Hmm, not necessarily, you only need 50 colonies, if you can plant the beacon, start construction and have the primary star port built before the next weeks tick you could do it in a year. The 4 weeks isn't how long it will take, the 4 weeks is your time limit for doing it, you must finish the first star port before the 4 weeks is up or you fail to colonise, in theory I suppose it could be done in a single week, but lets say 2 to be safe, then that's 2 years!
Colonisation Answers
- Thread starter Ian Doncaster
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Hmm, not necessarily, you only need 50 colonies, if you can plant the beacon, start construction and have the primary star port built before the next weeks tick you could do it in a year. The 4 weeks isn't how long it will take, the 4 weeks is your time limit for doing it, you must finish the first star port before the 4 weeks is up or you fail to colonise, in theory I suppose it could be done in a single week, but lets say 2 to be safe, then that's 2 years!
If anyone can get a minimum viable station running in one week and set up the next daisy chain system 10 Ly out 500 Ly is 50 weeks (ie a year) which is the point where we'd be looking at setting up industrial hubs to support further expansion.
Seconded. Reason why System Colonization will be disappointing:
- Cannot design / build unique structures.
- Don't receive a passive income (materials, goods etc) for the architect or controlling faction
- Cannot create another Colonia, because you must start from the Bubble and the limit is 10 ly which is zilch in galactic distance.
- Abandon a previous colony if you want to start another one. Repeat the boring grind over and over again.
- Did you want to become the Architect, but someone else got that title? You're out of luck. Try another system.
- Low number of slots to place buildings.
The system colonization feature will be a boring grind-fest to place (spawn) a few Odyssey / Horizons assets in a couple of slots.
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Based on the spansh dump from a few weeks ago and assuming a generous 300Ly from Sol as the bubble range I got:
- 20392 populated systems,
- 146398 unpopulated systems (because the range I chose is way to big)
- 32661 unpopulated systems that are within 10Ly from a populated system (aka Colonizable), most of those would be deep inside the bubble.
4858 with a FSS scan value above 8000cr
Meaning it's likely not 8 ice worlds, These are the "anything remotely interesting" category.
1440 with a FSS scan value above 100k cr
These could still be garbage.
616 with a FSS scan value above 300k cr
This is where you start finding stuff you might actually want to spend time building up.
Note, systems with just 1 ELW or a few water worlds and nothing else exist and can throw all these off, I know there's at least one in this dataset actually.
If I go with thresholding out systems in the inner bubble:
18664 colonizable systems that are > 150Ly from Sol
4218 colonizable systems that are> 200Ly from Sol
1115 colonizable systems that are > 250Ly from Sol
Anything higher value is almost guaranteed to be on the very edges of the bubble since it would've likely been grabbed by the initial creation of the bubble otherwise. Out of the ~18k colonizable systems >150Ly from sol 4177 had a scan value of over 8k cr. The % of higher value systems goes up the further out you go.
I also ran some faction-based colonization sims and I'm pretty sure that in theory almost any faction could (eventually) colonize out to the edge of the bubble by just using unpopulated systems even if they started from Sol. It'd be a grind sure, but the ratio of populated to unpopulated systems in the bubble is ~1:1 even in the most populated areas and if any bottleneck uncolonized system gets taken you can throw in an expansion every now and then.
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My understanding is you can continue to grow the system, as the original architect, and it's done so by basically initiating mini-CGs to deliver the necessary supplies. How that cost increases/tapers off to prevent infinitely large system development remains to be seen, as well as how tech levels and availability, pop growth and/or decline, wealth and all those other BGS stats without associated mechanics.
As I've kinda said a few times now... the point is to grow the bubble[1]. That's probably not going to be everyone's bag, but hey, neither was Odyssey.
[1] Notwithstanding careful crafting of systems can create highly lucrative routes. I imagine a key goal of people doing this will be to create those edge-case exploitations.
No way. If you make a 10ly range sidey and plot from sol, filtering out inhabited systems, you get nowhere.
Except I have seen virtually nobody ask for this the last ten years. Creative base building? Yup. Building mines for resources? Been asked since 2016. Freeform colonisation as with colonia? Huge interest.
Adding a generic system to a huge list of similar generic systems? Havent seen that request often.
Mmm, this may well be impossible but I don't think I'd trust the in-game route plotter to find a tricky route if one does exist.
Because that requires a destination and tries to compute a direct route, for colonization you just in whatever direction(s) are available until more paths open up.
I'm wondering to what extent the game will 'reimburse' a player who invested time and credits into a colonisation attempt but fails by a whisker, for whatever reason (burnout from boredom, IRL stuff, etc.).
