Please help this stupid explorer find some jump mats in the black (EDO)

[Kakamage]

Hello CMDRs. As the post says, I'm seeking help with finding raw mats on planet surfaces with geological features. As indicated, the game is EDO. An example material to address in this post would be Niobium, the absolute hardest raw material for me to find in the black.

1) I have no right to get upset at the game that even though the blue gradient color mapping very strongly hints at a heat map, it's not. I'm a fool for thinking that! It's nothing of the sort and actually seems to indicate terrain roughness!

2) I proceed to the areas with the lightest tint of blue to find the flattest terrain, dip down to maybe 300m, and slowly proceed over the landscape at about 100m/s, freelooking from the cockpit to find the supposed fumaroles/vents/lava spouts that are claimed to exist over almost the entirety of the planet surface. My computer is easily powerful enough to render items at this distance and speed, so it's not a render issue.I fly at this speed and height for 6-10 minutes, actually find nothing, pitch up, re-enter supercruise, find another spot, dip back down, and repeat for another 6-10 minutes, again finding nothing. I moronically repeat this process three or four times expecting to find even a single geological feature before I realize my moronic brain makes my vision 20/400 when searching for materials. Doh! It's not the game's fault! It's me, defying all medical science by temporarily going blind.

3) As a true idiot would, I desperately try one more up-and-down and notice a single lava spout and a single fumarole! I excitedly proceed to the surface. Neither feature has any materials attached. My dull-witted grey matter convinces me to search a little wider. I see two yellow blips on my SRV radar. Racing over, it's just Piceous Cobble, yielding g1's! Hooray! I'm too stupid to realize that these are g1's and not the desired Niobium I so desperately need, so I keep searching. I go so far from my ship that it takes off and flies away, desperate for a chance to be away from this colossal f**king nitwit. My far-ranging search yields more Piceous Cobble, one Bronzite Chondrite, and zero Crystalline Clusters/Crystalline Fragments/Needle Crystals.

4) I'm so dumb at this point that I'm drooling in my suit and can barely muster the intelligence to resummon my spaceship. I give up, take off, and for yet another first-discovered system, remain frustrated with myself (not the game, mind you!). It is singly and solely my fault that I can't locate vital materials for jumponium out in the black on planets that totally have them.

Sure, EDO dramatically changed the way mats are distributed over a planet's surface AND injected a misleading non-heat-map of these resources. However, that's MY fault for not being so insanely incompetent to be able to read the game's crystal ball and know exactly where to go on a newly discovered planet's entire surface to find the features. After all, why would an untouched, unharvested planet actually have the materials it says it has? How could I be so silly to assume that? I open the galmap, sigh, and ogle the systems 75LY+ from my location, because I'm out on the fringes where jumponium is a must and not an option. Even though I'm running low on premium jumponium, I can supercharge on this neutron star, but if I misjudge the distance between my destination star and its nearby brethren stars/neutron stars, I'll probably get myself stuck. But I deserve it, because I am literally the dumbest person in the galaxy, incapable of functional thought. The kind of dense, oxygen-sucking meatbag that can't even find materials on planet surface supposedly covered in them.

So CMDRs, please take pity on this dopey, pig-ignorant explorer. Share your enlightened secrets with me. Help this laughable, daft, vacuous waste of carbon to find even a single. f**king. Niobium. on planets with Nb percentages of 3.0-4.5% and three geological features.

TL;DR - Hope you had a laugh, but seriously, I can't find crap. I need the premium jumponium. Stars and star clusters out here are far away and I'm doing my best to rely on neutron stars to get around without getting trapped. I'm actually doing the thing in Elite that I so desperately wanted to do, which is exploring the fringes. But this feels like some kind of torture. I am finding nothing of value on planets with the material AND geological sites. I'm so over wasting hours searching planets and seeing only Piceous freaking Cobble. This can't be right. Is this more than a bug? Is it a superbug? An UberMegazordGreenRangerBug? Please help. I'm at my wit's end. Please.

 

[cmdr milesred]

I never bother with fumearoles, etc, total waste of time IMO

just drive and watch for meteorites, they are in edo too and really not much diff than horizons

as long as the system map says a mat is on a body, you will find it by finding meteorites.
the colorful 100% useless blue you mention is more for bio that is only going to be useful for thing that give off mats like barnacles and braintrees and Anemones, etc..
if you don't have much experience with this yet, just try not to go too fast in the srv when you see or hear no signals. 10-20 m/s is fast enough.
if you go to fast the rng for the meteorites is going to fail more than succeed meaning you can drive for a long time and see nothing....
this is normal in odyssey, not in horizons.

if rng is treating you poorly, it can sometimes be changed simply by exit to menu, re-enter and try again.

