How to find biological life?

Dziondziak · May 25, 2021

Im missing something.
Long time player
I find a planet with bio on it. I hit it with the probes. A heat map of sorts comes up. I believe the blue areas are where the life is.
I land. Pull out my bio scanner. I do the ping...nothing. I drive around for an hour...nothing. No life anywhere. Tried 4 different planets that had bio signals on them.
What is the part i am not doing?

CMDR Corlas · May 25, 2021

I go the blue parts and then zip around above the surface until I see something that's not rocks (having night vision on can help it stand out more). Then I land and get out. The bio-scanner only works when you're basically touching the organism.

SgtMajRaz · May 25, 2021

You don't get like a bio-radar to at least guide you in the right direction when you hit the SRV?

Riverside · May 25, 2021

SgtMajRaz said:
You don't get like a bio-radar to at least guide you in the right direction when you hit the SRV?

No, the SRV wave scanner shows nothing, which does seem like a missed opportunity.

I use the ship to find a good place then either use the SRV to drive around, getting out briefly to check & bio-scan then immediately return to the SRV, or similar but with the ship (easier to spot stuff & cover ground more quickly, potentially harder to find landing spots).

Enjoying it so far, I'm getting into a routine although if I start having to return to orbit to check the heatmap it's probably going to start getting a bit of a chore

EmmyV · May 25, 2021

Shout "Heeeeyyyyy" and wait for the "Whaaaaaaat" in return.

Dziondziak · May 25, 2021

Ok...
I guess that means im not missing anything. Its just much harder to find bio than i would have expected.
Double edged sword. Now i have to work to earn it.
not having the wave scanner on the srv help seems like a pretty big miss. Perhaps a future engineer can help with this?
Also seems like there are some opportunities for artemis suit upgrades that would actually be useful to explorers. From what i see right now, none of the suit upgrades really matter for explorers.

Riverside · May 25, 2021

Dziondziak said:
Ok...
I guess that means im not missing anything. Its just much harder to find bio than i would have expected.
Double edged sword. Now i have to work to earn it.
not having the wave scanner on the srv help seems like a pretty big miss. Perhaps a future engineer can help with this?
Also seems like there are some opportunities for artemis suit upgrades that would actually be useful to explorers. From what i see right now, none of the suit upgrades really matter for explorers.

Yeah you got it

The life I've found is pretty much all over the place, you might not find (three of) a specific thing quickly but you'll find something almost straight away and as someone that used to search for stuff on planets before the December 2018 3.3 update pinpointed everything on a planet it is still way, way easier than it was before mapping was introduced.

But it's a self contained gameplay loop. It requires the armetis (explorer) suit and counts towards a new Elite rank & apart from earning good money (and being a nice excuse to fly, drive & walk on planets) there doesn't seem to be any connection to the rest of the game (maybe rank increase will unlock an engineer, I don't know). No mats, no data or recipes, no food chemicals or meds that can be synthed that I've found so far.

Still, it's something to do if you're out exploring anyway

Aurora Velius · May 25, 2021

After some trial and error I usually don't bother if the planet has less than 3 bio types. If it is just a single bio signal, it most likely is a bacteria, and they can be hard to spot. 2 signals is usually bacteria + some shrub or other common plant life tied to the atmo and planet type. Anything 3+ you start to get some good clustering of different plant types. Best I have seen so far was 8 bio signals.

cmdrkat · May 25, 2021

You can filter different biological signs in the surface scanner mode. I use my ship to fly close to surface around the blue areas of the heat map. Bacterial signs are most difficult to find if you don't know what you're looking for visually. But you can see them from air and they are pretty easy to spot after you get an idea of what they look like. Organic blotches usually have a round shape and more defined edges than other blotches on the surface. If you're flying too high above the surface you might not see the plants.