A couple of months ago I posted a series of updates on my search up above the known Guardian region, centered on WREGOE MC-Z B41-6. I was looking for undiscovered Guardian sites, and I found them! Which was pretty exciting.
It's taken me almost as long to collect and present the data as it did to gather it. But the highlights are here:
And here's an inexplicably small version of the video you can see larger on my "Overview" page:
While I was putting this data together it occurred to me that those Brain Tree locations could be useful to people who are gathering Guardian blueprints and mats. So I put together an itinerary (the 'Harvest Tour') for doing that, while also collecting enough raw materials to satisfy just about anyone.
In the meantime I've continued the search. Adding new data will take a lot less time than it took to create the system that displays it: but I have some catching up to do!
I haven't updated this thread for awhile, but I've continued to search along my A (and now B) vectors. All my new results have been negative... which is less disappointing than you might think.
The negative results have been interesting because they've led me to speculate about the site selection process for these structures. Why do we find them in one place, but not another? And what can that tell us about the process that picked the bodies where we do find them?
But I have gotten a little tired of searching in places where I was pretty sure I wouldn't find anything. So rather than continue up to Area A4 I dropped down to the downward vector below the known Guardian sites and continued there.
Here's a new visualization that shows where I've looked:
I don't detail the Brain Tree locations I've found in these areas because you just expect to find them scattered around here. Not finding Brain Trees would be pretty significant. But finding them doesn't tell us anything new.
As I said, I was toying with an idea about the site selection process. In very simple terms I thought that these sites might have been chosen by projecting rays from some central point (which might or might not be the Guardian home system).
I even worked out a simple rule set for how these rays could work. It was very interesting to think about... but there was no way to prove it. Some entity involved in the site selection process would have to weigh in on the question, and that's unlikely whether in-game or out.
By the time I'd finished searching Area B3 I worked out a set of observations that could show me whether I might be on the right track. Last night, when I made those observations, I found exactly the opposite of what I expected to find.
I think I just debunked my own hypothesis.
That's interesting, though! Now I have to go back to what I have seen and try to figure out what it means.
Because my old idea is almost certainly false I have shielded it from your eyes inside a Spoiler tag.
The idea is that Guardian structure sites were placed by projecting rays from a central point.
A ray would have a limited range, and each ray would continue up to that range unless it collided with a system that had candidate bodies. Those bodies would be tested, and each one would have a very small chance of hosting a Guardian Structure.
If a body was chosen, the ray would die. If no body was chosen, the ray would probably also die. If a ray didn't collide with a compatible system it would continue on its course until it did collide with a system or reached the limit of its range.
This seems pretty sensible, and relatively simple.
You'd project a very large number of rays from your origin point. Many of the rays would collide with systems quickly, so as you went farther from the origin there would be a lower and lower density of Guardian structures until you exceeded the rays' range. The result would be a roughly spherical region with a high density of structures in the middle and a lower density of structures as you neared the boundary.
Significantly, you could expect to find more structures in areas that were densely populated with systems (like my Area A1). Rays that passed through densely packed areas would die off quickly; rays that passed through sparsely populated areas would persist and be more likely to reach their maximum range.
If these rules were accurate then I could record the density of systems along my upward and downward vectors at intervals of about 40 light years. I would expect to find sparsely populated areas below my upward A vector, and thickly populated areas above my downward B vector.
What I found was the opposite. The very high density of Area A1 continued all the way down to the middle of the structures area, while the low density of Area B3 continued all the way up to that point.
At the very least, my ray rules are bunkum. At the worst, these sites were not selected by projecting rays.
They still could have been! If the actual center of the structures region is at least 200-300 light years East of the apparent center then my rays might travel through very different systems, and the whole idea could be accurate. That would place the real center very close to the permit-locked Regor sector.
But if that were the case you would expect a very high density of Guardian structures along the Regor boundary. We just haven't seen that – and that area has probably been examined very closely. So I'm in no hurry to look for the diagonal ray paths that would support my old idea.
The likely conclusion is that I was substantially wrong. And maybe completely wrong.
Now, there's another idea that's reinforced by these new observations. System density falls off very rapidly around the middle of Area A2. I found no more structures above that point.
That suggests that the Guardian sites might have been distributed in selected Stellar Forge cubes rather than by projecting rays. (That's because system density varies from one cube to another, the cause of those gigantic star cubes sometimes seen by explorers. So it looks like there's a cube boundary in Area A2.)
You know, maybe. It's one more thing I'm going to watch for as I survey the points along my search vectors.