 

[varonica]

2) I proceed to the areas with the lightest tint of blue to find the flattest terrain, dip down to maybe 300m

To high and maybe to fast, 100m is the correct height and depending on your PC specs, maybe slightly slower, but I usually keep to max 100m high.

But I suggest not flying at all, pick a spot, land, get in SRV, drive around the ship in a circle until you see contacts registering on the top part of the scope (or of course white dots in the main radar for meteorites etc) then drive towards them. If after a couple of circles of the ship you see nothing at all then fly a couple of klms futher, keep in mind the blue isn't a guarantee of presence, just the possibility of presence, local conditions around the ship can prevent geo and bio from spawning.

 

[cmdr milesred]

in a way it is a render issue..
my info is for srv period, as in don't even try to find it from your ship
I didn't think it would be what you are doing, unless as I said, you are looking for bio, which is also a waste of time.

there is a blue circle that appears when you are looking for POI's which is good, but that's HORIZONS.

for EDO, just use the srv only

mats will vanish 20meters away
meteorites will vanish at 250m away
meteorites are not visible from a ship at all or detectable by ship radar in any way at all. eyeball only, good use of tools.
so to try to find any in a ship is going to force you to change your IQ level to that of a rock.

but if you insist, then Varonica is correct, 100m is 90 m too high and 100 m/s is 80-90 m/s too fast

at 100m alt, you have about 25m of space directly below you to see something, you can/will pass over that in 1/4 second
like trying to find an ant by flying a helicopter whilst looking through a tiny tube pointed straight down

, good luck

I can say that experience would make it tolerable to search from the air, as you know what you are seeing.
but I have sooo many mm in the srv and I am good enough that I made many of the very first videos on finding meteorites, long long ago.
I do recognize some from the air, but I do NOT search from the air, other than the flying I do in the srv.

this game is about use of time, because time is the currency.
to search from the air means you will not see the weak or the strong signals, so you are going to miss most everything.
if you learn this in Horizons, you will then understand how bad an idea it is to try it in EDO where it had to be handwaviumed to even work at all.
one look at a crystal garden in EDO should be enough to convince most people to not waste time.
#1 raw farming sites turned to WASTE MY TIME PLEASE locations.



just use the srv by itself and you will be done in no time.
math is a thing
physics is a thing.

this is not unlike the difference between using a mouse as opposed to a flight stick
the physics are soooo against you when you use a flight stick, try to move a tiny amount by barely moving a very long lever, yet this is a mouse specialty.

to try to view meteorites from higher than 10m altitude, the distance the meteorite can be drawn gets smaller and smaller, till at 100m it is a petty 25m wide view straight down, so view through a keyhole whilst moving forward at some speed faster than 10 m/s
you would be lucky to see anything at all.

math

 

[LifesAJourney]

Yeah, I don't care about geo stuff, either. I just find a planet with decent % of the mat I need, touch down on as flat and nice to drive area as I can find, get into SRV, dismiss ship, and drive. Outcrops and meteorites are everywhere and if they're not, I just recall ship and change the location by several dozen or hundred kilometers.

 

[johnl666]

Use the scarab and scanner and drive towards the strongest signals. Dont use the scorpion for material gathering, no scanner.

 

[Kakamage]

I never bother with fumearoles, etc, total waste of time IMO

just drive and watch for meteorites, they are in edo too and really not much diff than horizons

as long as the system map says a mat is on a body, you will find it by finding meteorites.
the colorful 100% useless blue you mention is more for bio that is only going to be useful for thing that give off mats like barnacles and braintrees and Anemones, etc..
if you don't have much experience with this yet, just try not to go too fast in the srv when you see or hear no signals. 10-20 m/s is fast enough.
if you go to fast the rng for the meteorites is going to fail more than succeed meaning you can drive for a long time and see nothing....
this is normal in odyssey, not in horizons.

if rng is treating you poorly, it can sometimes be changed simply by exit to menu, re-enter and try again.

I gave your method a shot last night (30 minutes of testing on a body with a 1.5% Niobium concentration [best I could find] and 3 geological features [vents, fumaroles, lava spouts]) but results were no better. Not a single G3. Not a single G4.

