How to find Bio stuff in Odyssey

[Red Rocket]

After searching for a couple of hours looking for a atmospheric planet with bio life i found one with 2 bio life forms.
mapped the planet and it turned blue so far so good, dropped in on two shades of blue and found nothing.
I am using VR is the color showing Bio stuff broken or bugged ?
Just how do you find the Bio stuff.

I am surprised on just how rare landable atmospheric planets are, found lots of atmospheric planets with like less than 1 atmospheric but can't land.
I went to about 20 systems in the bubble before finding one landable atmospheric planet.

 

[Bigmaec]

I'll second this query. Anyone point us to a guide, especially a non-video guide?

 

[Ian Skippy]

Some life signs are bacterial/moss, you must land as it's so small to see from up higher. It's everywhere though.

 

[Amy Pendergast]

The map after scanning is no heat map as it was in Alpha, so it just shows a general "life is on this planet".
You will have to fly low or walk around to find the actual life.

In general this should be not too hard but if the planet only contains bacterial life, you will have a hard time to find them as they are really not easy to spot on the surface.

And remember, your bio tool has a scanning feature for short ranges, that helps with bacteria patches.

 

[Bigmaec]

The map after scanning is no heat map as it was in Alpha, so it just shows a general "life is on this planet".
You will have to fly low or walk around to find the actual life.

In general this should be not too hard but if the planet only contains bacterial life, you will have a hard time to find them as they are really not easy to spot on the surface.

And remember, your bio tool has a scanning feature for short ranges, that helps with bacteria patches.

How does that work? When I use secondary mode a green pulse goes out, that slightly highlights things like rocks.
What do bacteria patches look like with that? Color change?

 

[Winterwalker]

How does that work? When I use secondary mode a green pulse goes out, that slightly highlights things like rocks.
What do bacteria patches look like with that? Color change?

Under the pulse for the first time .. bright green. Dark colours indicate either a different species or a sampe of the same species as you have in your sample pot but not biodiverse enough (need to get further away from last sample)

SRV composition scanner also picks them up. Quite fun to drive through the turret control and scan around looking for the scanner to beep (ready to scan), you found 'something'.

 

[Amy Pendergast]

How does that work? When I use secondary mode a green pulse goes out, that slightly highlights things like rocks.
What do bacteria patches look like with that? Color change?

Yes, it should change the color but it only has a range of about 100 meters. I try to avoid searching for them and hop over to the next planet at the moment.

Another possibility is flying really low with your ship, then you can spot them also.

Sadly the pay for discovering them in no way reflects the difficulty to spot then, especially as you need 3 scans of each kind.

 

[Amy Pendergast]

Under the pulse for the first time .. bright green. Dark colours indicate either a different species or a sampe of the same thing but not biodiverse enough (need to get further from last sample)

SRV copmposition scanner also picks them up. Quite fun to drive through the turret control and scan around fo the scanner to beep (ready to scan), you found 'something'.

Ah thanks for the tip with the SRV scanner, didn't pick that up

 

[Ian Doncaster]

How does that work? When I use secondary mode a green pulse goes out, that slightly highlights things like rocks.
What do bacteria patches look like with that? Color change?

Bacteria patches will look like a persistent green patch on the floor after the pulse, and then when the pulse fades they tend to look like someone has drawn a maze in the rock. They're pretty subtle, patches can be tiny and separated by multiple kilometres, and I can rarely be bothered to look for them (I'll composition scan them for the Codex if I see them, but usually that's all) - it's easier to start with some of the more solid plants. To be honest, the pulse mode is basically useless right now except for telling if you're far enough away to get a second/third sample.

For finding plants, what I tend to do is:
- DSS the planet, switch the DSS filter through the plants modes, see which region has the most plant types on it (in daytime) and glide down to there.
- drop to about 30m up, deploy landing gear, then fly at about 100m/s upside down looking for anything which doesn't look like general terrain or a rock (with the planet colours fairly desaturated right now, most life stands out). If you're not close enough to see the rock scatter, you'll probably also miss the plants ... if you're travelling too fast, you'll probably have flown over by the time it renders.
- set your fire groups to analysis + composition scanner just on the off-chance, if that pings great but it probably won't
- if I see anything, land, get out the SRV, then get out of the SRV in the Artemis to scan it. Then get back in the SRV to drive around looking for two other clumps - other than bacteria, they'll generally be fairly nearby but not so close I'd just walk to them (and if they are that close, they'll be in "undiverse" range). If I'm lucky, there'll be two or three types of life just in this general area so I can spend a while driving around picking them up.
- if I don't see anything for a while, assume that while the general biome is suitable for this type of life, the specific terrain here isn't, return to orbital cruise and try to drop down somewhere else with different terrain.

 

[JTFireblaze]

Remember when Horizons launched and the only way we could find stuff on the surface was by flying over it and eyeballing the terrain?

Yep, we're back to that.

After DSSing and finding a blue zone on the surface, land, get in SRV -> camera suite -> zoom out to a comfortable level and drive forward until you see something.

Much like the step backwards with Odyssey's Engineers implementation, so is biological exploration.

 

[Drazkul]

After searching for a couple of hours looking for a atmospheric planet with bio life i found one with 2 bio life forms.
mapped the planet and it turned blue so far so good, dropped in on two shades of blue and found nothing.
I am using VR is the color showing Bio stuff broken or bugged ?
Just how do you find the Bio stuff.

I am surprised on just how rare landable atmospheric planets are, found lots of atmospheric planets with like less than 1 atmospheric but can't land.
I went to about 20 systems in the bubble before finding one landable atmospheric planet.

