Flak-harvesting Brain Trees. Not viable?

[Pyure]

Plenty of youtubes and googles suggest I can flak-harvest brain trees, but my limpets always die on the trees.
Backing off until the trees don't render is the popular workaround but they expire regardless.
What am I doing wrong?

 

[Pyure]

I'm around 1.1km above the trees, they're not rendered, the limpets can see something to go grab, and they run down but incur "Collection failed" and expire.

I got frustrated with this a year ago and took a break to go play X4. I was really hoping they'd have cleaned this up. Limpets should be more effective than Amazon drones.

 

[DjVortex]

I remember some people commenting that recent changes have made harvesting materials from the ground with limpets not working again.

As far as I know, unless I'm mistaken, it was never supposed to work, and the fact that at some point it did was the actual bug. Limpets are supposed to hit the ground and be destroyed when they try to pick something up from there.

Just collect them the old-fashioned way. No cheesing it.

 

[Pyure]

Pragmatically, makes a sort of sense. Bit of a shame though. It feels a bit forced that the limpets can pick up asteroid bits but not planetoid materials, and in principal the limpet mechanic just feels more amusing. I wouldn't say it's more "engaging" since the SRV route literally includes a rarely used mechanic, but I would say the fact that you can flak/bomb/missile them in the first place is down-right emergent. Too bad.

Honestly, flakking them picking them up by SRV is almost as quick as the long-distance-limpet route (unless you're packing 8 concurrent limpets), it's just...not very fun

 

[cmdr jonnimew]

I can personally attest to limpets no longer working to harvest brain trees. When I started about a month ago it worked quite well. Now not at all. Tried multiple graphics settings and multiple locations--doesn't work--sucks ass but if above is correct that it was always a bug that it did work well I guess I got lucky before but now back to the grind. But what es me off is how often stuff doesn't fall from the trees and then my srv gets stuck in the damn tree trying to retrieve raw materials. Very frustrating. Come on FDev, throw a dog a bone. Edit: Also sucks that there's no way to tell what the mat is until you shoot it so that just adds to the grind time. Why isn't there a way to discern what elements each patch of brain trees have, like say a scan showing X percent of this and Y percent of that at least. Very poor mechanics imo and could definitely use some love to make it less painful.

 

[Pyure]

100% agree. There's plenty of room to increase the fun factor at reasonable cost here.

 

[Dougie]

... Why isn't there a way to discern what elements each patch of brain trees have, like say a scan showing X percent of this and Y percent of that at least. ...

This is what I used (taken from /r ) ... there is an updated /r post about it "post 4.1" but I have not tried that.

 

[Archvillain]

I've seen comments that it is still possible to use limpets, but it's far more difficult now, the technique is slightly different, and you're gonna lose more limpets regardless. (Have the ship absolutely still while limpets work, and place yourself so the limpets' path is slightly closer to horizontal than vertical, presumably so they have a bit more overshoot beyond the mat before they hit ground)

So I think FDev fixed the bug with as light a touch as possible to avoid affecting other areas of the game, so it's possible to still work around that if you're determined enough, but it's hard because you're fighting dev intentions