I'm out in deep space, trying to find a bunch of biological stuff to have fun with. The issue I am running in to, is I go to the blue areas that, when the specific type are selected, as far as I can tell don't exist. Either the heat map is lying or it's bugged and either way is a nuisance. I know there should be a level of excitement to find something, but if you have it highlighted as "the area" and fly around for an hour and don't see it, something is wrong. I know I'm searching in an area that is capable of having the bio, at least as I've seen it on other worlds, but it's not showing up. Worst offender is fungoida. I have lost count of how many worlds I have just given up on finding it on. It shouldn't be that artificially difficult.
Biological signal hotspots lie to me
- Thread starter IcewindZG
- Start date
The type of terrain makes a difference, and you tend to have to go pretty low and slow as well.
Fungoida can be tricky to find. Its small patches are often quite dispersed and you have to look into all the valleys, cracks and crevices on the mountain sides. But once you find the first patch the others are usually not too far away. Of course, then you have the fun of trying to find a landing spot on the side of the mountain 
I guess I'm more surprised that the highlight areas aren't limited to potential areas to actually find it. Like Fungoida. It can only exist on mountainsides, but the hotspot often appears on everything from rolling hills to even completely flat areas. I understand that a hotspot isn't a guarantee, but highlighting a region where it's not even possible is incredibly frustrating.
Thats partly true. I've landed on planets where the mountains aren't the spikey sort you'd expect, but instead are like giant gently rolling hills. And sure enough, Fungoida were found on the higher-altitude areas, even though they were mostly almost-flat and not at all rocky. So I suspect it's more to do with them liking high altitudes... which are predominantly spikey mountains on most planets, but not exclusively.
I find that on some planets I have to be very low (belly scraping low) and going slow (20m/s or so) or else they don't spawn properly. Spawn time seems to be slow in some cases. I've even had situations where I didn't see them until I actually landed and stood still for a sec.
Usually it's not quite that bad, but it can be.
I think a lot of folks fly too high, and too fast, and thus miss them. I know I was.
Usually it's not quite that bad, but it can be.
I think a lot of folks fly too high, and too fast, and thus miss them. I know I was.
Yeah it seems to be different for different players, and even different times of the day, I usually fly fairly high and fast and that mostly works for me, but sometimes have to slow down and drop if things aren't popping, just gotta tune it for the player and current conditions as you go.
Computer capability and graphics settings have a big impact on draw distance for surface features, along with the size of the actual objects; large objects pop-in at greater range than smaller objects.
With my aging setup I need to fly at 20-30 and low level for all objects to reliably appear far enough ahead that I can see them from the cockpit. At up to 50 or so, the larger objects are still appearing in time. Much faster than that and everything spawns below my ship out of sight.
But I don't mind flying low and slow while exploring. I'll search an area, and if there's nothing much there I'll scoot over to another area at speed, before slowing to explore again.
With my aging setup I need to fly at 20-30 and low level for all objects to reliably appear far enough ahead that I can see them from the cockpit. At up to 50 or so, the larger objects are still appearing in time. Much faster than that and everything spawns below my ship out of sight.
But I don't mind flying low and slow while exploring. I'll search an area, and if there's nothing much there I'll scoot over to another area at speed, before slowing to explore again.
Yeah, volcanics, specially geysers and large fumarole stack show up a huge distance away, I can usually spot those at a height the bio doesn't have a chance of showing, I can usually spot most bio if I fly just under 100mps and below 100 meters up, but sometimes they won't pop in directly ahead until I am almost over the top of them, but that's not a big issue because with the ships I use to check planets for bio I always have great sideways view and use those windows most of the time. The times I have to fly a lot lower and slower are for the small grasses and patches of bacteria that nearly match the ground surface colour, hard little beggars to spot those are, but Tubus, Osseus and other large bio are easy to spot from reasonably high and fast.
Yeah, those are the ones, the small grasses. Sometimes I have to be right on top of them to see them.
FWIW I have a pretty darn good machine and graphics card (AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core Processor 3.70 GHz, 32GB of RAM, and RTX 3070 Ti) so it's not just a low-end computer problem.
I did spend some fair amount of time flying nose down and even playing around in FA/Off in keeping my window to the ground while buzzing around planets for various biologicals. I can say I'm massively thankful for my shields in this learning experience.
Yeah that's why I like a ship with a good downward view for hunting bio, the Type 6 is one of my favourite ships for bio hunting, don't need to bother with any nose down stuff, but yes shields are handy, I've a had a few brushes with rocks.
It'd be quite nice if our ships/SRVs had a way to detect bio/geo stuff with their scanner tools.
Like, SRV's wave scanner can detect items from about 1-1.5km away, which means game knows about them even if it doesn't render them yet. Same with ship radar - it knows about things outside of visual range.
Might clutter up the display in some cases, but would be invaluable in cases when it's really needed - like low light, dark terrain, bacterium.
Like, SRV's wave scanner can detect items from about 1-1.5km away, which means game knows about them even if it doesn't render them yet. Same with ship radar - it knows about things outside of visual range.
Might clutter up the display in some cases, but would be invaluable in cases when it's really needed - like low light, dark terrain, bacterium.