CMDR Kelly Eldridge's Green Gas Giant aka "Unknown GGG", the first discovered GGG has been found
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Remarkable ‘Lost Planet’ Rediscovered - Elite Dangerous: Odyssey
The location of the first green gas giant ever recorded was a mystery for years, but it has now been found by a community of explorers. Commander Kell...
Hey, I'm part of the storyline!
Wow love the method used to find this! And thanks so much to everyone involved for sharing the great step-by-step description, and the screenshots and videos!
My reply is maybe a baby-necro, because I only found out about this story today. I've been away for a couple years and reading up on all the past galnet articles to find out what's been going on (TL;DR a lotta stuff got blowed up
).
I have a reallyyyy stupid question though... Was the planet truly "lost", meaning even FDev couldn't locate it in the server database somehow? Or was it only lost from players' reach within the game itself (and our various API tools/databases)?
The reason I ask is the screenshot of the system map shows Eldridge's name as the discoverer, which gives me the impression that it was still in the server database somewhere. But then I also see stories (on other sites) saying she had "reset her account", seemingly implying that's why the planet was lost. I mean that would suggest that "first discovery" data isn't permanent and only lasts as long as a player's account, which isn't my understanding of how the game's database works. I mean it would certainly make first discovery status kinda meaningless if it got wiped with our accounts, and someone else could become its new "discoverer".
Anyhow I didn't see this aspect mentioned in all the posts/stories I saw, so hoping someone can break it down for me please. Thanks so much! And kudos again on the detective work!! Cheers!
My reply is maybe a baby-necro, because I only found out about this story today. I've been away for a couple years and reading up on all the past galnet articles to find out what's been going on (TL;DR a lotta stuff got blowed up
).I have a reallyyyy stupid question though... Was the planet truly "lost", meaning even FDev couldn't locate it in the server database somehow? Or was it only lost from players' reach within the game itself (and our various API tools/databases)?
The reason I ask is the screenshot of the system map shows Eldridge's name as the discoverer, which gives me the impression that it was still in the server database somewhere. But then I also see stories (on other sites) saying she had "reset her account", seemingly implying that's why the planet was lost. I mean that would suggest that "first discovery" data isn't permanent and only lasts as long as a player's account, which isn't my understanding of how the game's database works. I mean it would certainly make first discovery status kinda meaningless if it got wiped with our accounts, and someone else could become its new "discoverer".
Anyhow I didn't see this aspect mentioned in all the posts/stories I saw, so hoping someone can break it down for me please. Thanks so much! And kudos again on the detective work!!
Cheers!
You can't search FDEV's database of discovered bodies, they can of course, but they don't, it's up to players to explore and keep a record, which is why it's important to preserve your logs and upload them to a third party site. There's no way to get a precise location unless the data is saved by the CMDR either in his logs or by a third party site like EDSM, so it was effectively lost to the player base.
Ok thanks for that, that's the way I always thought it was, just wanted to make sure. It was "lost" in the player world, but there was no actual data loss on the server caused by a player resetting their account (which was the part I was confused about, given the way some of the stories were written). Thanks!
That's one of the reasons for FDEV not allowing duplicate names, if you reset your account and take a new pilot name no-else can take that old name because discoveries on the galmap are still recorded to that name, so if it was given to a new CMDR they could falsely claim the old discoveries as theirs, but if you later decide you want to reset and go back to the same name as before, you can do that, that name is permanently linked to your account and only you can use it........there is some stuff to do with console account names that is different, not sure about that but that's how it works on PC.
I believe that what Frontier stores about discoveries is who got the tag, and not all the data about the body. After all, why would they need it, what would they use it for?
So in this case, assuming this is true, then for Frontier, finding Kelly Eldridge's lost green gas giant would have needed a query to the tags database to list all the character's discoveries, and then to generate them until a GGG is found. That isn't free, and even if it likely wouldn't have cost much, it's still something - and FD would know that once players got wind that they actually do this, other people would also start making such requests.
With this in mind, it should be little wonder that when Kelly Eldridge's player asked Frontier support, they said no. And hey, it's good that they did that, because all this made a much more interesting story than "player loses first Green Gas Giant's location, support retrieves it" would have.
So in this case, assuming this is true, then for Frontier, finding Kelly Eldridge's lost green gas giant would have needed a query to the tags database to list all the character's discoveries, and then to generate them until a GGG is found. That isn't free, and even if it likely wouldn't have cost much, it's still something - and FD would know that once players got wind that they actually do this, other people would also start making such requests.
