Okay, I admit it. I don't know how to find Raw Mat's.

[Stealthie]

I used to know, but apparently not any more.

I used to look for a planet that was rich in whatever I was looking for and had surface Volcanism.
I'd scan the planet and that'd reveal a bunch of geological POIs on the surface.
I'd head down to one of the POIs and it'd be an area of Geysers, Fumaroles or whatever.
Deploy SRV, spend a bit of time shooting stuff and I'd collect a dozen or so of the thing I was looking for, along with a big pile of "lesser" things too.

I know this got changed just before I took my break from ED and, since I got back, it's all been "crashed Anaconda sites" and "Brain Trees" followed by visits to a mat' trader.
Thing is, I don't want to rely on "loot crates" to find stuff.
I want to know how to find it naturally... like I used to.

I've just been trying to find a handful of Selenium, for example, to finish a bit of engineering.
Went to Wardhr A9a, which I have bookmarked as being a source of Selenium.
It still has Volcanism.
Scan planet and most of it turns blue with a few patches of white.
No Surface Geo' POIs, though, even though the map says I can choose between All, Geysers and Fumaroles.

Surely we're not expected to just fly down to the surface and just eyeball for whatever we need, or go back to randomly driving about in an SRV, looking for randomly spawning outcrops etc?

 

[Archvillain]

I think how it works now it's that you learn about what geological conditions are favorable to the feature you seek, so once you are within the blue zone via scanner you can cast your expert eye on the surface geology to narrow your search that way.

SRV scanners still work, but looking for the right geology allows you to cover ground fast by ship

I like it; it feels like I am bringing expertise to bear, evaluating the surface, not a monkey just going where the computer told me to go

 

[Ozric]

You realise your third paragraph contradicts your second.

Surely we're not expected to just fly down to the surface and just eyeball for whatever we need, or go back to randomly driving about in an SRV, looking for randomly spawning outcrops etc?

I'm not sure what you're expecting they would have added to exploration to make it any different

FSS the system. Look at planets in the system map to see which has the highest concentration of the materials you are looking for. Land anywhere (I tend to look for craters as I find them the best, but as your planet has Volcanism land in the Blue area for that). Pick a compass heading and drive the SRV in that direction. Detour when you pick something up on the wave scanner, there's normally 2 or 3 of the outcrop type close together, also there will be the volcanic features that still have mats. Resume driving to the original compass heading you were.

You'll come across loads and get to practice your flyving in the SRV

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Alternately, just go mining, get tons of raw mats that way, then trade for what you need.

 

[CMDR Lefty Jackson]

Yeah, there needs to be an updated method for finding materials. I've been trying to learn where to find materials for several days now, but there's a lack of current videos or information that are no longer valid or old and unknown. No way am I going to travel long distances only to find a location that no longer spawns as it used to.

Naturally? Yeah, I prefer to use the game itself, no outside 3rd party software. There should be no need for such tools. But does that mean we are left with blindly searching system to system with no clear method to narrow the search down?

Then there is also the greedy types that are posting false information to keep their little honey holes a secret. Every video I have watched on the topic has in it's comment section several people claiming, "I went there and it didn't work!"..."Oh, that spot is dead now". Really? Resorting to immature greedy tactics in a video game? Nah, surely players wouldn't do that would they?

Well, yes they would! And they will even cheat the game and other players, and gank players for no legit reason just because they like to role play being "pirates".

It's a freakin' video game people! We aren't trying to save the world, we are just trying to find silly digital materials.

I'll even toss in my money maker location as an offer of reason...Delkar system, 7A rings for Platinum, and a buyer right there in the same system. Load up, supercruise about 3600LS to the station, get paid, repeat.

 

[Stealthie]

You realise your third paragraph contradicts your second.

Sorry, I don't follow.
What contradicts what?

I'm not sure what you're expecting they would have added to exploration to make it any different

FSS the system. Look at planets in the system map to see which has the highest concentration of the materials you are looking for. Land anywhere (I tend to look for craters as I find them the best, but as your planet has Volcanism land in the Blue area for that). Pick a compass heading and drive the SRV in that direction. Detour when you pick something up on the wave scanner, there's normally 2 or 3 of the outcrop type close together, also there will be the volcanic features that still have mats. Resume driving to the original compass heading you were.

You'll come across loads and get to practice your flyving in the SRV

So we are back in the start-of-Horizons dark ages?
No more clusters of Geysers or Fumaroles that appear on our Nav' HUDs as Geo' POIs?
And, people are okay with this?

Cos, on Wardhr A9a, mapping the planet just makes it all turn blue (aside from a few tiny bits of white) so scanning does almost nothing to help.
I'm expected to just land and drive around almost the ENTIRE planet in the hope of stumbling on the odd outcrop every so often?