Your average, cold-hearted, full-time playing top 1% CMDR will just say "tough" as expected, but it'd for sure put people off the feature, if not the entire game, especially if the credits/work required will be substantial (for a single player at least). A lot of potential for frustrations if this isn't balanced fairly.
But then, if a reimbursement happens, the game would need to track this for every single player/contributor for any given colonisation project, so I wonder if Frontier take the easy approach and just line up with afore-mentioned 1% CMDR?
There could also be a (partial) reimbursement of not just credits but commodities invested, so that you don't have to start from the very beginning of hauling stuff, i.e. that would somewhat alleviate the time investment and keep things moving still for a new attempt.
Your average, cold-hearted, full-time playing top 1% CMDR will just say "tough" as expected, but it'd for sure put people off the feature, if not the entire game, especially if the credits/work required will be substantial (for a single player at least). A lot of potential for frustrations if this isn't balanced fairly.
But then, if a reimbursement happens, the game would need to track this for every single player/contributor for any given colonisation project, so I wonder if Frontier take the easy approach and just line up with afore-mentioned 1% CMDR?
There could also be a (partial) reimbursement of not just credits but commodities invested, so that you don't have to start from the very beginning of hauling stuff, i.e. that would somewhat alleviate the time investment and keep things moving still for a new attempt.
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If you want an answer to something on the internet give the wrong answer and wait for someone to correct you. 
Excellent work, thanks both, far better than my back-of-cigarette-packet scribblings! Aside from the more philosophical discussion of who and what colonisation is for, I do find the practical analysis of what we're actually looking at in terms of numbers and types of systems for day 1 colonisation really interesting.
OK, checking the maths:
Only one noteworthy error I reckon - you can't divide an area by a distance and get a dimensionless number like a system-count. Instead, you need to divide the area by another area (e.g. the average area on that sphere per system).
I was going to guess somewhere between 5 and 10 ly for the distance between systems out there, but then realised that I could cheat and get a better estimate of it by using Spansh to count the systems between 150 and 152 ly from Sol (it gave 952). This is probably including pretty much all of the systems in that sphere, I guess, since there are probably few or no undiscovered systems in the vicinity of the Bubble.
That yields an average inter-system distance of roughly 8.4 ly, using what is I guess a bit of a fudge - I just took the cube root of: (the volume of that 2-ly-thick shell divided by the system count within it) - but is probably plenty accurate enough for this purpose.
Using that to estimate a per-system area would give us around 4000 systems on/near the surface of the sphere, most of which probably do have some neighbours which could be colonised.
We can of course cheat even harder and just use Spansh to directly give us a estimate (again this depends on the assumption that everything remotely near the Bubble has been discovered already):
First of all, adopting Ian's note that the Bubble radius is more like 200 ly, and then just asking Spansh to give us all systems between 200 and 210 ly from Sol, it returns 7978 systems. All of those are just outside the perimeter of that 200 ly sphere, and are thus likely to be (just about) colonisable from within that sphere. (The number is very linear with the thickness of the shell, so if we choose 8 ly we get almost 6400 systems etc.) This is a pretty good match to Ian's guess of "probably under 10,000 for actual outward expansion". (Who's surprised?
If we just use the 8.4 ly system separation on its own, and use that to very roughly estimate the expected number of systems in a 10-ly-thick annulus around a 200-ly-radius sphere, i.e. ~ 4*pi*200^2*10/(8.4^3), we get an estimate of 8480 systems, which is the same as 7978 if you're a physicist
(In fact, the average "known to Spansh"-system separation, calculated as above, is a wee bit higher at 200 ly from Sol than at 150 ly - around 8.7 ly - which may be a hint that Spansh does not know about all systems in that annulus... Or it may just be a random fluctuation in the star density.)
So who wants to guess at many Elite players are going to want to colonise a system each Thursday morning?
I have no real instinct for this (others will!), but it's pretty hard for me to believe it'll be even close to 8000, especially after the initial novelty-surge wears off. If I had to guess, I'd say after the first few weeks it'll be < 1000 but I look forward to finding out.
(The recent very attractive CG got almost 23000 participants, but I'd say colonisation is a lot more niche than "I want the awesome FSDs".)
Excellent work, thanks both, far better than my back-of-cigarette-packet scribblings! Aside from the more philosophical discussion of who and what colonisation is for, I do find the practical analysis of what we're actually looking at in terms of numbers and types of systems for day 1 colonisation really interesting.
People have been asking for colonisation. They've just been calling it "Base building". So they're getting base building, just not in the form people expected.
People wanted capital ships which, among other things, they wanted to fly into CZs to do battle. They got FCs.
