Lost??

[Mr.Sharku]

I'm kinda stuck on forward progress. I'm trying to follow the spiral arm up into the main body of the galaxy.
I'm about 1700ly out at System PRU EUQ NX-J B41-0.Trying to plot a course forward and I keep getting Plot Failed.
It seems I'm in an area with few stars close enuf for my 26ly jump range.
I can find my way back but that's a lot of lost ground. Is there a tool or something that I can use to help plot a course into the center? Was hoping to make it to Sag A. Will only let me plot out 1k ly and have trouble seeing stars. Either they're 50ly or 2kly away.

 

[Mr.Sharku]

NM. Found the Neutron Highway Route Planner.
Just what the Dr. ordered.

 

[iain666]

The in-game route plotter only works out to 1kly. Where the stars are sparse (relative to your jump range) it can struggle to manage that (mostly because down a bit then back a bit and then left a bit before you go forward again is something it struggles to manage and is sometimes necessary when the density is low) but plotting 3-400ly can often help with that.

In terms of external tools that can plot longer routes, that is one of the many useful features of ED Discovery.

3rd party route plotting tools pretty much all rely on EDSM , a crowd sourced database of stars in ED, do consider also registering with that and uploading your logs (if you use EDD it'll do that for you if you supply the API key from EDSM...)

Disclaimer: I am one of the developers on EDD so I am biased. Other tools dedicated to or incorporating route plotting (like the Neutron Highway Route Planner) exist. EDD does other cool stuff though.

 

[Mr.Sharku]

ok. I DL'd & Installed EDD. Plotted a route from the above mentioned station to Sag a+ Depot.
I now have a plot of 931 jumps. Unfortunately, most of the systems just say Waypoint Distance 26.7 ly.
Scrolling thru the list I see maybe 50 system names out to jump # 820 where the rest are named.
Not sure how I would plot my course with this.

I DO like the History & Journal. I've been logging distances and system names on my Kindle Fire.
Even tho I just installed this 10 minutes ago it has my entire history since 10/25!!!
Including all the jumps in this journey. I just need to go add notes. :] Thank You!

 

[iain666]

Where it just says 'Waypoint' then that means that there's not anything known that's close enough. You can change what's 'close enough' in the Metric drop down to allow it to go further from a straight line to find a known system, or you can use the coordinates to find something in the right general area on the galmap.

An alternative approach is to tell the route plotter that you can jump several hundred ly at a time, then it should give you a smaller list of way points that the in-game route plotter should be generally able to manage and be less likely to find nothing close enough that is on EDSM.

 

[iain666]

PS - 10/25 is when 2.2 dropped. You may have more history in the old style netlogs.

You can load those as well from the Admin menu, you'll need to browse to the right folder though. By default it will have been C:\Users\%user%\AppData\Local\Frontier_Developments\Products\elite-dangerous-64\Logs (for a non-steam install anyway).