With this in mind, it should be little wonder that when Kelly Eldridge's player asked Frontier support, they said no. And hey, it's good that they did that, because all this made a much more interesting story than "player loses first Green Gas Giant's location, support retrieves it" would have.
Ah! This is a key nugget of the story I haven't seen mentioned before (thus the reason for the question asked in my first post). Yeah that doesn't surprise me that a dev might not be interested in doing that.
Anyhow thanks everyone for answering my question! I simply wasn't sure how to interpret some parts of the news stories I read about this, in the absence of some key background details like this one, so it left me wondering whether there was an actual data loss from the game server or not. Thanks for putting my curiosity to rest by assuring me that the giant excel spreadsheet is still intact haha
Cheers!
Part of the problem with the "Support could have found it" suggestion is, until the Codex updates in 3.0, there was literally no difference between a GGG and a perfectly normal gas giant as far as any of the game's algorithms could tell. GGGs were not deliberately programmed into the game, they were emergent phenomena. They didn't have a special annotation on the system map, or anything else to flag the difference. The only difference was the exceptional colour, and only the player's eyes care about what colour a planet is. Planet colours are generated on the fly procedurally, rather than stored in a database somewhere. Certainly nothing was journalled or recorded anywhere.
So the only way for FD to "look it up", would be for them to generate up each and every star system Kelly Eldridge had visited, and physically eyeball the system that was subsequently generated. Either that, or they would have had to write some bespoke code to generate and examine the systems, looking for... whatever it was that caused GGGs to exist. Because up until 3.0, I seriously don't know if anyone in FD had a clue why GGGs existed.
So the only way for FD to "look it up", would be for them to generate up each and every star system Kelly Eldridge had visited, and physically eyeball the system that was subsequently generated. Either that, or they would have had to write some bespoke code to generate and examine the systems, looking for... whatever it was that caused GGGs to exist. Because up until 3.0, I seriously don't know if anyone in FD had a clue why GGGs existed.
There'd be no need for manual checks: once the system is generated, writing a check to look at the gas giants' resulting textures and flag if there's any green on them would be simple. This is likely what the game is doing now anyway. Looking through them manually would be significantly worse not just for the time required, but also because of the possibility of a human missing the GGGs which have only a few splotches of green.
Of course, the problems I wrote about in my previous post still apply, so this is just a side note.
Yeah that's why I think a more attainable middle ground would be the devs giving a list of that player's first discoveries to them (assuming that's a quick database query), and then leave it up to the player(s) to go check them. I wouldn't really expect devs to mine that list to find something specific. Again I'm not suggesting they should have done this and are somehow bad for declining. I'm just thinking it's an easier ask, that's all.
Anyhow, on a slightly different vein... I'm still trying to catch up to how the account reset affected in this story. I'm struggling to remember what was available in-game (without 3rd party API tools) for travel records back in 2015. I don't recall there being any in-game travel log showing me where I'd been. I could click around the galmap looking for my own first discoveries, but no system-by-system travel log. For that matter I don't even recall anything like that in-game when I last played in Dec 2020. According to my EDSM records, I first started using logscrapers like EDMC to connect with EDSM, etc in Oct 2015, and so those were my travel records after that point, but they're not in-game.
So without running 3rd party API scrapers, what record would a 2015 player ever have of where they've been? How long are the game log files stored on the client machine? (I don't have my gaming rig here to be able to check my own.) Is this why the account reset became an issue? It wiped the previous game log files from the client PC so they couldn't be bulk imported into EDSM, etc? If I were to reset my own account today, would my travel records pre-Oct 2015 be lost forever? Or are they already lost?
We had a visited stars list back when I started in 2016, there was tracking of what stars we visited, EDSM was up and running and reporting was up and running, I still have my logs from my old laptop when I started playing in 2016, they can be easily copied from one installation to a new PC and put into the log folder for EDDiscovery to read, of course the format of the logs changed a few times and that may cause issues. My Flight Log on EDSM goes back to September 2016 and the player logs themselves did record all visited stars although the details were a bit...lets say sparse, and wouldn't have recorded a GGG or any other body, just the star. However given that, if those logs existed at all it would have been quite possible to follow the flight path star by star until you reached the required system.
