As mentioned in the OP, exobiology is not about the Cr per Hour - it's not a mats farm like it became in Horizons. Anyone who wants it to be that needs to jump over to NMS where they can farm on bios forever...
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Guide / Tutorial Odyssey Biological and Geological Guide
- Thread starter CMDR Sheehy
- Start date
While I don't want exobiology to be a Cr or mat farm, it would be nice if it was more connected to the rest of the game. If nothing else, we should be able to pick up the bits we shoot off rocks etc (via hand weapons) and load them into our SRV or ship by hand (not really exobiology, that one, but related).
Hopefully, it's just the slow pace of ED event development that makes exobiology seem very disconnected.
Ok, I'll put it another way. Adding the chance to lose all of the data you've collected for hours and hours because of "added danger" is the last thing exobiology needs.
Taniwha-qf makes a good point above and I'll add to it with a question: Where are the Exobiology missions?
What's one more danger atop things like crashing into the ground? (got my first rebuy on my dbx the other night, after over 200kLy travel).
Exobiology need danger. They did it for Geology - you can burn to death or be thrown 15km into the sky...
What we need is... "Oh my God, it's got me!"
Or this shorting out your systems...
So that you have to run back to your ship or SRV with the face plate freezing up with every breath - 10 seconds to live...
Or your ship falling apart because you rolled over a bacteria patch with your SRV and then boarded it without disinfecting it first...
100% agree. I like the relaxed pace of exploration in this game, but I strongly feel it can be a bit more exciting, a bit riskier, a LOT more unpredictable, and quite a bit less dry without making it unfair or sacrificing what makes it good.
I say that as someone who has blown up multiple times with multiple weeks' worth of exporation data while landing on a high-G worlds tens of thousands of light years from civilisation. Yes, it's frustrating, but ultimately it's just a game, and the excitement of having more to do, more to watch out for, and less predicability the other 99.9% of the time more than outweighs the bad feels on death and data loss imo
And to be honest, I'd probably have felt less compelled to do canyon running or high-G landings for fun in the first place if there was more spice to exploration in general.
Part of good gameplay comes from taking risks (and risk = probability of things going wrong multiplied by cost of things going wrong).
I agree. It doesn't even need to be awfully HIGH risk. Doesn't have to always be insta-death to add suspense and excitement. Out in the black, something that eats a few hull percentage points or adds wear-and-tear to your power plant is a concern, because it contributes to the attrition of your ship (unless you want to trade-off hauling a fleer carrier everywhere).
As much as I love exploring, at times, without some risk, it can feel a bit too much like flying around a database with a pretty and very slow-to-navigate UI.
If that database had a rare chance of harbouring metal-eating asteroid mites and killer cacti and sandworms and ancient alien Von Neumann probes trying to take core samples of your hull, it would all feel a bit LESS like a database.
Heh, that's a pretty apt description, actually.
And as to your risk suggestions, yeah, that sounds fun
There was a thread a while back where someone reported a similar issue, but I think I've lost some exobiology data during my last trip (~150K LY, ~1500 systems, ~100 first footfalls, ~1,2B in data). I've of course tried to focus on the more exotic species and getting a good mix of star classes and atmospheric types, yet I still feel the payout and rank increase (up to 59% in Taxonomist) was slightly underwhelming. I've also managed to generate quite a few new Codex entries in different galactic sectors (to my surprise) and came back with over 4 million in Codex Discoveries. Are my statistics representative for some average Exobiologising?
UNIQUE GENUS ENCOUNTERED 16
UNIQUE SPECIES ENCOUNTERED 62
UNIQUE VARIANTS ENCOUNTERED 174
PROFIT FROM ORGANIC DATA 101,439,000 Cr
ORGANIC DATA REGISTERED 242
PROFIT FROM FIRST LOGGED 50,719,500 Cr
FIRST LOGGED 242
PLANETS WITH ORGANIC LIFE 115
SYSTEMS WITH ORGANIC LIFE 109
UNIQUE GENUS DATA LOGGED 10
UNIQUE SPECIES DATA LOGGED 29
Ditch the "Stubborn Sample", and pick up another sample and drive around for an hour looking for "Like but different" types of the 2nd sample.
No. Till they give me a "Smart" Sampler, compared to the PRIMITIVE one we're forced to use, I'm not even bothering to land any more. The "1st Footfall" is another joke because it gets you nothing other than the off chance that someone else might come to this system out in a corner of the void, and see someone else has landed.
Only when I can see other candidates of the second sample (or I know where I found the first so I can go back to it easily).
Primitive? Heh, lets see you find a hand-held genetic sampler/analyser on the market now
It seems to me that you're doing a lot of work for little advancement/profit. Or maybe your losses just affected the Registered/Logged and financial aspects of the stats and your Encounters were still logged, because you seem to have encountered a lot more than I have but registered/logged a lot less.