I've been exploring none stop since Odyssey released.

The blue layers show where life is possible but not always where you'll find it.

I've noticed that there are two shades to the blue layer though - a light blue and a darker blue. Always aim to land in the lighter blue area.

I've only very rarely not found what I was looking for when doing this - and the only type I have trouble finding is bacteria as its flat and can blend in with the surface.

As someone else has pointed out use the SRV in turret view to scan for stuff with the comp scanner (scanning stuff can give you small codex vouchers too)

How does that work? When I use secondary mode a green pulse goes out, that slightly highlights things like rocks.
What do bacteria patches look like with that? Color change?

When you fire it, if you haven't already scanned a species everything will be highlighted green.

If you have one or two samples then that species will either be green or dark blue, if it is blue you need to go further from your last one.

If the scanner picks up another species to the one your currently sampling they'll be purple or turquoise in colour.

Any species you've completely scanned will be dark blue like when you haven't gone far enough for genetic variety (which for a rough guide is you need to go at least 500m away from the last scanned - your HuD automatically places a marker on your compass and tells you the distance you are away from it)

Also some species only grow in certain areas - fungoids for example, I've only seen them in mountainous areas

 

[Red Rocket]

i spent about 1 hour flying around different colored spots on the posted planet and only found some small green looking rocksthat turned out to be a moss, not very impressive.
In total I have about 8 hours looking for cool looking plants and found 1 nice looking plant and green moss, I just don’t have the time to search for stuff because my playing time is limited, here’s hopping Fdev improves the color mapping scheme.
finding stuff in Horizons is fantastic.

 

[Red Rocket]

After looking and flying around I seem to have better luck finding stuff, earlier i was just flying too fast.

You have to fly slow enough and low enough for the rendering to become visible.

I try to keep around 50 meters high and 100 to 130 speed to keep up with tthe rendering, may depend on your video card.
what you want to see is the rocks start to render, if you don't see the small rocks pop into sight then you are too fast or to high.

I found a planet with 2 bio's found one and could't find the second. What we need is some onboard tools to help guide us to the different types.

 

[varonica]

After looking and flying around I seem to have better luck finding stuff, earlier i was just flying too fast.

You have to fly slow enough and low enough for the rendering to become visible.

I try to keep around 50 meters high and 100 to 130 speed to keep up with tthe rendering, may depend on your video card.
what you want to see is the rocks start to render, if you don't see the small rocks pop into sight then you are too fast or to high.

I found a planet with 2 bio's found one and could't find the second. What we need is some onboard tools to help guide us to the different types.

If you found one and couldn't find the other that was probably bacteria, there's a good chance you walked, drove over or just flew past dozens. For example two bacteria sites in this picture;

If it's hard to find it's the same colour as the ground, here's another example of easy to find, you can see the yellow patches clearly against the ground. You can try flying to a different area of the planet with different coloured surface, otherwise it's just a matter of persisting until you get them;

 

[Vasious]

From here

DSS heatmap

Can anyone tell me how to see if the different filters actually work? Pressing Q/E doesn’t change anything and there is no visible indication what mode I‘m in when VSS is opened. The entire planet is just blue 🙄

forums.frontier.co.uk

Filters showing different locales of biologicals

Blue is location it can be found, may take a bit of driving

Different blues seems to just be the underlying terrain bleeding through the filter

Spoiler

As you pic an area I like turn off analysis mode to get a visual id on the location for Glide

Spoiler

The areas are usually littered with what shows up and you can get clusters of different types near each other, though I find bacteria hard to find as I have no Artemis Suit

This was picking a Concha area on the heat map that overlapped with Tussock grass found nearby

Tied to use the Vanity camera to get both in but to fly up far enough to get both in shot they both rendered out

Spoiler

Note Biological (3) Does NOT mean there are three SITES

It means there are three TYPES

Biological (1) means one TYPE which is usually bacteria which is really easy to miss

To spot them I use the vanity Camera and position it well above and behind the SRV looking on an downwards angle.

It is often a colour similar to the ground and flat, but once you know what you are looking for

Suits may have scanners to help with this

Spoiler

Similarly

Geological (2) and Geological (3) refer to the TYPES not SITES and they will be scattered in the zone and different types can be found near each other if the heat maps overlap

Here Fumaroles and Geysers

Spoiler

Hope this helps

 

[Red Rocket]

Thanks for great post, this will help a lot of commanders.
Nice find on those egg/ball type things.
this is what I was hopping to see in Odyssey

 

[Chorda]

I've had best luck concentrating around the edges of craters and transition zones like foothills and mountain ranges. Beyond an indication there's alien life to be found, the blue filter doesn't seem to do anything, nor does switching filter modes.

 

[getplayeronline]

Hi, researching at the moment, got some from 4 to 8, check here for some samples, enjoy. Good luck brother.

https://youtube.com/channel/UCbgXtoPaCX9kSpZXVtTLyHg

 

[Mike Hanson]

It would be so nice if we could get some kind of tool that could point us in the general direction with the SRV when we are near Bio-samples, because driving around, getting out of the SRC, scanning, driving some more, getting out, scanning, etc. tends to become a bit time consuming.

 

[aRJay]

It would be so nice if we could get some kind of tool that could point us in the general direction with the SRV when we are near Bio-samples, because driving around, getting out of the SRC, scanning, driving some more, getting out, scanning, etc. tends to become a bit time consuming.

It is often better to fly a ship with a small landing footprint at low level to spot the bios by eye then land and collect the sample on foot, No SRV requirement and can be quite quick when you have your eye in.

Apologies for compounding the necro.