out a small amount each week doesn't really bother me, but I can understand my attitude is not the same as others.

 

[Darth Wonko]

not really as you can get 500k each 5min if lucky with Exploration, but for 16min (if you are lucky) you get half of it.

Not really efficient. needs a buff, maybe not as much as he's asking, but still.

Don't forget opportunity cost. In the 18 minutes you spent getting 280k, you could have gotten ~10m worth of exploration data, and you can't really do both at the same time.

Those are both good points. I'd like to refer you to "I'm being lazy" in my original post.

If one is credit driven, doing exploration is not worthwhile, surely?

For the time it takes to scan a system of 50+ bodies, visit the 5 or 6 that have bio greater than 1, find them, scan them, then move on to the next system, probably hundreds of millions could have been 'earned' doing something else!

ETA: I'll be interested in seeing the value of the 50 or so species I have scanned on my alt 2 when they arrive in a system with Genomics, I don't expect too much

Having given this some thought now (read: I thought about it for the 45 seconds I've been writing this and I'm still falling back on the 'too lazy' excuse), I'm not quite sure we're accurately accounting for time and I believe we're being overly optimistic about 'regular' exploration payouts.

While OP's experience has been "[finding], on average, about 1 terraformable planet per jump", I don't think my success rate there has been anywhere near that as I scanned systems all the way to Colonia, then Sag A*, then Beagle Point and back.

Also, we're not taking into account the number of bodies in a system. While there are some systems that have one or two stars and no planets/moons, there are also systems that have 30+ bodies. I'm sure this all averages out, but if there are 32 bodies in a system (one of the systems I was in heading to the Jameson crash site to farm some encoded mats), now we're looking at over an hour and a half to scan that system... and that's not taking into account some of those might be 100k+ ls from the main star. The vast majority of those will be rice, earning maybe 10k CR for FSS + DSS or a little more if it's a First Discovery.

Let's say we average 15 bodies per system, and let's say we use OP's times of 3 minutes per body, that's 45 minutes. Given 1 terraformable world per system (and I think that's VERY generous), we're looking at probably 3.5M CR per system which works out to less than 60k CR per minute. Now, if all we're doing is mapping that one terraformable world, then we're looking at 2M CR for the four minutes originally quoted. And, yes.. that is 500k per minute.

If we're only mapping the high-paying bodies, but then travel to the bodies that have biological signals - let's say we average one per system - we will add that 18 minutes to our total time and it's taking 23 minutes total and adding ~275k CR to the total equaling ~2.3M CR, or ~383k per minute.

If we're mapping the whole system, then our CR/min is around 59.5k.

Again, based on my own experience, I think the idea we find one terraformable world per system is overly optimistic. If we take that out of the equation, then the CR/min for mapping an 'average' system would be about 10k with a biological and about 5k without. In this case, we're doubling our payout by scanning exos.

I guess the bottom line is:

If you simply want credits per hour, or credits at all, for exploration, then look up ELWs in the bubble on INARA and just go system to system and DSS them. You'll get about 1.1M credits (source) for each one. Your hit rate is 100% per system, and your CR/hr is going to be better than if you're in the black.

Other than that, I think the exobiology payouts are in line with the rest of the exploration payouts when one considers a biological signal is along the same lines as a geological signal and not the same magnitude of a terraformable or earth-like world.

 

[alexzk]

Alt 2 is journeying from around 5KLy from the bubble to Colonia, in a 50LY jump DBX (minimal engineering) so should be picking up enough to equip another ship when he arrives.

My 2 FC accounts just make sufficient to take care of the FC for a few months then play around doing whatever I think fun at the time. Paying out a small amount each week doesn't really bother me, but I can understand my attitude is not the same as others.

Yes, I have reserves for 20 years for FC.
Problem is "negative" play is not fun, that is when you want to do something interesting but that gives negative reward. Usually I avoid negative paid game loops.

I don't say about sums, I say about signs. I can gladly trade grain for +5000 cr during many hours total, but it is still + and fun comes from other parts, like rised BGS.

 

[Darth Wonko]

Other than that, I think the exobiology payouts are in line with the rest of the exploration payouts when one considers a biological signal is along the same lines as a geological signal and not the same magnitude of a terraformable or earth-like world.

I think it'd be cool to add more geological phenomena and create a 'Galactic Geologist' rank.

 

[Sysmon]

It's a risk vs reward thing, and exploration is no risk - little reward. Very relaxing, but not something to do for quick money.

Upping the payout would do nothing to make it better, as Road to Riches exploration would get out of hand similar to what mining and certain other activities did. Upping the risk would also not work, as we would still have the issue of little reward.

A solution could be to add actual sampling, which could be the real profit maker. That sampling could be the biology sampling we can already do expanded to on-foot exobiology, as well as on-foot "mining" by core sampling different "geomes" on each visited body. A sample could take up a fraction of a cargo unit (1/10? 1/100?), but be able to eventually fill up a cargo hold. Values of each sample could be on par with some of the more valuable minerals we can mine, though, thereby really racking up profit when taking a load back to civilisation. The values could also depend on distance from known space, similar to the range adjuster for rare commodities.

S

 

[alexzk]

A solution could be to add actual sampling,

Before Oddy came out I imagined exactly this.
From other side, we can sample space lifes like mollusks or thargoids now, do people do it often? I have 10 samples on carrier now...don't even bother to sell. That took pure 15 mins to collect, not counting to fly there. And well, 1 mill at best for all?

 

[Sysmon]

Before Oddy came out I imagined exactly this.
From other side, we can sample space lifes like mollusks or thargoids now, do people do it often? I have 10 samples on carrier now...don't even bother to sell. That took pure 15 mins to collect, not counting to fly there. And well, 1 mill at best for all?

I carry the kit to do this sampling on my exploration trips. But mainly for role-playing reasons, as it doesn't pay that well. That's one of the things that could be balanced better.

;D S

 

[alexzk]

Another fun could be - commanders must eat. In bubble they could visit cantina and/or refill ship's food producer.
However, in deep void - source of food could be that plants, i.e. you must recharge your ship by collected samples.