I know that long time ago there was no FSS and you had to manually fly to each planet in order to discover it. Although I know FSS is superior solution 99% of the time for 99% of the players, I'd love to have a "surprise" while exploring and also incentive to fly and map every planet in the system, without feeling like I waste time flying 15 minutes to map an icy planet. So I'd love to try the old system but it seems to me that there is no way to explore without FSS. The planets wont show on navigation list even as signal sources or something. Am I missing some solution or is there really no way to explore without FSS?
Any way to NOT use FSS and explore undiscovered planets?
- Thread starter Aella Fess
- Start date
The old ways should still work, you can just honk using the DSS scanner to get the orbits and then fly out to the planets and target/point at them for long enough (or fly really close) to do what FSS does without using the FSS.
I think the only thing you miss out on is some USS that only show up when resolved from FSS.
I think the only thing you miss out on is some USS that only show up when resolved from FSS.
Unfortunetly, I use Discovery scanner and nothing shows up neither in navigation panel, nor in the system, no orbits of planets. Orbits only show after discovering planet with FSS.
Thats exactly how its supposed to work.
If you want to find the planets visually you have to look at tiny glowing spots in the sky that move when you fly in a certain direction or in a curve. If you find these fly towards it at 75% throttle and you will discover it.
If you want to find the planets visually you have to look at tiny glowing spots in the sky that move when you fly in a certain direction or in a curve. If you find these fly towards it at 75% throttle and you will discover it.
This is true only in systems which are already explored by someone else.
Correct. If you're in a system which was already discovered and sold by someone else, you can see the system map after you honk the D-scanner; otherwise, in an undiscovered system, you can't. In that case, you're forced to grind out the FSS, or you can fly around to identify planets by eye. However, unlike the old times when you could determine planet types from the system map, their sounds and their targeting holos, you can't tell what kind of planets they might be from your cockpit. As such, it could easily be what you said: that you wasted time flying 15 minutes to map an icy planet.
So yeah, if you're looking to explore some undiscovered systems, then you can't try the old system anymore. The developers did say back when they introduced the FSS that they don't want the earlier way to work.
(Ironically enough, the old system would have worked out better for Odyssey: with that, you could tell if there were landable atmospheric bodies at a glance, while with the "new" one, you have to grind the FSS to completion to do that. FDev broke their own stated design goal for the FSS by not updating it for the expansion.)
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"Grind" might be a strong word, given that it takes maybe a minute on average. (Sure, if you are scanning a system with 50 bodies it will take longer, but those are rarer.)
Look on the bright side: When you scan the system with FSS you get a bonus when reporting to universal cartographics.
In those days, however, the initial "honk" of the discovery scanner would reveal all the bodies in the system. That no longer happens, so there's really no way to recreate the experience now.
I'm actually not very interested in recreating experiance, rather just having ability to manually detect traces of planets and be able, once in a while, to fly to them directly and discover them in a more engaged way that just: jump->fly for 10 sec from the star->dethrttle->FSS as quickly as possible without even letting graphics preview of planet load->leave system. I've noticed that I spend 99% time while exploring while either staring at hyperspace or in FSS. Not exactly fun, although I've already explored smth like 4k undiscovered previously systems so...
You can still use parallax in the game to locate nearby bodies, but saying manually detect puzzles me a bit, what other "manual" way do you think there should be, I mean it's either eyes or instruments, and the best instrument for the job is the FSS.
I guess you could possibly detect them visually, but it would be difficult and probably very hit-or-miss. I've never tried to do that.
I don't really understand why you feel you need to FSS as quickly as possible, though. I tend to spend a lot of time looking at the planets, determining if they have features I want to see better, or biological stuff, etc.
Anyway, the system is what it is. Try to find a way to have fun with it, or do something else that you find more fun
I know, grind is relative, but in the end, it's a simple and monotonous mini-game that you still have to complete to see if there was anything worth doing it for.
A minute on average also adds up. Consider that jumping into a system takes minimum 30 seconds, then there's time spent fuel scooping and lining up a jump out. We could say that's a minute too, but at the very least, it's a comparable time. So, if you play for an hour, and explore 30 systems then, half of your time is spent in the FSS. And it can all easily turn out to be a waste.