 

[Kakamage]

To high and maybe to fast, 100m is the correct height and depending on your PC specs, maybe slightly slower, but I usually keep to max 100m high.

But I suggest not flying at all, pick a spot, land, get in SRV, drive around the ship in a circle until you see contacts registering on the top part of the scope (or of course white dots in the main radar for meteorites etc) then drive towards them. If after a couple of circles of the ship you see nothing at all then fly a couple of klms futher, keep in mind the blue isn't a guarantee of presence, just the possibility of presence, local conditions around the ship can prevent geo and bio from spawning.

The 5900x and 3080Ti allow me to run basically all settings at high or ultra in 4k with draw distances as far as the slider allows. The PC easily renders fumaroles and spouts and vents surprisingly far. However, I'm happy to give your recommendations a try because I'm at my wit's end.

Your additional guidance is something that I already execute. My gripe is that I'm only finding Piceous Cobble. Maybe I see a Bronzite Chordrite. How many spots is reasonable to locate a single G4?

 

[Kakamage]

in a way it is a render issue..
my info is for srv period, as in don't even try to find it from your ship
I didn't think it would be what you are doing, unless as I said, you are looking for bio, which is also a waste of time.

there is a blue circle that appears when you are looking for POI's which is good, but that's HORIZONS.

for EDO, just use the srv only

mats will vanish 20meters away
meteorites will vanish at 250m away
meteorites are not visible from a ship at all or detectable by ship radar in any way at all. eyeball only, good use of tools.
so to try to find any in a ship is going to force you to change your IQ level to that of a rock.

but if you insist, then Varonica is correct, 100m is 90 m too high and 100 m/s is 80-90 m/s too fast

at 100m alt, you have about 25m of space directly below you to see something, you can/will pass over that in 1/4 second
like trying to find an ant by flying a helicopter whilst looking through a tiny tube pointed straight down

, good luck

I can say that experience would make it tolerable to search from the air, as you know what you are seeing.
but I have sooo many mm in the srv and I am good enough that I made many of the very first videos on finding meteorites, long long ago.
I do recognize some from the air, but I do NOT search from the air, other than the flying I do in the srv.

this game is about use of time, because time is the currency.
to search from the air means you will not see the weak or the strong signals, so you are going to miss most everything.
if you learn this in Horizons, you will then understand how bad an idea it is to try it in EDO where it had to be handwaviumed to even work at all.
one look at a crystal garden in EDO should be enough to convince most people to not waste time.
#1 raw farming sites turned to WASTE MY TIME PLEASE locations.



just use the srv by itself and you will be done in no time.
math is a thing
physics is a thing.

this is not unlike the difference between using a mouse as opposed to a flight stick
the physics are soooo against you when you use a flight stick, try to move a tiny amount by barely moving a very long lever, yet this is a mouse specialty.

to try to view meteorites from higher than 10m altitude, the distance the meteorite can be drawn gets smaller and smaller, till at 100m it is a petty 25m wide view straight down, so view through a keyhole whilst moving forward at some speed faster than 10 m/s
you would be lucky to see anything at all.

math

Yeah, I don't care about geo stuff, either. I just find a planet with decent % of the mat I need, touch down on as flat and nice to drive area as I can find, get into SRV, dismiss ship, and drive. Outcrops and meteorites are everywhere and if they're not, I just recall ship and change the location by several dozen or hundred kilometers.

I'm so desperate I will try anything, so I will try even more SRV searching, then.

With your advice, my plan is:
-FSS to locate the planets with the highest % of my desired mat + ignore geological features
-Land, deploy SRV, and turn drive assist on
-Travel at 10-15m/s in a straight line and keep an eye out for SRV radar returns

The only difference between that and my previous attempts comes down to using geological features and using high SRV speeds with drive assist off to quickly get around. So... I guess we'll see if this works.

