Newcomer / Intro Not a newcomer exactly, more of a returner

[Pastor Frog]

I haven't played since mid-January, and I got the itch to fire the game up again.

Is exploring worthwhile now, financially? Have there been any changes there? I remember when I left they were talking about making it so you didn't have to sell discoveries one at a time, but could rather dump your data in bulk. Did they ever add that? That would make the thought of getting back out into the black much more appealing, as selling each discovery individually took hours if you'd been out there a while.

Any other changes I should know about?

Thanks in advance!

 

[capt_carl]

Not totally in bulk but you can sell Pages of 20 discoveries at a time.
I recently returned from a 10,000ly trip out and had to spend about 30 minutes handing in pages of data.
As for value someone else may be able to clarify but I kow the values got buffed a little. I've only done two trips and for the 10,000 ly one I got paid about 15,000,000cr. Not stellar given it took about 2 months of playing 1-2 times a week but I enjoyed the job anyway.

 

[Dommarraa]

Income from exploring has been boosted a lot since then (doubled ?) but so has bounty hunting, so exploring is still the poor relative (lets not mention cousin Miner)
I got 73mil from my last trip, but it took me the best part of a day to cash it all in.
There has been a good moneymaking discovery. Fields of thousands upon thousands of Non Sequence stars all 1 jump apart that really rake the money in if thats what you like.

v1.3 in about 3 weeks time will add Extra Fuel Tanks. Maybe for mega deep journeys, or for turning any old bus into a viable explorer, maybe they are 1 shot emergency pods, we are not sure yet.

 

[JesusOnEez]

I took my first foray into exploring. It probably amounted to nothing more than about 8 hours play. I only went out about 1,000Ly but pretty much everything after 600Ly was undiscovered with the route I took. I happened across a sector that had a lot of M Class and Red Dwarf stars, many of which had Ammonia planets. Lots of gas giants, one with life.

After that little foray, I head back to Sol, and handed in about 8 pages of data for about 2 million. Not a hideous return, and certainly more fun than going back and forth on a trade route (at least, in my opinion).

The only thing I haven't tried yet is mining. Time to kit out my Cobra for the job.

 

[Hellhawk666]

The payouts for discovery were doubled, but so were the goals for achieving ranks. This was to balance exploration more against other activities, but exploration still isn't a money maker as such.

Bonuses for first discovery of an object probably came in while you were away - they can add quite a bit on top of the normal earnings.

 

[Philip Coutts]

Exploring is not done for the money I'm afraid. You will make money at it but compared to Trading it's pretty poor. That said I enjoy getting away from it all and just cruising about looking at pretty things.