 

[CMDR Lefty Jackson]

Alternately, just go mining, get tons of raw mats that way, then trade for what you need.

I've read that claim more than once, and it simply isn't true. I've been mining in rings, and occasionally I will get a couple of this or that, but it doesn't produce the materials in amounts or types claimed.

More than once a person has claimed, oh just go mine some platinum and you'll get all the other materials you need. BULL HOCKEY.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

I've read that claim more than once, and it simply isn't true. I've been mining in rings, and occasionally I will get a couple of this or that, but it doesn't produce the materials in amounts or types claimed.

More than once a person has claimed, oh just go mine some platinum and you'll get all the other materials you need. BULL HOCKEY.

Its totally true and the way i've got raw mats now for years.

Each rock has a number of mats trapped within it, some have quite a lot, going from low (common), medium (somewhat common), high (rare as hen's teeth). Each mat collected gives you 3 (IIRC) in your supply.

You get a range of mats, not just tier 1.

Different ring types give different mats.

Always plenty for any engineering project. Not as quick as doing a geological site, much quicker that driving in your SRV looking for tocks. As a plus, earn good money from the mining.

 

[Stealthie]

Alternately, just go mining, get tons of raw mats that way, then trade for what you need.

Yeah, that's how I've been managing for the last few months.
I had a heap of raw mat's already and, after I came back, I've been supplemeting it by mining and the odd visit to the Annie on Koli Disci (sp?).

I don't want to have to rely on those methods, though.
I'd like to know how to find stuff on a planet, by finding planets with rich deposits of what I'm actually lookling for and collecting it "from the source".

Used to be that, if you just needed, for example, a handful of Selenium to finish a mod', you could just head over to somewhere like Wardhr and KNOW you could land at one of the Geo POIs and collect a dozen or so lumps of Selenium - guaranteed.

 

[Ozric]

Sorry, I don't follow.
What contradicts what?

Well you said you don't want lootboxes. But you want to be able to fly down to a specific geological location and get a bunch of materials from one location. The methods you mention in the way people suggest brain trees now, is exactly the same as geological sites used to be. The only difference is there's more high grade mats at the current ones.

So we are back in the start-of-Horizons dark ages?
No more clusters of Geysers or Fumaroles that appear on our Nav' HUDs as Geo' POIs?
And, people are okay with this?

Cos, on Wardhr A9a, mapping the planet just makes it all turn blue (aside from a few tiny bits of white) so scanning does almost nothing to help.
I'm expected to just land and drive around almost the ENTIRE planet in the hope of stumbling on the odd outcrop every so often?

Well whether people are OK with it or not is very debatable. On the whole probably not, but hey all the people who don't explore complained enough during the Odyssey Alpha things were too confusing that Frontier removed the actual functional heatmap we were going to get. So this is the player's decision.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

but hey all the people who don't explore complained enough during the Odyssey Alpha things were too confusing that Frontier removed the actual functional heatmap we were going to get

The Odyssey heatmap was just the existing blue one with some highly misleading colouring, especially on the region borders. It looked prettier but was considerably less functional.

If they'd been able to make it into an actual "this colour represents a higher density" heatmap they might have kept it.

 

[Stealthie]

I like it; it feels like I am bringing expertise to bear, evaluating the surface, not a monkey just going where the computer told me to go

Not sure about that.

Previously (to me, at least), it seemed like the "expertise" was in finding suitable planets and the payoff was an immediate, guaranteed, supply of a modest amount of whatever mat' you needed.

Now, if we're back to just driving about in the SRV, I'd say that requires less expertise, especially given that we know the various outcrops/meteorites/geodes we find aren't actually persistent and the game just spawns one somewhere in front of us when it thinks we're statistically likely to stumble on one.

 

[Ozric]

If they'd been able to make it into an actual "this colour represents a higher density" heatmap they might have kept it.

That's what it was with the Blues, Greens, and Yellows. It wasn't 100% accurate but we never got the chance to refine it.

This was a patch note

• The DSS Heatmap no longer displays with "hot" or "cold" areas, but with an overlay where organics/geologicals highlighted should appear

 

[galahad2069]

I was in need of some Tellurium recently (because of the new double engineered SCO FSDs), and the situation seems to be the following:

Planet with volcanism = Piceous Cobble infestation, occasionally some middle tier material in Crystalline Clusters, but no Needle Crystals or Metallic Meteorites anywhere.

Planet without volcanism = Meteorites are very rare. On one specific planet which was supposed to have a lot of Tellurium (according to Inara), no shootable rocks of any kind spawned anywhere (the SRV scanner was completely blank no matter where I was).

Mining (did not try, but) = forget it, you can only ever find low grade materials, and it's extremely slow.

