Are we done?

[Tengreasypigeons]

Is everything that is discoverable in the galaxy, already discovered?

I've spent most my time exploring the beautiful rendition of the milky way that frontier games has made and I will continue to do so.

However, I always wonder, is there anything left to find?

I know there are 400 billion systems and we will never see them all.

But are there any left that have thargoid sites? Guardian ruins? Rarer planets than GGGs? Anything like that?

I just wish someone from fdev would give an honest yes or no.

What are your thoughts?

 

[Heavy Johnson]

No.

 

[Dr. Nagi]

We can never know.

 

[Rudi Raumkraut]

Yes.

 

[Sapyx]

By definition, we don't and can't know the unknown until and unless we make it known. Not even FD know what emergent phenomena the Stellar Forge might have generated. GGGs are a classic example of an extremely rare edge-case phenomena; neither FD nor anyone else had any idea GGGs could exist, until they were found.

 

[Deleted member 38366]

I guess there's three things still left more or less :

• Green Gas Giants (Alpha Rare - but you can hunt them, they're out there)
• bugged Codex entries that hundreds of CMDRs already tried to scan but failed to register (their content might not be new to the Galaxy, however)
• the possibility of a truly undiscovered Codex entry (their content might not be new to the Galaxy, however)

I'm for example looking at some Galactic Sectors and wonder "is there really not a single NSP in that entire Sector?".

Now if you're just into somewhat unusual/rare Orbital constellations or sightseeing, I'm sure there's alot of stuff for Screenshot material left - although it'll be very similar to what has already been discovered in that respect.
Stellar Forge has fairly digital restrictions and limits - and most of that has already been explored/exploited.
If there's still undiscovered bugs/oddities in there, those would be Ultra Alpha Rare.

400 Billion Systems might sound huge - but if 399.99 Billion of them are basically just "more of the same with some mild variation", things rapidly look quite different.

 

[Tengreasypigeons]

By definition, we don't and can't know the unknown until and unless we make it known. Not even FD know what emergent phenomena the Stellar Forge might have generated. GGGs are a classic example of an extremely rare edge-case phenomena; neither FD nor anyone else had any idea GGGs could exist, until they were found.

Im assuming that all structures and megaships/generation ships are known by fdev though, yeah?

Also, the first GGG was found years and years ago. Seems nothing new has been found in a long time.

 

[Jmanis]

Well we've still not discovered where to obtain the following commodities:

• anomaly particles; and
• calcite plate membranes

... so presumably there's still some variants out there which can be sampled, which we haven't found.

 

[Rudi Raumkraut]

... Or which could be sampled if they weren't bugged

 

[Jmanis]

... Or which could be sampled if they weren't bugged

I don't know... i thought sampling molluscs was bugged, but its just the ones which are the smaller than the limpet which can't be sampled.

Unfortunately if the first- pass guardians didn't demonstrate the inability to differentiate between bug and feature, it's hard not to agree with you.

 

[Old Duck]

I don't know about "we", but "I" feel done. I used to love exploring, but somewhere along the way the repetitiveness of it became apparent. My problem isn't that the majority of systems have ice planets and gas giants, but rather that they are all the SAME ice planets and gas giants. There is a lack of variety in the textures used in non-landable worlds, to the point that even ELWs have grown boring. Compare and contrast this to different scenes from various Star Wars movies / TV shows (Mandalorian) where each planet feels unique despite most being a form of an ELW, and I realized just how shallow the Stellar Forge is when it comes to planets.

I'm guessing these textures are hand-crafted and selected from a limited collection, rather than being procedurally generated. One of the reasons I'm hoping New Era gives us landable atmospheric planets and skimmable gas giants is that this should improve how all these planets look from space as well. Because I'm at the point where I've seen all the textures, and it's killed the thrill of exploration for me. "I" am done, and it makes me sad because exploration was something I really enjoyed.

(ED is not alone in this. NMS also have a surprisingly small variety of worlds, even less now than before some of the major updates. Once worlds start repeating themselves over and over, then it's over.)

 

[Deleted member 38366]

I don't know about "we", but "I" feel done. I used to love exploring, but somewhere along the way the repetitiveness of it became apparent.

One thing that kicked me back into Exploration was the VisitedStarsCache.

While it only offers the EDSM Data, that's still as good as it get when it comes to the missing Galaxy Map Filter "UC has Data on this System or not".

Toggling the Visited Stars Filter and seeing entire bubbles of Red is still tempting to check out.
(I plan to do exactly that when Carriers arrive - hop into one of those Red bubbles and turn them Blue (cyan?), do a little mining along the trip (maybe I find myself double/triple Hotspots?) and then move to the next)

Then - who knows - there might be something in those huge clusters that no (EDSM) CMDR has ever visited
(I know, odds remain low - but that's still "as pristine and cool" as it gets. Works for me)

 

[marx]

Something came up recently that brought to my mind this question: an NSP area that appears to be around 10 ly in radius. Which rather boggled my mind, but then a thought came to me: how many more of such might be out there, so that Frontier can always say that there are still things not yet discovered?
Only Frontier knows, of course.

There are two types of exploration content out there: procedurally generated and hand-crafted. For the former, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that there exist some things so rare that even Frontier didn't know about them. For the latter, well, of course they know about them, and they often tend to have clues inserted that point towards them.

