The thing is, I am not trying to be right. I have nothing to gain from being right for the sake of it, and I am generally happy to be proven wrong: there is something new to learn, and I love it.
I am sharing my findings, my experience, in the hope that it can help someone else through the painful process that is Exobiology (in this specific case), and I am very happy to give my insight! I only want to help, not mislead!
There are some shades (darker) where I rarely found specimens, and others where there was always a high chance: they are certainly related to the type of terrain, but from experience it's not fully related to the topography, but rather the type of terrain that the plant prefers.
The Devs know what's the reasoning behind it, they have implemented the system, whatever it is supposed to do, I just happen to think that whatever info was passed to Zac, it was possibly oversimplified: he hasn't given us wrong information (that would be absurd), just not the full picture.
Have a look at these two pictures, for example.
It is clear that the blue area corresponds to the darker terrain, however there is no univocal correspondence between altimetric data, for example. Some craters become invisible in the blue map (just highlighted a couple fo examples with black circles), while some apparently featureless areas become of a different (darker) blue. There is not necessarily a 1:1 correspondence.
It's easy to verify this in person, everywhere, especially in areas with Fungoids, Concha, Frutexa, or other plants that prefer highly irregular terrain.
I did not achieve Elite in Exobiology by dropping randomly wherever I found blue, but trying to make sense of what those blue areas mean.
If I can give my piece of advice, purely based on all my trials, when you have a situation like the one below, I would go for the area with less noise indicated by the arrow, and completely avoid the darker blue area to the left.
In the thread where Zac responded, you can also see the pictures posted by Florenus, and what he says matches what I have observed: you can see in his pictures that, despite the irregular terrain, some areas are "greener" and do not reflect the shape/shading of the ground underneath.
Hi all, are there any experts who can tell me what the different shades of blue / green mean on the planetary surface biological heat map? They don't seem related to terrain features, height etc as they either appear, or don't, at certain altitudes with colour varying a lot at the same altitude...
forums.frontier.co.uk
Perhaps those are the remants of the original heat map: the thing is: go for the "greener" areas, and you will find the plants more easily.
As far as I am concerned, I am not touching a space hairdryier until they revamp Exobiology!!!
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