And to remember that the P.I. are only used for grade 5 dirty drives, so you might need 10 for fully G5:ed dirty drives on a ship. Seems a big waste of time to try to look for a HGE to try to farm them, but be happy if you come across one by chance. But I guess for the reloggers one might be enough to fill up on them.
PSA: If you have Checkerboard Rendering off, it may disable biological/geological material variety. (IE, "Why am I only getting Polyporous Growths?")
- Thread starter DemiserofD
- Start date
Okay, just tested it again. I am now 100% confident it's the checkerboard rendering.
It will not reset an area you've already visited, but it does fix NEW areas. I landed in half a dozen places, nothing but polyporous growths. Marked a spot, flipped checkerboard rendering on, and tried a half dozen things with that one area(ie relogging, orbiting, main menu, various combinations), no change. Took off once more, went to orbit, flew back to a NEW area, now I'm getting everything I'm supposed to get.
Again, no idea why this would be the case, but it's the only thing I changed.
It will not reset an area you've already visited, but it does fix NEW areas. I landed in half a dozen places, nothing but polyporous growths. Marked a spot, flipped checkerboard rendering on, and tried a half dozen things with that one area(ie relogging, orbiting, main menu, various combinations), no change. Took off once more, went to orbit, flew back to a NEW area, now I'm getting everything I'm supposed to get.
Again, no idea why this would be the case, but it's the only thing I changed.
Crumbs. If it does this it could be affecting plants, Guardian/Thargoid stuff, anything.
Checkerboard rendering significantly reduces graphical computation strain, freeing up more CPU/GPU time for procgen which explains why procgen is so unstable and inconsistent.
Nobody however should have to reduce graphics quality to ensure the loot tables work as intended...
Btw, if you factor in multiplayer, these inconsistencies can affect sync on the procgen level and may be a factor to its instability because every client calculated something entirely different.
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The setting you're talking about is essentially a way to set the generate-ahead - if you set it too short (or it's forced too short by your underpowered silicon) you will get horrible pop-in, but not because of LOD or other rendering issues - rather it is because the game is not generating the objects in the world fast enough.Well, the game does have a setting for balancing the ratio of juice going toward rendering, and to terrain procgen (possibly in actuality more a balance between CPU and GPU expenditure - not sure), so I'd guess that's all as designed - bad or not. There is no lack of LOD pop-ins, as each new level of subdivision finishes building asynchronously in the background...
Every time I look for plants, even without any extra delays, I certainly wish things would spawn earlier than they do, and farther away, instead of popping into existence just after I have flown past the patch of ground they grow on, even though do I realise greater distances come with geometric expansion.
...and then we have physics calculation ticks falling together with framerates, causing all sorts of funny explosions; And UI animation timings being frame-, rather than time-bound... ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
Set it too long and yes the game will burn CPU on creating and managing the world, that the GPU never then gets around to rendering, so you're wasting CPU at that point.
I posted in another thread about big pauses when I got close to a settlement and after that I went and fiddled with this balance, and found I could tune out these pauses because indeed I was having it generate-ahead too far when I first got into the drop zone.
Generating the exobiology and putting it in the "world" is not a matter of physics or rendering though - so if that is on yet another thread and that thread never gets any attention, I can see how a defect might arise where nothing gets generated. Because rendering doesn't know to expect it, it won't wait.
Decoupled is good, as someone commented earlier here, but sometimes you need a watchdog to force things to wait if the opportunistic threads aren't ever getting enough time. Could easily be that, especially since this whole thing is in Odyssey but not in Horizons 4.0.
However, the link the checkerboard specifically seems like the symptoms are the wrong way around. If you ENABLE checkerboard you should have more CPU free time so you should get MORE time free for those sacrificial things like generating exobio.
However here's another second possible cause: if you enable checkerboard you are also halving the number of objects that are properly understood, and the other half are just ghosts... so I can immediately see that unless someone thought of that, enabling checkerboard will just plain halve the amount of everything going on in the world, because the world is now half as many entities. If you're supposed to have one spawn per square km and it's actually counting the number of TILES, not the virtual kilometers, everything will be twice as sparse when checkerboard is on.