But I'm sad about my rays. With enough data they could have led us to the actual center of known Guardian space.
I just couldn't be more proud of my fighter pilot, Lori Wright. I promised her that when she ranked up to Elite I'd get her set up with a Pilots Federation license and a Sidewinder of her own, and I finally did that one week ago. Seven days later she's flying her unengineered Dolphin toward my Area A1 to gather raw materials and unlock the FSD booster - and on her approach she discovered this:
... at WREGOE CQ-G D10-153 C 2. This is another Tiny#002 site, though unlike the one I found earlier this one is stocked with Guardian materials, four obelisks, and artifacts. It's guarded by four Sentinels. Lori nabbed a lot of Guardian Technology Components there. The body was discovered previously but never mapped, and is either a new discovery or an unreported one.
This site is a short distance west of Area A1's center, close enough (less than 41 LY) that I'm surprised to have missed it. But things do get haphazard in the Galactic map at about that range.
Credit where credit's due:
I was told last year that no one had yet found a Tiny 002 site. This turns out to be untrue, and I think the confusion may lie in the Cannon maps page where Tiny 002 is one of two maps labeled "Tiny 003". But there are quite a few of them known to date. I'll have to edit my original post.
I've continued my search over the past months and I'm still at it. I've amassed a lot of negative results, and although those are informative they're not as much fun to talk about. At some point soon I'll update my summary.
I'm long overdue for posting an update here: it seemed like any time I had a chance to prepare this I was halfway through another search area - so it wasn't a good time after all. But right now I'm about 16,000 light years away, and I did just finish my Area A1 W1, so here it is.
I continued my search above the region of the known Guardian structures (the A Areas, shown below); and did the same thing down below (the B Areas). Since I'd never been too confident about my center line I also looked to the East of the B vector and to both the East and West of the A vector.
(Looking North toward the Guardian structures region)
That's eleven spheres of space, each one about ninety light years across. I did my best to scan every system within each sphere. I know I missed some of them (see the post above for a dramatic example!), but that still leaves a pretty complete survey. In the ten blue areas you see here I found no new structures at all. (Areas B1 and B1 E1 included a few that were already known.)
The thing that bedevils me is the idea that I reasoned my way to the exact kind of thing I was looking for, but when I applied the same reasoning in the opposite direction I found nothing. I may have just blundered into the single isolated place where more structures were hiding. But that simply feels unlikely even though I know that it's perfectly possible.
I'm not done - I still haven't searched anything to the North or South, for example. But I'm a bit tired of making detailed surveys of 90 LY spheres, so for the moment I'm doing something that's almost the exact opposite of these searches. That'll keep me busy for awhile, and eventually I'll come back to beat my head against this again.
A few things i was wondering you might know an answer to:
-Is there a pattern to the properties of the systems themselves? What about the stars in the systems? Are they similar amongst those guardian systems? Do they have a star class they prefer to settle under?
-Do they only settle on rocky planets or others too?
-Do they always settle in systems with a lot of bodies in them or did you see ruins in systems with less then 10 or 8 bodies too? Because all the guardian systems i visited so far always had at least 20 bodies in them. Are they biased towards systems with a high count of planets?
-Also, will FSS scan be enough to get the info about a ruin in the system map or do you have to DSS before it shows up?
Would be great if you could weigh in on this as it could be a great help for my own efforts to uncover some more ruins, thanks.
First off, I've never (yet) found an undiscovered Ruin. I've been looking for undiscovered Structures, which are the more interactive sites that very often have Sentinels and artifacts and (a little less often) the Data Terminals where you can scan blueprints.
-Is there a pattern to the properties of the systems themselves? What about the stars in the systems? Are they similar amongst those guardian systems? Do they have a star class they prefer to settle under?
This was one of the first things I looked into when I started searching for new Structures. What I recall is that they had been found in systems with main stars of every one of the common types except for Brown Dwarfs*, and for that reason I guessed that the systems' location was much more important than their star class. I did find one new structure on a body in orbit around a ringed Class Y - which was a lovely place for it - but that was in a system with a different class of main star: so not an exception. Just a nice view.
I haven't looked over the star classes of systems with Ruins. I'd be surprised (but interested!) if they were different.
So far, rocky or any of the metallics (high metal content or metal-rich). If you look at Guardian architecture you can see why they wouldn't like to build on ice if they could help it.
-Do they always settle in systems with a lot of bodies in them or did you see ruins in systems with less then 10 or 8 bodies too? Because all the guardian systems i visited so far always had at least 20 bodies in them. Are they biased towards systems with a high count of planets?