CMDR Eldridge's GGG was discovered before my logs start, research indicates that the very first iteration of the player logs was indeed in July 2016 and the discovery was made in May 2016, so it is quite possible that CMDR Eldridge's discovery was before the player journals existed, my first journals are actually an indication of when player logs started since I started playing in early 2016 and there are no player logs or journals for that period.
Old player logs and journals are not deleted on a reset, I even have my beta logs and journals and can look at them and see where I went even when the beta required I use a different player name than my main account, I suspect the problem here is that the discovery was indeed made before players logs were stored on our PC's so players wouldn't have a log of visited stars to access.
I may be wrong on some details, someone will correct me if I am, that's how the internet works
Oh gawd this just brought back suppressed traumatic memories of the days of OCRing market data from screenshots... {shudder twitch twitch} 
When I get my gaming rig back I'll have to check through the folders to satisfy my morbid curiosity. I do know that EDMC was logging my systems for me as of Oct 2015. But you're right I think all this 2015 stuff was before journal files were implemented (at least the more-detailed ones). And it was definitely pre-Horizons (released Dec 2015), so it was actually a separate game installation.
Anyhow my recollection is there really was nothing in-game at that time to show me where I'd been, aside from feeling around the gal map. And I don't recall there was a "visited" filter on the gal map back then. So I think the last time we could see our discoveries in-game was the stellar carto sell screen. We otherwise had to rely on 3rd party tools and whatever they had scraped from our sessions (whether by OCR screenshots or otherwise). Dark ages, whew!
When I get my gaming rig back I'll have to check through the folders to satisfy my morbid curiosity. I do know that EDMC was logging my systems for me as of Oct 2015. But you're right I think all this 2015 stuff was before journal files were implemented (at least the more-detailed ones). And it was definitely pre-Horizons (released Dec 2015), so it was actually a separate game installation.
Anyhow my recollection is there really was nothing in-game at that time to show me where I'd been, aside from feeling around the gal map. And I don't recall there was a "visited" filter on the gal map back then. So I think the last time we could see our discoveries in-game was the stellar carto sell screen. We otherwise had to rely on 3rd party tools and whatever they had scraped from our sessions (whether by OCR screenshots or otherwise). Dark ages, whew!
It depends on when in 2015, things were moving faster back then. But the topic is the (once-)lost GGG, which was first discovered in 2015. May, so let's look at that time. There was no EDSM yet: that launched on Sept. 1. No journals, no visited stars filter, no auto-tagging stars, no neutron star boosts, and so on. (However, neutron stars did later become an important part of picking up Kelly's trail.) The only thing that was there is if you manually enabled verbose logging (not in-game, but by editing a config file), then the netlogs would be generated, and those would contain system names. Later on, in 2016 Frontier would add system coordinates to them (in update 2.1 or something), which would lead to the explosion of systems on EDSM, but back at 2015. May, there was nothing.
Granted, the system names alone would have helped immensely and the lost GGG would have been discovered years ago, but even if there were any log files, the discoverer lost them.
In this sense though, the character getting reset didn't cause much. Without system names from the netlog, the player would have had to find systems over a very wide area, without the visited stars showing up. Possible in theory, highly unlikely in practice.
I've no idea if a character reset deletes previous logs, and I'd rather not find out
Could have been that it cleared netlogs I guess, I have no idea.Back to your personal question: if you had verbose logging enabled manually, and if you still have your netlog files, then the records of your travels are still there. They have no coordinates though, so if you tried to upload them and found somewhere that still accepts the format, the systems would still be refused, but you could get them out manually at least. If you didn't enable verbose logging at the time, then they are lost forever.
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I have netlogs back to 22/3/2019, they do have coordinates at that time, this must have been when I enabled verbose logging since that's obviously not my starter system but quite a distance away and a few years after I started, it's likely when I took my first trip out to Colonia shortly after Jacques was found and they had the rescue CG, they were fun times!;
{12:57:04GMT 777.508s} System:"Flyoo Phroo VW-Q a59-0" StarPos
It depends on when in 2015, things were moving faster back then. But the topic is the (once-)lost GGG, which was first discovered in 2015. May, so let's look at that time. There was no EDSM yet: that launched on Sept. 1. No journals, no visited stars filter, no neutron star boosts, and so on. (However, neutron stars did later become an important part of picking up Kelly's trail.) The only thing that was there is if you manually enabled verbose logging (not in-game, but by editing a config file), then the netlogs would be generated, and those would contain system names. Later on, in 2016 Frontier would add system coordinates to them (in update 2.1 or something), which would lead to the explosion of systems on EDSM, but back at 2015. May, there was nothing.