(inb4 edit: "counting" means "based on something or other per entity in the model.")
However here's another second possible cause: if you enable checkerboard you are also halving the number of objects that are properly understood, and the other half are just ghosts... so I can immediately see that unless someone thought of that, enabling checkerboard will just plain halve the amount of everything going on in the world, because the world is now half as many entities. If you're supposed to have one spawn per square km and it's actually counting the number of TILES, not the virtual kilometers, everything will be twice as sparse when checkerboard is on.
(inb4 edit: "counting" means "based on something or other per entity in the model.")
This isn't about generating bios, it's the type of materials on the brain trees. The cost involved in picking those types would be miniscule. I seriously doubt there is any truth to this "discovery" at all, both because it makes no sense from a technical perspective and doesn't match up with my direct and other's experiences. OP can't even reproduce the issue when they switch the setting and reload the game, which would completely wipe out any previously generated terrain - it's not cached anywhere locally and definitely not stored remotely...
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This is insane. It means client side can affect the game world. That simply shouldn't be possible in an online game.
I would agree with you if it wasn't actually happening to me. I really don't know how else to explain it; when I have it off, all I can find are polyporous growths. When I have it on, I find everything.
If you had any other suggestions, I would be happy to test them, but I seriously can't think of anything else it could be.
We get so many utterly mad bugs in this game that I don't think we should dare to dismiss your actual reported observations by saying what "should" be possible.
See elsewhere the reports that having a ship kit gets you more caustic damage!
I may be blowing gas here, but this is what I've put in eddb.io for searching for Pharmaceuticals
| Material | Allegiance | Government | System State | HGE Faction State | Population |
| Pharmaceutical Isolators | Independent | Dictatorship | Outbreak | Outbreak | 362,029 |
| Pharmaceutical Isolators | Independent | Patronage | Outbreak, Expansion | Expansion | 4,319,058,358 |
Obviously the population comes in from the search itself where I found these materials.
I recently found them here, but the weekly tick has gone now so you may not have the same criteria.
| Hyades Sector PJ-E a13-1 |
| HIP 29720 |
Try it for yourself and see what happens, I found 2 systems with them in out of 11 so it is hit and miss, but I was able to max out.
I put all the sites with the materials I want into the Tourist route planner, then jump to them in that order cutting down the number of jumps, works better that way.
Like I said you may already know all this, but it's just a thought.
I've recently Maxed out on CDC's and PC's, these are the criterial I used and the systems I found them in, not entirely text book stuff:
| Material | Allegiance | Government | System State | HGE Faction State | Population |
| Core Dynamics Composites | Federation | Corporate | Boom | None | 557,659 |
| Core Dynamics Composites | Federation | Democracy | Boom | None | 3,922,114 |
| Core Dynamics Composites | Federation | Corporate | Civil Unrest | Civil Unrest | 344,457,920 |
| Core Dynamics Composites | Federation | Democracy | War | Infrastructure Failure | 2,125,239,496 |
| Arietis Sector CQ-Y d60 |
| HIP 14211 |
| Kutjarasvat |
| LFT 361 |
| Purut |
Like I said in my other post, this was early last week, and I've maxed out all 10 HGE's without any material trading. Yes it took a number of hours spread over a week, but job done.
So I visited 82 systems and found all materials in 28.
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I've checked HIP 29720 among others at least 10 times last week, not even once was there a HGE in it. 90% of the outbreak systems don't spawn any HGE at all. Even most boom systems don't have HGEs. Their spawn rate needs to be increased by at least 10 times.
And almost all the Core Composite HGEs dropped mostly 4 Proprietary Composites with maybe 1 Core mixed in every other instance, once in a blue moon there may be 2 Core Composites.
The only viable way is to go to Empire systems and farm Imperial Shieldings to then trade for all the other categories. We need a HIP 36601 for Manufactured Materials.
Slightly off-topic, but I don't bother with HGEs. I get all my Core Dynamics, Pharmaceuticals and Imperials by running stacked delivery missions and destroying the pirates which are attracted. There can be up to 4 pirates per mission and mission-reward materials (Exquisite and Biotech) as well.
As to this: I've checked HIP 29720 among others at least 10 times last week. Don't go back, move on to the next one.