In the absence of new clues, and pretty much all earlier avenues exhausted, the most likely scenario is that the hand-crafted content has run out. After all, if there were still more big things to be found, then Frontier would likely want them found in this long content drought, so they'd add further clues perhaps. They haven't done, so you can draw your own conclusions from that. Maybe they will with the carrier update, but I wouldn't bet on anything major before the next expansion.

So, what else might be out there is the truly unknown generated stuff. That has been there since the launch of the game, or in the cases of landable planets, since 2.0 Horizons. The complexities of that generation brought us years of exploration, and hopefully, whatever the next expansion will be will also add at least something to the Forge.
Because hand-crafted content can be pretty cool, but will only last so long until all its interactions are exhausted. Then it's back to the Forge.


Speaking of interactions though, I'm still surprised that Frontier has had the spaceborne life in so long, and even hinted at more research in them, and has yet to add any such. They could just do stuff like selling gyre pod scrapings or whatever to stations triggering BGS changes, and a number of people would be all over them. There are far too few interactions between exploration and the rest of the game, so there's plenty of room for improvement there.

 

[Jackie Silver]

In the absence of new clues, and pretty much all earlier avenues exhausted, the most likely scenario is that the hand-crafted content has run out. After all, if there were still more big things to be found, then Frontier would likely want them found in this long content drought, so they'd add further clues perhaps. They haven't done, so you can draw your own conclusions from that. Maybe they will with the carrier update, but I wouldn't bet on anything major before the next expansion.

I would not be in the least bit surprised if there were things hidden in the game which the current 'generation' of Elite developers did not know about, and it's a big and creaky codebase for anyone to check through unless they were super keen, and I suspect that would be frowned upon.

I can just picture the scene... our space-bronzed heroes screech to a halt outside the Mystery Planet R. Suddenly up pops a message, warning of untold horror:
YOU MUST INSTALL FLASH IN ORDER TO VIEW THIS CONTENT

 

[Rudi Raumkraut]

Only Frontier knows, of course.

And this I doubt seriously.
Wanted to write more about new dev generation don't have a clue what might be buried somewhere...
But Jackie ninja'ed already

 

[Rooster Podunk]

I'm still out there looking for the Jupiter 7, the Spanish fleet of 1592, and Judy Jetson.

 

[Sapyx]

I'm guessing these textures are hand-crafted and selected from a limited collection, rather than being procedurally generated...

Nope, they're all procedurally-generated, assembled together from various rules. For gas giants, the rules seem to involve colour-sets and the degree of "storminess" on the surface. Evidence: look at GGGs, where one of the generated colours is "bright green". Each one looks remarably different. That's not hand-painting, that's Stellar Forge. For Earthlikes, you've got a heightmap-generator with a separate "sea-level generator" that determines roughly what percentage of a planet is going to be covered in ocean.

Where you will find some "sameness" on Earthlikes is in the cloud patterns. Clouds on atmospheric worlds are indeed sets of pre-loaded patterns, which are slammed down on top of the procedurally-generated surface. Find a pattern of clouds, and I can pretty much guarantee you can go to another planet with similar atmospheric conditions and find exactly the same cloud-pattern.

Unfortunately, this "weather" does not yet exist as a separate surface phenomenon - the clouds, either on gas giants or Earth-likes, are static, nailed into place on the surface. In effect, the clouds on Earth-likes are treated as very tall mountains. Which explains why, when you go and visit Earth, there's always the exact same cyclone over Italy and Greece, and Britain is perpetually cloud-free. I suspect that generating dynamic weather that moves around a planet in a realistic fashion is one of the major hold-ups in giving us landable atmospherics. The simplest solution would be to take the "shell" of clouds as currently implemented, and make it rotate at a slightly different speed to the planet. Not very realistic, but better than what we have now. Clouds that move relative to each other, cyclones that form over warm oceans, spin around for a while and eventually hit land and dissipate (on planets that have land for them to dissipate over), would be next-level order of difficulty.

 

[Sysmon]

Depends also on what we are looking for. If CODEX entries is the goal, then yes, everything has (most likely) been found as that is really just a Pokemon-style game feature. Only added details are size/temperature and such.

As other have mentioned and hinted at, orbital configurations and associated Stellar Forge oddities are still likely to show unknown extremes we haven't yet found. I'm still looking for fun things, and lately finally almost found a shepherd moon close enough to a gas giant ring system to almost touch it.

S

 

[Anticon]

Bottom line - it's incumbent on Frontier to maintain player interest in this game, or else they will just trail away into unemployed dust. Basically their choice, but we can encourage them to think ahead in the "right" manner by using these forums. Current content is pretty damn good, but like all programming, it runs out of lines eventually. So what lines to add for the best refresh? Everyone has their own opinion, and should express it here for Fdev to read (hopefully).
So. Great to know that a major update is coming. We'll find some new content, a thousand thanks and hooray. What would I like to see effected by this new content?

There are far too few interactions between exploration and the rest of the game

Hits the nail on the head. You can add new things to find in the galaxy, but if there's no deeper relevance than "oh, that's nice/pretty/rare" then it's a bit pointless, just like IRL (I hasten to exclude artistic masterpieces!).

 

[Pete4000uk]

I'm heading south in my Asp. It's the second time I have been out of the bubble. I got quite board quite quickly as it was just star after star. I found one with three landable plants on. I landed on two of them to use the Scarab, but it became boring very quickly. Lots of featureless nothingness.

Oh, and the FSS scanner is more scanner.

Still onward and downward. Do I get a alert IF I find somthing new?