People wanted "Space legs", the catchall for EVA, boarding ships and such. They got Elite, but in FPS form.
This is really no different. People expect the world, but don't understand the underlying limits of the game,. so they get an interpretation of what was asked for, within the world of possibility. Unfortunately, that's usually not what people want.
I'm unsurprised by the shape Colonisation is taking... it's going down the obvious path the game can handle. It's why I personally have never wanted any of these things, and would rather the content updates stick to what the game is good at.
Taking that list into consideration, this is exactly what's being delivered under colonisation.
Creative base building? You get to put the bases on the system wherever you like. Maybe that's not creative enough for people though.
Building mines for resources? You get to place a base with an extraction economy. But maybe that's not what people meant.
Freeform colonisation? Again, you're free to shape the system how you like... probably within certain constraints, but you can put things wherever you want in the system.
Again... everyone's going to be looking at this going "But not like that!"... but the core game isn't in a place to support anything else. It's why PP2 wasn't that revolutionary. Standard FD playbook stuff.
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You wouldn't get anywhere fast or by a direct route, certainly - but there are 20 uninhabited systems within 15 LY of Sol, which is more than enough density of them to move about with on a 10 LY range - and they get more common as you get further out so long as you stick close to the galactic plane
The ones who might have a trickier time are the ones who are on the edge of the bubble - but the top or bottom edge, 200 LY from the galactic plane, where finding any jumps <10 LY is going to be rare.
My strong impression from what they've said is that the 10 LY limit or the "start from the bubble" limit and most likely both to some extent are intended to be relaxed once they've got the "live testing" phase out of the way.
All the things they said about maybe building up an intermediate stop so you don't have to go back as far for cargo, for example, doesn't make sense if those are expected to be the final limits; the bubble will always be right there for any practical colonisation; getting a colony far enough away from the bubble that it starts to take two FC jumps to deliver the cargo will take years of effort even with the lightest possible chain, and no-one without FC support is going to be getting that far out.
Similiarly, since colonisation will be permanent, near the existing oversized bubble is the place which needs that the least (but it is, of course, largely harmless for testing purposes).
You don't get refunded if you fail on any other part of the game, so I wouldn't expect it here either. Maybe you get the credits part of the claim fee back? (Depending on what the commodities requirements are it may be that you don't lose a significant amount of credits part-filling those anyway)
Though it only seems to be a risk for setting up that first station, so it wouldn't be a surprise if player-run "help finish a project" groups sprang up - if it's within practical reach of an established solo player to do in full in four weeks, then a wing of players with FC support can probably finish a mostly-complete one in under an hour.
Depending on the interfaces, it might even not need the player running out of time to deliberately call on them - an in-game list or even a third-party-assisted list of the projects closest to failing would probably see various people just finishing them off as "something to do in weeks that don't have CGs".
Yup, it's interesting to think about how things might go... And many thanks for your initial estimates which provided the spark to explore the numbers further!
This is actually something that makes me a bit worried because you could end up with a NMS situation where there's a station in every system which would be a jarringly different experience.
What was the brit thing for this? We need green belts for the inner bubble!
Well... technically each time you eat a rebuy you 'save' 95% of your ship
and when you decommission the FC, you get most of the credits back also.Having said that, I'm not even too fussed about the credits themselves, but the commodities hauled. Even lore wise, it would make sense to get at least some of it back, if you don't make your target surely leftover commodities won't just get chucked into the bin/space. I can certainly envisage FDev going for a simplistic UI approach (filling a progress bar by feeding it commodities, comodities leave your hold but won't be tracked from then on in). Would feel overly harsh if that was the case tbh.
Again, really depends on what the requirements to fulfil are, but I'm currently expecting along station repair levels, even though I think that would be too much, I can see FDev at least initially aiming for that ballpark.
Very possible, depending on how many colonisation projects are out there, and their locations. Granted, I'm still dreaming about setting up shop in the middle of nowhere (not going to happen, I know) but convincing random strangers outside of their own squadron as a nobody player in-game will be a challenge for all but the more known/popular individuals I reckon, especially the more 'competition' there is.
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So, the question of how to identify systems one has personally discovered came up in another thread a few days ago. A potential approach was identified:
However:
Does anybody here know if the journal files from before
WasDiscovered became a thing (2019-2021?) do actually contain anything to signify undiscovered systems?
Nonsense. There is zero reason the game can only handle 10ly. The game can take weekly credits out of my pockets, I am sure it can also add to it.
Sorry, but that argument seems really disingenious. Not all questionable design choices are "because thats how game development works". If I want that kind of rhetoric Ill go to the star citizen forums.
