It’s hilarious to see someone so dogmatic that it borders on religion and who can’t seem to comprehend that a high level statement can be both true and incomplete. I used to be in the “all shades are due to terrain” camp until another cmdr showed me it couldn’t be completely responsible via screenshots showing unequivocally that something else was at work.
Rather than cling to a position I had parroted solely because of the coarse explanation of a mechanic that had been clumsily altered from its original design (and by a person who, I suspect, was probably tired of talking about it), I took the radical step of actually logging into the game and seeing for myself. Heretical, I know, but I guess I’m just crazy that way.
Over the next several (30-40) planets, I paid close attention to overlays where the blue area was identical but the shading differed. This most often happened on two-signal planets with bacteria and fonticulua. If you’ve actually done exobiology for any length of time, you’ll know that these often share identical availability zones in flat areas. Some of these were on icy planets with little or no rock to interfere terrain-wise.
What I found is that the shading does change, often markedly, between the two species without any change in the underlying terrain. The “teal” or “greeny-blue” flat areas almost uniformly had the indicated bio signal within approximately 500 meters (coincidentally the colony distance for those two bios) of the border of the shade. The other shadings also would have that bio, but not always within that range or at the same density.
I have no idea what is causing the obvious variations in shading over identical areas when selecting for different species. More to the point, it doesn’t matter what the actual underlying code is doing or what a dev said in a brief and high level comment on a discussion forum.
The only thing that matters to me is that I have determined, with my own eyes and through my own actions, that if I head for a teal zone within the overlay, I find the bio I’m looking for >99% of the time within a few hundred meters.
So maybe it is just terrain. I think that’s an incomplete description of the mechanic even if grossly accurate, but let’s take the statement at face value. It doesn’t matter because the visual overlay does change between species and my experience says that one certain shade provides me with a positive result more often than any other shade.
I don’t care why it’s different, I only care that I have satisfactorily demonstrated to myself, multiple times over, that by going to a particular shade, I have a better chance of finding what I’m looking for. I don’t care if anyone else believes that or not. I will happily continue to head for the teal zones while actually playing the game instead of trolling a forum for a game I don’t play.