Granted, the system names alone would have helped immensely and the lost GGG would have been discovered years ago, but even if there were any log files, the discoverer lost them.
In this sense though, the character getting reset didn't cause much. Without system names from the netlog, the player would have had to find systems over a very wide area, without the visited stars showing up. Possible in theory, highly unlikely in practice.
I've no idea if a character reset deletes previous logs, and I'd rather not find out
Back to your personal question: if you had verbose logging enabled manually, and if you still have your netlog files, then the records of your travels are still there. They have no coordinates though, so if you tried to upload them and found somewhere that still accepts the format, the systems would still be refused, but you could get them out manually at least. If you didn't enable verbose logging at the time, then they are lost forever.
Wow great memory, thanks for the details!! Like a cruise down memory lane haha
Ok I'm guessing then that's why the player reset was mentioned, it must have wiped that early trail of breadcrumbs (assuming they were verblogging).
I'm trying to recall if EDMC required verblog in order to work. If that was the only way the current system was available back then, it probably did. When I checked this week that I first showed up in EDSM in Oct 2015, I assumed it was with system coords, etc, and that it was after the era of manually submitting distances. But I was still a wee bubble baby back then and wasn't submitting anything new from out in the unknown. So I guess I was mainly just feeding my current position and market data (thus the MC in EDMC, derp
).Ok let's test the reset deletion, everybody reset on 3... 2... 1...
Haha I'm going to check for those old netlogs though, curious to see what's still in them.While poking around this topic today I ended up logged into ROSS, the backend for EDDB. I remember having gone there years ago for some reason, think I was debugging message submission issues or something (though I do vaguely recall making some manual submissions to EDDB). Anyhow I wanted to mention a mind-blowing stat here: ROSS currently shows almost 10 million data submission messages... from just the past 2 weeks!!
The volume of message traffic generated by players is UNREAL 
"Flyoo Phroo" lolI have netlogs back to 22/3/2019, they do have coordinates at that time, this must have been when I enabled verbose logging since that's obviously not my starter system but quite a distance away and a few years after I started, it's likely when I took my first trip out to Colonia shortly after Jacques was found and they had the rescue CG, they were fun times!; {12:57:04GMT 777.508s} System:"Flyoo Phroo VW-Q a59-0" StarPos
I think Jacques would have been long before that, it was back around 2016 I think. 2019 would have been in between Beyond and Odyssey ish. And this is where I'm not sure how major updates affect local log files, because some of them create a separate game installation folder. I forget if the logs are in a common folder (I reallyyy need my game rig back...). Anyhow what I mean is I'm wondering if your first netlog being in 2019 is because one of the major updates was at that time and it removed older files or started using a different folder for them.
Verbose netlogs got coordinates added back in the 2.1 update in early 2016. There's still about 1.5 million systems on EDSM which predate that and haven't either been visited since or had their coordinates derived through trilateration (which used to be about the only way to get coordinates: the explosion of coordinate data after 2.1 made it trivial was huge!)
If you want to work on getting those coordinates for those legacy routes, https://www.edsm.net/en/systems/unresolved is the list of ones which need them - you can either visit the systems yourself, or you can use EDDiscovery or similar to send in distances (to the 0.01 LY precision the map allows) from systems with known coordinates. Minimum required is 4, ideally from different parts of the galaxy. It's a nice little thing to contribute when waiting for an FC jump, or on a 20kLs supercruise to check out an interesting planet at the other end of the system.
If you want to work on getting those coordinates for those legacy routes, https://www.edsm.net/en/systems/unresolved is the list of ones which need them - you can either visit the systems yourself, or you can use EDDiscovery or similar to send in distances (to the 0.01 LY precision the map allows) from systems with known coordinates. Minimum required is 4, ideally from different parts of the galaxy. It's a nice little thing to contribute when waiting for an FC jump, or on a 20kLs supercruise to check out an interesting planet at the other end of the system.
"Flyoo Phroo" lol
I think Jacques would have been long before that, it was back around 2016 I think. 2019 would have been in between Beyond and Odyssey ish.
Yeah I think I have lost track of time, after so many tears it all seems to bunch together lol!