Just find a planet with .05 G or less and fire a prospector limpet at the ground. It will illuminate all the good rocks just like when you go mining. Only works on the tiny planets though.
Make the SRV scanner actually useful.
- Thread starter Tryst
- Start date
OP there is no need to make the SRV scanner useful, it already is.
Now if you had asked to have it made dead easy then there might have been something to discuss as it isn't easy to interpret fully but even without being able personally to identify clearly what I am detecting I can get enough of an idea as to what it is and can find it easily enough which makes it useful enough for me.
It certainly doesn't need to be made so easy that there is nothing to learn in how to use it.
Now if you had asked to have it made dead easy then there might have been something to discuss as it isn't easy to interpret fully but even without being able personally to identify clearly what I am detecting I can get enough of an idea as to what it is and can find it easily enough which makes it useful enough for me.
It certainly doesn't need to be made so easy that there is nothing to learn in how to use it.
They are easy to use. I went to a system 1.5K from the hub and found a planet with a few sites in seconds.
Not quite like the one in the video, this one had a LOT of hills and places the SRV couldn't even get to in order to shoot the nodes or collect the mats. Much spinning of wheels on a hill but not going anywhere and hitting reverse results in rolling over and over down the hill again.
As for the scanner, it's still just a jumble of useless visual and audio noise to me. I have to agree with @Pug it's a 1990's piece of equipment being used in a year 3000 timeline. I've seen modern metal detectors with more advanced tech than that SRV scanner.
The scanner works bass akwards. On a radar, you would not see 3 or 4 aircraft in the distance making a signal 160 degrees in width. You would see a single dot and only as they came closer would you see it diverge into several dots. the scanner should show s single vertical line and as you come closer, it then diverges into a reading of what it actually is (what you see when you currently get close) you can then choose to ignore it or head for it. A node half a mile away isn't going to be 160 degrees in width.
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Blue circles was such a terrible mechanic, can't believe anyone actually designed that.
Oh a bad analogy. What if there were hundreds or thousands of aircraft and only 3 of them were the ones you wanted and you had to figure out which ones they were from a crowded radar screen. You are on a planet with high concentrations of metal, you are looking for a slightly higher concentration of metal in the form of a chondrite or mesidorite, how do you determine which is which from just normal deposits. You can't tune a radar to meteorite, chondrite or mesidorite, they are just abstract ideas, you have to tune it to a material, and if there is a high concentration of said material scattered about already you aren't going to get an arrow pointing and saying "that way" from a couple of kilometers distant, you are going to get interference from the same material you all around that will resolve down once you get closer and a clearer signal from the deposit.
The iWin button points to the geo and bio sites, not meteorites!
That's where I went in the end. Not easy since many of the nodes are on hills that the SRV can't even get to, but there's enough on the flat areas to stock up.
The SRV scanner is a non starter for me, from my POV, it's little more than the display on the right side of the ship cockpit that shows an oscilliscope display of what may be a radio signal. It serves no purpose other than make the cockpit look busy.
Got any Stupfz worth hazing (no SRV scanners please, apparently your's are faulty)...
(Asking for friend
)
Six pages of help, and not one person pointed out the obvious solution to the OP's problem.
OP: "I have difficulty using the SRV's scanner, so I can't get the germanium and other raw mats I need for engineering and synthesis.".
Here is the solution. There is another source of raw mats, that requires zero landing on planets and zero SRV driving: asteroid mining. All you need is a mining laser, and some collector limpets. No refinery or actual mining required. Just fly up to any ring or asteroid belt, and fire your mining laser. Mineral chunks will fly off. Some of these chunks are commodity minerals (bauxite, gold, painite, etc; if you don't have a refinery, your collector limpets will ignore those) and some are engineering materials.
You probably won't get any germanium directly, unless you're lucky and happen to hit a ring/belt containing germanium (the game won't tell you the composition of a ring, so you can't go looking for one unless you use out-of-game tools to find one). but collect whatever you can, then fly to a minerals trader and trade up/down for what you need.
You can, of course, combine this with actual mining, either for profit or for Engineer unlocking. Note that the materials chunks only come out for old-fashioned laser surface mining; they don't appear for subsurface and deep core mining techniques.
OP: "I have difficulty using the SRV's scanner, so I can't get the germanium and other raw mats I need for engineering and synthesis.".
Here is the solution. There is another source of raw mats, that requires zero landing on planets and zero SRV driving: asteroid mining. All you need is a mining laser, and some collector limpets. No refinery or actual mining required. Just fly up to any ring or asteroid belt, and fire your mining laser. Mineral chunks will fly off. Some of these chunks are commodity minerals (bauxite, gold, painite, etc; if you don't have a refinery, your collector limpets will ignore those) and some are engineering materials.
You probably won't get any germanium directly, unless you're lucky and happen to hit a ring/belt containing germanium (the game won't tell you the composition of a ring, so you can't go looking for one unless you use out-of-game tools to find one). but collect whatever you can, then fly to a minerals trader and trade up/down for what you need.
You can, of course, combine this with actual mining, either for profit or for Engineer unlocking. Note that the materials chunks only come out for old-fashioned laser surface mining; they don't appear for subsurface and deep core mining techniques.
