Newcomer / Intro Exploration: I had forgotten the reality

[marx]

Am I really that slow? With 21 bodies to find and classify on the FSS and then 6 of those (5 heavy metal worlds & 1 gas giant with water based life) to fly to and scan in detail, is an hour very slow? Please keep in mind I have only been at this new found exploration method for a week or so & I am much faster at the FSS than I was.

I bolded out the part that's not the FSS, but the DSS, and the part which doesn't need to be done. There's no need to fly to every planet and shoot it with the DSS, unless you're a hardcore completionist.
Completing the DSS's "shoot the planet" minigame rewards you with:
1. the exact locations of all the surface sites on the planet, if there are any (just scanning with the FSS tells you the number and types of sites)
2. more credits
3. a "First Mapped by" tag in addition to the "First Discovered by"

In other words, if it's a planet that has no sites (the FSS tells you about them), and not valuable, and you don't want two tags on it, then it's a waste of time to fly to it. These will make up the vast majority of bodies you'll find.

 

[LeSamzer]

I bolded out the part that's not the FSS, but the DSS, and the part which doesn't need to be done. There's no need to fly to every planet and shoot it with the DSS, unless you're a hardcore completionist.

@HurstLlama This can be correct for most cases. If you havn't, you really need to grab EDDiscovery, its essential for exploring (ie. finding valuable planets).
Going back to what Marx said, yes "shooting the planet" usually useless, but in the occasions where you find a valuable planet (Earth like, water world, etc..) you definitly need to use the DSS, it can double or triple the amount of credits you can get for it (up to 4 million credits in my case).

 

[Vetinari]

So beware young padawan pilot it takes a special kind of person who can enjoy exploration.

Or combat, or mining, or trading....and certainly BGS! Thats the beauty of the game though.

Am I really that slow? With 21 bodies to find and classify on the FSS and then 6 of those (5 heavy metal worlds & 1 gas giant with water based life) to fly to and scan in detail, is an hour very slow? Please keep in mind I have only been at this new found exploration method for a week or so & I am much faster at the FSS than I was.

To map 6 of them depending on distance no its not unusually slow. Distance being the main factor.

Can use the Orrery view in SysMap to make it easier or more efficient. When you map the rings just check it says 'A' ring or you may have missed one. I use DSS a lot, bit of completionist plus you never know. FSS shows 99% of all things in the planet but not human Crashed Ships unless they are specific POI. Theres random wrecks all over that dont appear in the FSS. Havent found one in the void buy who knows what else may not show up on the FSS....

Its a Treasure Hunt, exploring, and you define what the Treasure is. But yes theres usually unavoidable amounts of jumping Go when the urge takes you, come back when youve had enough....jumping all the way, think of the Rep you can buy with the data.

 

[TiberiusDuval]

My normal way is to get to some set waypoint and on back travel hit the neutron highway....

 

[Hawk of Battle]

Personally I wouldn't bother mapping anything with the DSS unless it's an Earth-like World, a Water World, an Ammonia World, or a Terraformable of some description. I'll occasionally fire at a Metal Rich if I'm already quite close by, or I find a bunch together. Don't bother with anything else, especially Gas Giants, they take way too much time. The only reason you'd scan Gas Giants or Ice Worlds or whatever else is if you really, really want to get your name on absolutely everything, but after you've mapped a few hundred worlds you'll start to not care about the chaff that's not worth any credits.

So yeah, after you've FSS a system, check the map and scan for any of those valuables I mentioned and then plot the most direct path to each and just ignore the rest. Sometimes you might find a system with a bunch of say 4-5 terraformables/water worlds, but they'll be a few hundred thousand ls away. Beelining towards them should still only take you like 15-20 minutes and is worth your time.

 

[Para Handy]

Am I really that slow? With 21 bodies to find and classify on the FSS and then 6 of those (5 heavy metal worlds & 1 gas giant with water based life) to fly to and scan in detail, is an hour very slow? Please keep in mind I have only been at this new found exploration method for a week or so & I am much faster at the FSS than I was.

I wonder if you are waiting for the FSS panel in the upper right to finish determining the actual number of surface features? If you are going to do that you need to unlock your FPS as the time this takes is determined by your FPS. So for example when I am out exploring I disable v-sync which means in the FSS I have hundreds of FPS so the features resolution is much shorter (even if my feet get warm from the GFX card fan running). The time it takes for that part to resolve is why they introduced the probability notification - 60fps means 20+seconds to resolve, 350fps means under 5 seconds.

 

[Para Handy]

Further to what @Hawk of Battle says, I use EDDiscovery which shows at a glance which bodies are terraformable. So for example in this system I would never have considered that body B9a was worth mapping - but there it was, just waiting to earn me over 1.1MCr:

EDDiscovery, I wouldn't leave home without it.