 

[cmdr milesred]

use the hud to pick a direction too, that way if you go bump and spin around etc, you don't have to guess

it isn't a huge concern though
for the same reason that going too fast is bad

both versions have a respawn range for meteorites and know that their are various such ranges for everything that you might see, no 2 things have the same spawn range
horizons can keep up with it at top speed, but you will still miss things going too fast

Odyssey was missing the respawn upon release and spawn area was about 2km radius from ship landing. drive past it and nothing, ever again. it did not move from the ship landing spot.
they sort of added a fix over top, that made it work, so it has the same range as horizons, but its redraw/re-spawn speed is so slow that 5-10 m/s is not bad
but if you end up driving for more than 2 minutes and do not see any signs, stop, relog and try again.
if you go past the 2km edge before it has done its respawn, you get nothing, ever , till you relog.

p.s. - no need to be picky, as you are out exploring, odds are every body you find is pristine reserves.
more importantly, if the things you want are listed, good enough.
the most important thing about meteorites, just like USS's - the best places to get good material drops is a place that simply drops a lots.
I mentioned once, go longer than 2 minutes and seeing nothing, relog. if it takes too long, its a bad planet with a bad rng.
as long as I start seeing meteorites within 2 minutes, I will go for at least 1 hour, to see a better bunch of rolls.
if it is too crappy, move on.
if selenium were to go as high as 50%, but the place only drops 1 meteor an hour, its a planet worth blowing up. it is useless.

 

[Kakamage]

use the hud to pick a direction too, that way if you go bump and spin around etc, you don't have to guess

it isn't a huge concern though
for the same reason that going too fast is bad

both versions have a respawn range for meteorites and know that their are various such ranges for everything that you might see, no 2 things have the same spawn range
horizons can keep up with it at top speed, but you will still miss things going too fast

Odyssey was missing the respawn upon release and spawn area was about 2km radius from ship landing. drive past it and nothing, ever again. it did not move from the ship landing spot.
they sort of added a fix over top, that made it work, so it has the same range as horizons, but its redraw/re-spawn speed is so slow that 5-10 m/s is not bad
but if you end up driving for more than 2 minutes and do not see any signs, stop, relog and try again.
if you go past the 2km edge before it has done its respawn, you get nothing, ever , till you relog.

p.s. - no need to be picky, as you are out exploring, odds are every body you find is pristine reserves.
more importantly, if the things you want are listed, good enough.
the most important thing about meteorites, just like USS's - the best places to get good material drops is a place that simply drops a lots.
I mentioned once, go longer than 2 minutes and seeing nothing, relog. if it takes too long, its a bad planet with a bad rng.
as long as I start seeing meteorites within 2 minutes, I will go for at least 1 hour, to see a better bunch of rolls.
if it is too crappy, move on.
if selenium were to go as high as 50%, but the place only drops 1 meteor an hour, its a planet worth blowing up. it is useless.

I really appreciate you informing me about the redraw/respawn limitations! Also, I did some digging and see the benefit of hunting for meteorites now. With them usually being in clusters of 3 and with each one giving 3 of the material, I see how it can work out.

With your comment about the 2km, I guess I'm a bit confused. Are you saying I should not go beyond 2km from my ship? Or that I should always relog once I go beyond 2km from my ship? Should I be relogging every 2km or something?

For example, if you see a meteorite within 2 minutes of leaving your ship, you said you will go for an hour. Does that mean you are relogging every so often during that hour?

 

[GroG79]

Elite Dangerous: Horizons Wave Scanner Object Identifier [Animated]

www.wavescanner.net

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zyzsvNZ3ZY

 

[LifesAJourney]

-Travel at 10-15m/s in a straight line and keep an eye out for SRV radar returns

The more distance you cover, the more stones you find. I always drive as fast as I can with drive assist off. Often above 50 m/s. That's why I wrote about plain area to land on. The risk of hitting some late-spawned stone is worth taking because I usually find a bunch of metallic meteorites (they often spawn in groups of three) in <10 minutes.

 

[Kakamage]

The more distance you cover, the more stones you find. I always drive as fast as I can with drive assist off. Often above 50 m/s. That's why I wrote about plain area to land on. The risk of hitting some late-spawned stone is worth taking because I usually find a bunch of metallic meteorites (they often spawn in groups of three) in <10 minutes.

I appreciate your advice! Although, I'm confused because your recommended speed seems to conflict with what CMDR milesred has stated, which is to drive slowly. I don't have enough experience to say which one of you is correct, especially since you have personal experience and success with driving fast.

 

[Kakamage]

Elite Dangerous: Horizons Wave Scanner Object Identifier [Animated]

www.wavescanner.net

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zyzsvNZ3ZY

Yeah I have this bookmarked already and even practicing with the website doesn't seem to help. I deeply struggle to use the wave scanner. Interestingly enough, even though my original post's story was dripping with sarcasm about my stupidity, when it comes to using the wave scanner, I actually and truly do feel stupid. Maybe it's because I so rarely come across anything other than Piceous Cobble, but I just don't see it or get it.