As I mentioned before, the FSS was explicitly designed so that you could jump into a system, look at the bar, and jump out if there's nothing of interest to you there. This was what the developers at the time said. Even when that wasn't entirely true at the time, as lots of explorers were interested in things beyond "there's an ELW / WW in this system", it certainly broke entirely with Odyssey: if you're looking for thin atmospheric planets, where the expansion's content is, you can't see those at a glance.
Yeah, a whopping 1,000 Cr per body. That might as well not exist.
You know, this was another problem with the FSS that used to be better before it. You looked at the system map and how planets (stars, moons) actually looked. This was swapped for a blue overlay, with grids, and you can only see one planet at a time. Even then, they aren't rendered entirely as how they'd look.
I know, it's not a big deal for most, but it's still yet another thing that could be improved, for everyone.
Well anyway, I digress. The original question was whether you can use anything other than the FSS to determine a planet's type and then fly there, and this has been answered: you can't, not in undiscovered systems.
You can see visually that there's something there as you fly around, but you'll only know what it is if you fly there. (By the way, before, you'd start scanning bodies from a distance, so you only had to fly towards it, not to fly all the way to it. The DSS could be engineered either for longer distance or for faster scan completion.) This is it.
The FSS is required for worthwhile exploration.
I just FSS fast, then I check EDDiscovery's exploration panel (after FSS is complete) for anything interesting. During FSS, I just zoom in and immediately back out on each body, so fast that I don't even see the closeup view of each body. EDDiscovery records it all instantly. This allows me to skip all the details during FSS, saving a load of time.
An FSS of a 50 body system can take less than a minute this way (depending on it's layout).
I just FSS fast, then I check EDDiscovery's exploration panel (after FSS is complete) for anything interesting. During FSS, I just zoom in and immediately back out on each body, so fast that I don't even see the closeup view of each body. EDDiscovery records it all instantly. This allows me to skip all the details during FSS, saving a load of time.
An FSS of a 50 body system can take less than a minute this way (depending on it's layout).
Its called 'Exploration', why should it be instant? I scan every new system i come across and sometimes some that others have honked just to see what they missed.
If your not interested in exploring just jump and scoop.
Honestly cant understand why some folks are in a rush these days.
O7
Agreed. It seems some people never chew, they just gulp down their content without ever tasting it.
I know several people IRL who eat that way. All of them have severe digestive issues.
To be fair, it can become a bit repetitive.
I myself just reached Colonia for the first time. I took a slightly different route than the direct one (which is dotted with inhabited systems at regular intervals). I traversed the Temple region to the Orion-Cygnus Arm region, and there I turned towards Colonia. That's a really long stretch of uninhabited systems. When I finally reaced Colonia I had 10 pages of cartography data to report. At 50 systems per page that's almost 500 systems (the vast, vast majority of them previously undiscovered.) I fully FSS-scanned each one of them. Additionally I flew to and surface-scanned every waterworld, earth-like world and ammonia world that I encountered, as well as maybe half of all metal-rich planets (ie. those large planets with thick atmospheres), especially in the systems that had one of those three types of world.
I must admit it was a bit exhausting towards the end.
But its the same as everything else in the game, you dont have to do it
O7
Yeah I find traveling and scanning systems relaxing, if I didn't I wouldn't do it. But once I found the necessity of traveling 11kly in a day, that was, not relaxing, but I only did it because it was extremely necessary.
Leaving a previously undiscovered system unscanned triggers my OCD. So I do have to do it.But its the same as everything else in the game, you dont have to do it
O7
I didn't say it should be instant.
Maybe you're thinking about what I said of the FSS's design? Well, that wasn't me, but to quote Frontier, from this video, around 53:03:
"You're right, the [FSS graph] system is learnable, [...] very quickly you can jump into a system, perform the pulse scan, look at that bar and say "there's nothing there that I want", there's no Earth-likes, there's no whatever you're looking for, and get back out again."
Also,
"[...] you can still get in, honk, find out, see what body you want because you can see it on that bar, and then move on if you want to". (Conveniently forgetting the fact that quite a lot of people looked for stuff beyond "yet another ELW / WW / AW".)
So yeah, that's from Frontier. It's what was intended, most likely because explorers have always been cherry-picking (even after the FSS, by the way) - and that's not due to "laziness" or whatever on the players' part, but simply because of how the galaxy is. But for Odyssey, this no longer works, and you have to do the FSS to completion. It's a shame, especially because flying your ship and looking for varied things is much better gameplay than rotating a camera to click at blue blobs.