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I'm sure this info will be utterly ignored followed by a reiteration by OP of how they CBF to learn the game they play and how it's somehow the game's fault
That's often a problem, but I generally find on any one planet there's enough variety of landscapes you can find a site on a flat area. Or just do as much on one site as easily can and then move on to the next area.
+1 OP. It's 3307. Why doesn't my SRV interpret the signals for me? Even after years of playing I still can't remember what those lines mean. Only that there is some junk up ahead. I only find out what's up after shooting it. My brain is just wired that way. And I refuse to have little post-it notes on my monitor for reminders.
Someone else said this to me but I wasn't aware that your limpets would pickup only mats if you didn't have a refinery. I thought they meant the mats appear as a result of the refining process so it meant you had to have a refinery.
I'm not a great fan of the wasteful collector limpets that don't return to recharge their batteries or refuel before going out again instead of just dying and floating in space, creating more space junk. It means you have to keep a hold full of limpets and leave little space to put the refined ore unless you have a huge hold space, it makes mining with a smaller ship pretty pointless. Whoever thought up that idea certainly didn't have all their brain cells firing properly that day and whoever signed it off as a workable idea wasn't too bright either.
I guess the devs of a game designed way back in 2003 called Eve Online, that used mining drones that were persistent unless physically destroyed and even followed you unless you went into warp, were definitely brighter. It's just a shame the devs of Eve Online only bothered about the big alliances when they made new updates and forgot about the smaller corporations and solo players or I wouldn't have left it at all. However, ED now has a larger active player base than Eve Online.
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I only did mining once way back when the game was first launched and gave up when you had to chase the chunks all over the place to scoop them, then tried again briefly with the collector limpets when they were added, but with small ship there wasn't much cargo space left after the refinery and a hold full of limpets, barely enough to fil all the cargo space if you had any left. Frankly, I think a 5 year old could have designed a better system.
It would make sense if you had a drone bay and collector drones that have to recharge at intervals but are then recalled before you move. But that's a different topic.
I might have a go mining with the collector limpets and no refinery since you don't need cargo space for the mats, I really don't have the credits for a proper mining ship right now with enough cargo space to make it worth the hassle.
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Collector limpets will keep collecting until their time runs out. The trick is, don't select a target.
No no no, it is the games fault!
Tbh i am amazed the OP keep finding things that do actually work to moan about, rather than moaning about the long list of stuff that actually doesn't work!
Its like some weird alternate reality...
You do know that the refinery itself (at least 2A model one) holds 6 ton of material on its own? (The 4A ten tons.)
You just have to ignore the "cargo hold full" message and rigorously vent every other mineral (100% or below) you do not want to see in there.
This means a sidewinder with a full 2a refinery and a full class 2 cargo rack (4 tons) can hand in 10 tones of ore.
And if that's Alexandrite at 400.000, this means you can buy a Keelback now.
Micromanagement is boring quite honestly. Once it has refined it, the ore should be transferred to a seperate holding slot, even if it's less than 1 unit, the next load would allow it to be made up to one unit, but it frees up a refinery slot for other ores. Throwing away good ore that's been refined just seems like a waste to me, but then, what do you expect from a game that forces you to keep buying limpets that die in no time and litter space with debris?
A drone bay with persistent drones that have to come back for a recharge regularly would make more sense. Like Eve Online, if you leave them behind because you failed to recall them before you warped off, someone else can scoop them up and use them or sell them.
Could add an optional radar 'beep' maybe? OPTIONAL I said everyone, calm down.
Learn to use the scanner? Oh I see not that.
Just accept its not easy but it is learnable. Personally I know that signals at the top are artificial / alien / human and signals at the bottom are mineral. Thats all I need to play my game. Well I dont need it but it does make it easier to choose which signal to follow.
Practice with known signals, drive away and turn around, what does scanner look like from that distance, how far does it scan? etc
Do you not understand that I appear to have a problem with these so called patterns? They all look the same to me, it's just random visual noise from my POV, making the scanner totally useless. I am undoubtedly not the only one with this problem although I may be one of the few who have made it public.
You keep thinking that, it will make you feel better.
Most people manage to understand that the number and layout of the arcs denotes the type of target and that the width of the arc represents how far away that target is. If you cannot understand the different patterns and sounds on https://www.wavescanner.net/ then I don't know of anything that could help you.
Stop trying to think of it as a radar - it is more like something akin to a geiger counter that is detecting a source of radiation but which has a wide range of sensitivity - so that it is less precise in direction the weaker the source (i.e. the further away) - so travelling closer to the source allows more precise direction indication.
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Outcrops and meteorites;
Volcanic features with mats;
I realise you have a problem with it, but when I see these patterns I know what to expect when I get to my target, much practice just makes it second nature. Using the SRV scanner today I found multiple volcanic features and tracked down a number of Outcrops, so it is useful to me and many others. Yes they could make it obvious for people by just writing the words volcanism at the top with an arrow, or meteorite, or Brain Trees etc, but that would be silly in my opinion, how much more obvious do you need to make something before it becomes silly?
They aren't the same and it's not random noise, so knowing that should lead to a desire to learn how to interpret the scanner, not just rejecting it outright and demanding it be replaced with something with big bold letters to tell you exactly what's there.