 

[Zieman]

Maybe this stylised reference pic helps, at least with shootable rocks (meteorites & outrcrops):

It's pretty accurate in 3.8 at least, but I don't know if FDEV changed those signals too in 4.0, would appreciate confirmation one way or another.

 

[Kakamage]

Maybe this stylised reference pic helps, at least with shootable rocks (meteorites & outrcrops):
View attachment 329102
It's pretty accurate in 3.8 at least, but I don't know if FDEV changed those signals too in 4.0, would appreciate confirmation one way or another.

Thanks for the reference pic! I'm going to sear the metallic radar returns into my mind, although applying them to the tiny radar readout in-game will definitely prove challenging. Appreciate this reference, CMDR!

 

[cmdr milesred]

there meterorite also give audio, the metallic meteorite is very distinct.

I tell you to go slow because of the flakey programming that went into Odyssey in order to make it work at all.
in EDO it is flakey and can stop working if you go fast enough to beat the re-spawn to the 2 km edge.
this is easy to break in odyssey
you cannot break it in horizons. in horizons you can go full speed and still se stuff.

I fly the srv
I go full speed
I have experience and I know what I am looking for.
you don't
till you do, slow is better
also, I do it in Horizons, because it is not worth my time to try and look for mats in EDO.
I test it in EDO, every time I am hunting, and ALWAYS end up using the srv in horizons only.
EDO doesn't have the same POI's either and I prefer any Horizons POI over an EDO POI that has mats I have zero use for.

the 2km circle is supposed to move when you move, and in Horizons, it does.
in Odyssey, it is very possible to go past the 2km circle, just go full speed and in about 2-4 minutes you will no longer have any meteorite near you and no more will spawn.
then stop, sit and wait and see if any new ones pop into existence.
As I do this often enough to see that fdev has not fixed it yet. I am telling you it is a damaged mechanic in Odyssey
there are hundreds of posts and many threads on the materials in ODY.
It took them more updates to make it work in Odyssey, but it is crap and still fails OFTEN.

know that many cmdrs give advice and just assume it is natural and anyone should be able to do it...

It was easy to tell from the op that you had no experience with this.

but it did take a couple responses to see you were following bad advice.

 

[cmdr milesred]

I forgot an answer..
as long as I can see meteorites, I keep looking.
If they stop appearing, I put a 2 minute timer on it, meaning I should see new ones in 2 minutes
if not, relog.
from landing, it often takes 1 to 2 minutes for meteorites to spawn.
so if you land and start driving around and nothing ever appears...relog.
use what ever time frame you want. after that
after the landing, I am simply fussy, I would be happiest with many sets of metallic or singles.. then Mesoderite.
but I am happy to see anything and will break apart any and all.

also, if rng is being unfair and only giving common easy to find stuff, relog

relog resets the instance you are in, RNG for things is applied at this time.
so, if RNG is being crap, change it by doing a relog.

as you are in EDO
know that only the scarab has a wave scanner
call it what it is by the way
it is a sonar

when you see some lines on it
;;--- -- -- --- --- --- --- ----- --;;

not the best depiction, assume from that signal, you are 5-10 km away
as you get closer, it gets narrower
;-- -------- - - -;
you will eventually see the little ends and bea able to zero in on driving towards the center of that line, taking you right to a meteorite.

the lines can be overshadowed by the lines of other things.
so, sometimes they will vanish because another signal is stronger and over riding what you see.

It takes time to learn it.

 

[Kakamage]

Thanks for the feedback! I'm absolutely going to employ relogging more than I have before. I have taken everyone's advice to heart and have practiced what you recommended. I located a body with no formations and touched down. I practiced driving around and seeking out the metallic meteorites and actually found a few, although I did not find any of the Niobium I needed.

I also practiced with the wave scanner and started feeling a little more comfortable but I still have much to learn.

Even with some incremental gains, my frustration with the materials collection system remains. Mats for jumponium like Niobium still fail to show up in formations or meteorites. At my current rate, I would estimate spending weeks in a "green" system (EDSM's words, not mine) to replenish premium jumponium mats if we assume a few hours a night of collecting. How utterly ridiculous. We can travel through witchspace across dozens of LY at a time but I can't deploy some kind of automated miner to harvest resources from a planet? I think FDev missed the mark and it feels like it harshly punishes explorers.