Bio sites = they are far away, and the Horizons type dense forests are long since gone. Missile bombing would probably still work, but I did not feel like wasting time watching tons of loading screens and suicidal limpets for 20 something units of Tellurium.

 

[Archvillain]

Now, if we're back to just driving about in the SRV

You're not though. My point is that you can use expertise to pick favorable geology from the air (while within the scanner blue area), then fly over there for a closer look. It's quicker than SRV scanners and less brainless

 

[Stealthie]

Well you said you don't want lootboxes. But you want to be able to fly down to a specific geological location and get a bunch of materials from one location. The methods you mention in the way people suggest brain trees now, is exactly the same as geological sites used to be. The only difference is there's more high grade mats at the current ones.

Not sure about that either.

Geo' POI's weren't a "loot crate" in the same way that, say, a crashed Annie is.
To find them you had to scan planets to discover if they were rich in what you were looking for and look for planets with Volcanism.
You were doing the work to find a suitable location for the stuff you're looking for.
The actual Geo' POIs were simply the payoff for your success in locating a suitable location.

Equally, brain-tree sites have similar prerequisites so they're not a "loot crate" either.
The issue I have with them is simply the fact that they're usually not a source of what you're actually looking for,
Instead, they're somewhere you can go to find something and then trade it for the thing you actually need.

 

[CMDR Lefty Jackson]

Its totally true and the way i've got raw mats now for years.

Each rock has a number of mats trapped within it, some have quite a lot, going from low (common), medium (somewhat common), high (rare as hen's teeth). Each mat collected gives you 3 (IIRC) in your supply.

You get a range of mats, not just tier 1.

Different ring types give different mats.

Always plenty for any engineering project. Not as quick as doing a geological site, much quicker that driving in your SRV looking for tocks. As a plus, earn good money from the mining.

Okay, for the sake of civility, it may be the location I mine doesn't produce much.

My problem is you make it sound like it's all there for the taking, but it's not, and nowhere near the quantities you claim.

There are not "tons" of it. There is not "...Always plenty for any engineering project...". If that were true, I would already have all the Grade 4/5 mats to trade down that I need for engineering my ships. I'm currently trying to learn how to locate materials and it's been a mess of information so far.

And more than one method from "years" past simply don't work these days. It's a wild goose chase with newer players getting mad they can't seem to do it right when the reality is that the location no longer produces what it MAY have in the past.

So, in other words, people don't need exaggerations, they need facts.

The problem we are discussing is about locating such systems in the first place. Blindly going from system to system is technically possible, but the point is, surely there is a better way to use what info the game provides, a method beyond random searches.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

That's what it was with the Blues, Greens, and Yellows. It wasn't 100% accurate but we never got the chance to refine it.

This was a patch note

Regardless of the patch note, it was never even slightly accurate like that. "Hot" and "Cold" meant exactly the same in practice, because you got an overlay which was either "hot" or "nothing" with a very thin band around the border fading through "cold".

But that's not how the borders work in-game - they are very sharp cut-offs where it can be present in vast fields one side, and two hundred metres away on the other side of the line, completely absent. The "heatmap" was pretty, but the differential colourings purely represented "how likely are you to accidentally drive/fly out of the biome because you can't see this from the ground".

Conversely you can have an entire area that's "hot" but the bio only appears in fairly small sub-regions of it because that's how the local-level terrain generation has gone.

The current shades of blue don't have consistent meanings, necessarily, but at least they expose underlying geome/biome borders, some of them very important, in a way that the "yeah, that's all hot" heatmap view completely hid.

(I'd certainly not object to them using a wider palette than "blue", "light blue", "dark blue", "speckly blue", etc. for the different geome/biomes, or providing a full geome/biome overlay with a separate highlighting method for which ones might contain your currently selected feature, or letting you see the geome/biome data without going back to supercruise. Lots more that they could do that way)

 

[Stealthie]

I was in need of some Tellurium recently (because of the new double engineered SCO FSDs), and the situation seems to be the following:

FWIW, you can definitely pick up heaps of tellurium directly from the Crashed Annie in Koli Discii (planet C6a).
It has enough cargo racks that you can fill up on Ruthenium, Tellurium and Antimony with a couple of relogs.

Honestly, it's a good enough site that it'll provide enough of those G4 mat's to keep you going and allow you to trade for G1-G3 mat's in other categories too.
Not great for trading for other G4 mat's though.

Besides, it's kind of like being told that if you want beef you need to go to Tesco for it.
And then, when you go to Tesco and find all they have is lamb, you need to buy the lamb and trade it for beef.
At some point, you're going to want to know where the actual cows are.

 

[CMDR Lefty Jackson]

At some point, you're going to want to know where the actual cows are.

Indeed!