Welcome back! Six years? Oof, that's a lot, and a lot has happened since. Let's see, just for exploration... lots of research has been done on exploration, external sites have proliferated: first, I'd recommend looking at all the stuff on
EDAstro, then moving on to the new
Galactic Exploration Catalog. There's
Inara,
EDSM (used to be The site to go to, but it isn't up-to-date anymore), and plenty of others. Third-party utilities will help you significantly: the game logs much more information to the disk now, the apps can help look through them automatically to find stuff that you might have missed, provide you with some extra help, and most importantly, to share your data with the crowdsourcing community.
The subforum here hasn't seen a lot of activity, most discussion seems to have moved over on various Discords these days. Often on squadron Discords - oh hey, that's another game feature you haven't seen yet.
On that note, moving on to game features: listing everything from all over the game would be too long, so I'll just stick to exploration.
First and foremost, you'll see that you now have to grind a minigame called the FSS to scan bodies, the system map is no longer revealed without doing so. But in the process, you can scan everything from infinite range in the system. Exploration payouts have been increased by around nine times, and if you play on Odyssey, mapping planets with the DSS (another grindy minigame) will give a bonus on top of that. Exploration rank requirements have stayed the same though, so reaching Elite is much faster now. Then there's that in Odyssey, you can level up even farther: doing the same amount will get you to "Elite I", then it caps out at "Elite V". The old Elite rating would be around Elite VIII now though.
Then for other stuff, the route plotter is much improved: it no longer chokes in the core, has a maximum range of 20,000 ly, and you can add filters to it. People usually filter by star types. Neutron stars have had jets added to them, which you can use for a one-time 4x jump range boost. However, if you hit the exclusion zone and drop down into the jet, it'll quickly fry your ship, so it's not without risk.
There are also Notable Stellar Phenomena to be found in space, various flora down on landable planets (Odyssey introduced landing on thin atmospherics), and a Codex that tallies discoveries from all Commanders. While that concept sounds good, the Codex has plenty of issues though, and lots of bugs.
As for ship equipment, we've had new exploration-related stuff added as well. (There have been new weapons, new equipment, and so on, I'll just stick to the exploration-related stuff.) The most notable is the unlockable Guardian FSD Booster: you can to gather stuff from the ruins of an extinct alien civilization, unlock the booster at tech brokers, and then fitting one on your ship will increase your jump range by a flat amount. The largest one is a class 5 module, it adds +10.5 ly. Then on regular equipment, there's Supercruise Assist, Automated Docking, Automated Landing and Take-off (all of these are optional).
Also, Engineering has been overhauled, and it takes much less time than it used to. There has been power creep as well, of course.
Bunch of new ships too (even though it has been over two years since we've last had a new one); for exploration, you'll mostly want to take a look at the Krait Phantom. It's around the Asp Explorer's level, it's slightly better in some aspects, slightly worse in others.
Then there are fleet carriers, which are basically mobile player-owned stations. Quite many of them have anchored in permanent locations around the galaxy, where explorers can stop at to repair their ships, sell their exploration data (at a 25% loss though), have their ships transferred over if they wish to switch, and so on. Fleet carriers have a 500 ly jump range, but can only jump every 20 minutes. So, travelling by ship is faster, but there are some systems which can only be reached with a carrier.
In addition to the Guardian stuff I mentioned above, there has also been plenty of Thargoid content as well, but it's pretty much confined to the vicinity of the bubble only, you won't find much in the rest of the galaxy. Just their occasional crashed probes, in Odyssey.
Oh, and Colonia (the systems that have sprung up around Jaques) has a bunch of inhabited systems now, but it's still less than 1% of the bubble's size. With plenty of player groups, it has had quite a rich history over the years. That's something cool to read up on too, search for Ian Doncaster's stuff if you're interested.
Well, I think that's it in a nutshell, although I can't help but feel like there's still exploration-related stuff I forgot about. In any case, I'm sure someone else will mention anything I missed, or you'll find it on your own. So, have fun exploring!