 

[Dragsham]

Read this whole thread thus far. And yes Op is right it can be boring.
But that's because of your approach.
Take a carrier out.
3 mths later l came back having learned what it was I wanted to do.
So.
This time I'll head out not to map as such. That's a side effect. I've got 10000 ton of cargo space free on my carrier the rest is fuel and odds n ends
My intention is to go out and farm voids ltds & painite even after the nerf hammers hit.
So I'll be scanning ringed planets looking for nice doubles or triples. Filling my hold as I go.
Jump to a system out 2k from the bubble and map till I've had my fill and move on.
The exploring aspect is just a bonus.
The point is both tagging and mining. Resulting in good profits and lots of tags.
I also surface map high metal content worlds cos they pay well along with the obvious ones.
Just my slant on how one can turn what's fundamentally boring, into a more interesting trip.

o7

 

[TiberiusDuval]

I wonder if you are waiting for the FSS panel in the upper right to finish determining the actual number of surface features? If you are going to do that you need to unlock your FPS as the time this takes is determined by your FPS. So for example when I am out exploring I disable v-sync which means in the FSS I have hundreds of FPS so the features resolution is much shorter (even if my feet get warm from the GFX card fan running). The time it takes for that part to resolve is why they introduced the probability notification - 60fps means 20+seconds to resolve, 350fps means under 5 seconds.

That was good trick, I did not know it, tried it and scan times went down dramatically.

 

[HurstLlama]

Well, I have been out nearly three weeks now and still have not yet reached real virgin space. I console myself with the knowledge that having got to those regions where no man has ever been I am going to be obliged to stay there for at least four weeks before spending another three weeks (or more) getting home again. So this little trip will entail more the best part of three months gaming - which I am not enjoying at all.

In an attempt to brighten my evenings I have decided to follow Para Handy's advice (which is usually a wise thing to do) and install voice attack and an HCS pack or two. I played around with Voice Attack in the very early days but back then HCS was known as ASTRA and was an unfinished gleam in the developers eye. Can anyone point me to a tutorial on how to set up these tools. Ta.

 

[Para Handy]

........e. Can anyone point me to a tutorial on how to set up these tools. Ta.

Have you looked at their own tutorial videos?

VoiceAttack & voice pack setup | HCS Voice Packs Ltd

Included in your voice pack is a manual.It will explain everything you need to knowto run your pack and issue the coolestvoice commands in gaming history! Preparing your PC for using voice control is vital. It doesn't take much effort, but make sure you follow the steps and we garantee your...

www.hcsvoicepacks.com

ByTheWay - Watch out for old videos about VA and HCS on the yootoob - things are much simpler / user friendly these days, some of the old stuff was excruciating.

There is also good stuff in their forum:

Forums - HCS Voice Packs

vBulletin Forums

forum.hcsvoicepacks.com

I'm told their Discord is good too but I don't use that.

 

[Jakester13]

As an explorer (at times), I'd first agree with this 100%:

Personally I wouldn't bother mapping anything with the DSS unless it's an Earth-like World, a Water World, an Ammonia World, or a Terraformable of some description. I'll occasionally fire at a Metal Rich if I'm already quite close by, or I find a bunch together. Don't bother with anything else, especially Gas Giants, they take way too much time. The only reason you'd scan Gas Giants or Ice Worlds or whatever else is if you really, really want to get your name on absolutely everything, but after you've mapped a few hundred worlds you'll start to not care about the chaff that's not worth any credits.

So yeah, after you've FSS a system, check the map and scan for any of those valuables I mentioned and then plot the most direct path to each and just ignore the rest. Sometimes you might find a system with a bunch of say 4-5 terraformables/water worlds, but they'll be a few hundred thousand ls away. Beelining towards them should still only take you like 15-20 minutes and is worth your time.

Exceptions are those special, amazing systems no one has touched before that may be worth fully "claiming".

I liken exploring to playing the slot machines: 98% of the time: boooooring. FSS and move on. But then you spot something strange in the distance in the stars, or in the galaxy map: a blue fuzzball, or a brightness, and dozens of jumps later you arrive at a nebula, a cluster of O stars or something else. Amazing.

And the core. The core. So. Many. Stars. Black holes, neutrons, weirdness - rare but rewarding when you find them.

o7

 

[Deleted member 166264]

Well, I have been out nearly three weeks now and still have not yet reached real virgin space...

You must either be speaking hyperbolically or you're doing something really wrong (or you could only have about 10 minutes of available playtime per week and thus haven't really gotten anywhere yet). You're in a DBX, so you should have a decent jump range to the point where you should have been finding uncharted systems on your first day. Is your route plotter set to fastest route or economical? Economical will lower your jump distance and thus keep you closer to the Bubble longer. Are you heading towards a nebula? AFAIK just about all of them have been charted already, and since lots of people go to them to check them out the paths heading between them and the Bubble are well traveled.