Horizons Motivations for landing on planets in 2.1?

[[VR] Enexemander]

Hi everyone,

I bought Horizons right before the 2.1 patch, so I don't have a lot of experience with planetary goings on. Aside from the great experience, what in game reasons do we have to land on planets?

Have the random POI (blue circle) blips stopped showing up while in orbital flight in the ship? Are there rare materials you can mine that you can't find while mining asteroids? Do the base assaults give a lot of rep?

I haven't done the base assaults before. Do they always make you wanted in that system or does it depend on something I'm not aware of?

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read this and hopefully answer a few questions.

 

[Lightspeed]

Missions for base assaults can be lucrative, especially since you can sometimes stack them - getting paid at least twice for the same mission. They are very difficult to achieve for a +++ site, because of ship patrols.

Planet based stations are good to visit for missions also, either to pick new ones or because you are being sent there.

POI's have useful materials if you drive out in your SRV to zap rocks for minerals for re-fuel, repair etc. so are worth collecting, but maybe not in huge numbers.

Then there is always the "wow" factor of engaging in ship-ship combat low over the surface of a planet !

 

[Pville_Piper]

The random POIs are still there, but, they seem to be mostly mining and other structures... Not sure if that has just been bad luck but about 1 out of 6 seem to be salvage so far for me. The interesting note is when you find a wreck it either a bunch of varied commodities or all missing pilots. The bad new is there are no longer any find the missing pilot missions that I have seen since 2.1 dropped but then I haven't has a lot of time in game so I might be wrong.

 

[Tinman]

The random POIs are still there, but, they seem to be mostly mining and other structures... Not sure if that has just been bad luck but about 1 out of 6 seem to be salvage so far for me. The interesting note is when you find a wreck it either a bunch of varied commodities or all missing pilots. The bad new is there are no longer any find the missing pilot missions that I have seen since 2.1 dropped but then I haven't has a lot of time in game so I might be wrong.

Find the missing pilots (or other things) on planets are still there.

Not only that...now they actually make sense since you will see the crash site search area from orbit and when you get down to the planet the HUD does a "search pattern" thing that eventually leads you to the crash site. In other words...specific things to find are at specific locations.

The planet based missions are the most fun ones at the moment IMO. Going in to bases for missions are what I spent most of the weekend doing.

Hopefully they'll soon fix one of the bugged missions from Beta that is currently disabled where the mission giver wanted you to raid mining sites for resources, thus giving the mining sites purpose.

 

[Tikigod]

Planetary outposts are the single most effective means of getting data for use in Engineer modifications for one.

One set from a 5 node network:

Another set from a 4 node network:

Not to mention that once you actually look into the findings other people have taken the time and effort to put together about what elements tend to spawn on what kind of planets, searching planet surfaces for particular elements is far more effective than running missions and hoping you luck out with a reward of a particular element you happen to have need of.