Now that's an interesting question. The lowest number of bodies in one of my Structure systems is the 18 bodies at PENCIL SECTOR YJ-A C12. It's true that Structures (and Brain Trees, for that matter) seem to show up in systems with many bodies; binary planets are also quite common as hosts for the sites.
Since I've only recently started to look out for Ruins, I haven't examined their data and I can't say from my own experience that this is also typical of those.
I've thought a lot, and perhaps foolishly, about how the site selection process for these sites may work. My working theory is that systems are tested in an unknown pattern, and candidate systems are then given a chance of hosting a Brain Tree or Structure location. Systems with a larger number of bodies get more chances than the emptier systems, and so you'd expect to find more sites where there are plenty of bodies to choose from. This wouldn't rule out systems with eight or ten bodies: they just have a lower probability because they'd have been tested fewer times.
But that's really just speculation. Only the entity or entities that placed the sites could really know.
There's been some confusion about this lately in the Forum, but so far as I know the FSS should still reveal any kind of Guardian site, and the DSS should show you where on the surface it is.
* Brown Dwarfs are less likely to have a lot of appropriate bodies, so I wouldn't say they can't host a site. I just don't think that one's been found.
-Do they always settle in systems with a lot of bodies in them or did you see ruins in systems with less then 10 or 8 bodies too? Because all the guardian systems i visited so far always had at least 20 bodies in them. Are they biased towards systems with a high count of planets?
Oh, one other thing. I wouldn't use the word "settle". We've never found any remnant of a place where Guardians actually lived. The Ruins are a bit like public libraries, and the Structures like secure facilities. But we've found no ruined cities, and no derelict orbital stations, and in fact none of the kind of stuff that we ourselves would leave behind. As far as I'm concerned we still haven't seen the place where they used to live.
This is very interesting, thank you. I'll make sure to post a comment here in case i find out some more about any kind of patterns with guardian structures.
This is very interesting, thank you. I'll make sure to post a comment here in case i find out some more about any kind of patterns with guardian structures.
Oh, one other thing. I wouldn't use the word "settle". We've never found any remnant of a place where Guardians actually lived. The Ruins are a bit like public libraries, and the Structures like secure facilities. But we've found no ruined cities, and no derelict orbital stations, and in fact none of the kind of stuff that we ourselves would leave behind. As far as I'm concerned we still haven't seen the place where they used to live.
Good point! All indications are that they would live on ELW's with <1 G gravity. Not sure if they would still look like that "now"/34th century. It would be a cool thing to wait until Odyssey to put in the game.
I'm long overdue for posting an update here: it seemed like any time I had a chance to prepare this I was halfway through another search area - so it wasn't a good time after all. But right now I'm about 16,000 light years away, and I did just finish my Area A1 W1, so here it is.
I continued my search above the region of the known Guardian structures (the A Areas, shown below); and did the same thing down below (the B Areas). Since I'd never been too confident about my center line I also looked to the East of the B vector and to both the East and West of the A vector.
(Looking North toward the Guardian structures region)
That's eleven spheres of space, each one about ninety light years across. I did my best to scan every system within each sphere. I know I missed some of them (see the post above for a dramatic example!), but that still leaves a pretty complete survey. In the ten blue areas you see here I found no new structures at all. (Areas B1 and B1 E1 included a few that were already known.)
The thing that bedevils me is the idea that I reasoned my way to the exact kind of thing I was looking for, but when I applied the same reasoning in the opposite direction I found nothing. I may have just blundered into the single isolated place where more structures were hiding. But that simply feels unlikely even though I know that it's perfectly possible.
I'm not done - I still haven't searched anything to the North or South, for example. But I'm a bit tired of making detailed surveys of 90 LY spheres, so for the moment I'm doing something that's almost the exact opposite of these searches. That'll keep me busy for awhile, and eventually I'll come back to beat my head against this again.
A few things i was wondering you might know an answer to:
-Is there a pattern to the properties of the systems themselves? What about the stars in the systems? Are they similar amongst those guardian systems? Do they have a star class they prefer to settle under?
-Do they only settle on rocky planets or others too?
-Do they always settle in systems with a lot of bodies in them or did you see ruins in systems with less then 10 or 8 bodies too? Because all the guardian systems i visited so far always had at least 20 bodies in them. Are they biased towards systems with a high count of planets?
-Also, will FSS scan be enough to get the info about a ruin in the system map or do you have to DSS before it shows up?
Would be great if you could weigh in on this as it could be a great help for my own efforts to uncover some more ruins, thanks.