For comparison, here's my current stats @ 43% Ecologist:
UNIQUE GENUS ENCOUNTERED 10
UNIQUE SPECIES ENCOUNTERED 36
UNIQUE VARIANTS ENCOUNTERED 115
PROFIT FROM ORGANIC DATA 164,781,900 Cr
ORGANIC DATA REGISTERED 504
PROFIT FROM FIRST LOGGED 73.985,000 Cr
FIRST LOGGED 418
PLANETS WITH ORGANIC LIFE 163
SYSTEMS WITH ORGANIC LIFE 81
UNIQUE GENUS DATA LOGGED 8
UNIQUE SPECIES DATA LOGGED 10
I guess I'm just "unlucky" in the sense that I mostly found the lower value species, but most of the confusion just stems from the complete inability to go through your data in-game.
Would you happen to know how many entries each page of data has at Vista Genomics? I forgot to check myself (I know it's 50 for exploration data).
Sorry, I can't help there. I go out from the bubble every day, collect 30 or 40 specimens from as few systems as possible, then head back to the bubble to turn them in. I only usually have 4 or 5 systems logged and they pay by the system. I've never been close to filling the page.
Meanwhile, I've often encountered the "hidden bio page" (because you never get presented subsequent pages, lost 11MCr because of it once, too) and have to leave and restart the vista chat to sell the second page. Don't remember if I've had a third page.
[edit] Looks like I may have had 3 when I got to Colonia with that 44MCr of bio data.
[edit2], Going through those screenshots carefully, I think it was just two.
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That's why I think I lost some data, I only had 3 pages for my trip.
My data slightly 88% past Elite
FTR about 65% of this was accrued while visiting notable systems instead of prioritizing efficiency.
| UNIQUE GENUS ENCOUNTERED | 17 |
| UNIQUE SPECIES ENCOUNTERED | 85 |
| UNIQUE VARIANTS ENCOUNTERED | 610 |
| PROFIT FROM ORGANIC DATA | 639,841,200 Cr |
| ORGANIC DATA REGISTERED | 1,434 |
| PROFIT FROM FIRST LOGGED | 317,465,000 Cr |
| FIRST LOGGED | 1,409 |
| PLANETS WITH ORGANIC LIFE | 460 |
| SYSTEMS WITH ORGANIC LIFE | 281 |
| UNIQUE GENUS DATA LOGGED | 9 |
| UNIQUE SPECIES DATA LOGGED | 21 |
FTR about 65% of this was accrued while visiting notable systems instead of prioritizing efficiency.
They pay by the system so if, for example you find a system with 8 landable life-bearing planets each with 8 different species it's still just one entry on the data page. 3 pages of systems is potentially a huge amount of samples or possibly not that many depending on your system to planet to life signs ratios.
Edit: I'll have to assume that the 1500 systems you visited didn't all contain life because, deep in the black, I would expect that the vast majority of your planetary landings would be first footfalls. This would mean that the systems with life would be less than or equal to your 100 first footfalls (give or take a few) so no more than 2 pages of data (if it is 50 entries per page).*
*There are many assumptions in this calculation.
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You still get paid for handing in duplicate data (ie, not being first), just no bonus.
Some clarifications here:
It lists the bulk payouts by system, but, if you sell each system individually it shows you all the planets and their flora rewards. Rewards are paid out by each flora scanned, duplicate flora on separate planets in the same system will both payout appropriately for first footfalls etc.
The bonus 100% rewards do not count towards your Elite Ranking. First footfalls are meaningless for your rank which means It is likely that someone in the future will develop a "Road for Exobiology" with a list of 100ish planets and their flora coordinates in and around the Bubble that anyone could just follow to complete their Exobiology grind if so inclined. I suspect this mismatch in payout vs expected rank boost may be creating an illusion of lost data BUT...
I too noticed data 'felt' missing and started paying more attention to what I was selling and noticed 2 bugs that suggest lost data may be a thing (but in no way prove it just something along the lines of where there's smoke...)
Bug 1: You can sell all pages of your data, leave the window, talk to the npc again and often times there's another page of data that magically appears, and
Bug 2: If you sell a page of data and click 'Next Page' your game crashes.
That said, when I sold systems individually later on in my Exo-mightiness career it 'seemed' correct (I didn't take meticulous record of exactly where and what but did see appropriate amounts of low value systems vs Water Atmo worlds which was a behaviour I changed as part of this test). This could either be because patch 6 shadowfixed an underlying server issue that was corrupting Exo data or that data only starts getting lost if you have a LOT of data (5 pages or something).
My personal belief is that this is simply your subconcious telling you this is not worth it. You literally spend months out in the black landing on god knows how many planets, endlessly searching for the same stupid life blocks only to return to 3 pages of data that sells for half a mining load? Cognitive Dissonance is a b