As for this: 90% of the outbreak systems don't spawn any HGE at all. I can't disagree with you, I've visited loads, and if there's none there, I move on and don't go back.
As to this: And almost all the Core Composite HGEs dropped mostly 4 Proprietary Composites with maybe 1 Core mixed in every other instance
I assume your doing the shutdown game hack, your right it would be nice to have them spawn more, but lets be real here, that's unlikely to happen.
I guess it's down to your preference of farming, try and farm the materials or use material trader, its really a trade off, you would I guess have to max out imperial shielding 3 times to max out 1 other material (well almost 3:1 return), that's if you want to max it out I guess.
Here you go, I'll share a spreadsheet of where I went and what spawned or didn't, those lines in green did those in purple didn't.
docs.google.com
HGE's Farming Results
Sheet1 System,Stations,Carriers,Allegiance,Government,System State,HGE Faction State,Population,Powerplay,Distance,Reference System,HGE's (Yes/No),Material,Material Hreidmarda,1,0,Independent,Civil Unrest,2,384,-,45.13 ly,Kutjarasvat,No 10 Arietis,10,1,Independent,Communism,Boom,Boom,576,819,C: ...
Over 100 times lol, it takes 10185 Imperial Shields to fill up all items in all categories.
So about 850 relog to desktop to tank up! 
At those rates of exchange, you're probably better looking for the correct types, tbh.
I did a test a few weeks back. Using my bubble runner and jumping between different outbreak systems I found and capped out my pharma isos in about an hour. The trick is that signal sources are, afaik, persistent, so you need to find enough systems to jump between to always be seeing new things. About 10-15 different systems is probably ideal, that way if it spawns as soon as you leave you will still have time to exploit it.
The biggest problem is teaching players to do this. Most people look for them for ages, don't know what's best to do to get them, get frustrated, and turn to google. And then they're ALREADY frustrated, so every extra minute of searching without finding anything is 10x more frustrating!
Of course, this is only an issue in the first place because abusing HGEs is by far the only practical way to collect materials. I did the math a while ago and found that it is extremely inefficient to even stop to collect wreckage from destroyed ships.
If you ignore those mats entirely and just do combat, and then later grind HGEs in the saved time, you'll end up with more mats in the long term than if you just stop to collect the loot.
To put this another way; if you do combat for, say, an hour, and collect the materials dropped by ships, you'll end up spending maybe 10 minutes collecting those materials, and you'll probably get about the equivalent of 30 high-grade materials in that time.
If you instead used those 10 minutes to go collect HGEs, you'd get about 60 high-grade materials. The player is encouraged not to play organically and instead to grind.
This is clearly a problem. I'm not saying that combat should be better overall for getting high-grade materials - it shouldn't - but scooping up the wreckage, at least, absolutely should be.
I did a test a few weeks back. Using my bubble runner and jumping between different outbreak systems I found and capped out my pharma isos in about an hour. The trick is that signal sources are, afaik, persistent, so you need to find enough systems to jump between to always be seeing new things. About 10-15 different systems is probably ideal, that way if it spawns as soon as you leave you will still have time to exploit it.
The biggest problem is teaching players to do this. Most people look for them for ages, don't know what's best to do to get them, get frustrated, and turn to google. And then they're ALREADY frustrated, so every extra minute of searching without finding anything is 10x more frustrating!
Of course, this is only an issue in the first place because abusing HGEs is by far the only practical way to collect materials. I did the math a while ago and found that it is extremely inefficient to even stop to collect wreckage from destroyed ships.
If you ignore those mats entirely and just do combat, and then later grind HGEs in the saved time, you'll end up with more mats in the long term than if you just stop to collect the loot.
To put this another way; if you do combat for, say, an hour, and collect the materials dropped by ships, you'll end up spending maybe 10 minutes collecting those materials, and you'll probably get about the equivalent of 30 high-grade materials in that time.
If you instead used those 10 minutes to go collect HGEs, you'd get about 60 high-grade materials. The player is encouraged not to play organically and instead to grind.
This is clearly a problem. I'm not saying that combat should be better overall for getting high-grade materials - it shouldn't - but scooping up the wreckage, at least, absolutely should be.