Interestingly 2016 is closer to the time when I thought I remembered seeing planets with grids of craters, although I'd forgotten that similar patterns were visible right at the surface. It seems almost to be a manifestation of the same issue, but with the craters either generated on the fly or picked from a larger pool of assets.
Subjectively, re-use of assets at ground level never really bothered me. The Horizons rocks and boulders are clearly hand-crafted but generally (aside from cases like the ones above) placed in such a way as to disguise this quite well; same with the early alien flora, fumaroles etc.
And for my preferred SRV playing style I tend to either hang around one small area, where there exposure to duplication is minimal, or to speed across the surface in which case I would either be concentrating too much on not hitting things, or would rapidly move into different terrain. (Apropos of nothing, I tend to notice repeating rock assets more when I'm flying over them with night vision on than when I'm driving over them in an SRV in daylight. Shadow and relative position do a lot of the work when it comes to disguising re-use).
The current Odyssey issue almost seems to be topologically similar to what was reported in 2016, but scaled up in terms of the tile sizes. And for me I think that might be the key. Repeated patters from SRV height or even low aerial flight are harder to spot, or easier to accept, whereas repeated chunks the size of terrestrial islands visible from orbit stick out like sore thumbs.
I notice too that the discussion was in a beta forum and there was mention of LOD and related issues, so maybe FD fixed it, or rendered it so rare as to not be an ongoing problem. Which might bode quite well for them doing the same in Odyssey, if the problem is similar enough.
I wonder if this is related to the grid pattern that's sometimes visible on the SRV scanner in Odyssey? I don't remember ever seeing that in Horizons.
![[VR] Merkir](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/141/141091.jpg?1553527154){kind=avatar}
. Rebuys are insanely frequent. It's a great way to learn FAOFF too, which gives a real sense of freedom.