Raw materials grade 5 / 4

Quorgyle

Q
I went out to gather all the top grade raw materials so that I have some to trade down at the material trader. Just realized how there is some kind of mix up for material grades.
If you look up other sites like the Wiki or inara it shows only 4 grades for raw materials. Pretty sure it's like that at the material trader as well.
But if you look in-game, some are marked as grade 5. Here are my in-game screenshots:
145707

145705


As you can see, Antimony and Polonium are marked as grade 5. Also I was not able to pick up more than 100 of each, even thought it shows 100/150 in the HUD above. Yttrium is shown as grade 4 but was also able to collect only 100. Yttrium is at least displayed as 100/100, but still weird for a grade 4 material.
Then there's Zirconium, which is supposed to be a grade 2 raw material, but is shown here as grade 4 for whatever reason (I filtered my HUD to show only grade 4 and 5).

Guess this issue is probably in game for quite some time, I've just found out about it. Are there any Frontier information about this? Seems like a minor bug to fix.
Went out a bit out of the bubble to collect these materials, now I'm kind of irritated that I wasn't able to get the full amount from all of them.
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
They're meant to be grade 4.... so fix would be to actually make them that i guess.

Ticket submitted?
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Factabulous said:
Ian Doncaster will be along in a moment to explain... again. He has more patience than I ;)
Click to expand...
You could just paste it from last time. :) And it's an interesting tale of how changes in game design can leave "leftovers" in the implementation.


Anyway, the problem is that there are four separate material gradings for raw materials.

The original "geological" grading was introduced in Horizons in 2.0 and determines which planets have which materials. This only has four grades. All planets have all G1 (except metal-rich, which only have Iron and Nickel). They then have 3 G2, 2 G3 and 1 G4 - the 3-2-1 rule of early planetary exploration. This was nice and simple.

When engineers were introduced in 2.1 data and manufactured materials had five grades, so Frontier "spread out" raw materials over five grades as well for engineers. So the engineering grading system has five grades of raw materials - G1 is the same, G2 is some of the G2 geological, G3 is a mix of G2 and G3 geological, G4 is a mix of G3 and G4 geological, and G5 is the remaining G4 geologicals. Generally the materials which end up higher than their geological grade are the harder ones to find (Arsenic is G3 engineering) for various reasons. Frontier considered redoing the planetary materials so that the geologic grading was 5-grade as well, but explorers noticed in Beta and complained about it a lot, as it invalidated all their previous surveys (and this was before 2.2 made surveying easier, so to find out what materials a planet had you had to land on it and shoot a lot of rocks)

In 3.0, Frontier introduced material traders. Because of how they work, they need a rectangular block of materials - a requirement never envisaged for the original raw materials ... but there were only originally 5 G1 materials on the geological scheme, and lots of G2 materials. Neither existing scheme was suitable. To beat the raw materials into a rectangular shape with minimal deviation, Frontier:
- used the geological scheme as a basis
- added three mining-only raw materials (Rhenium and Lead at G1, Boron at G3) ... a way to add new ones without breaking the 3-2-1 rule.
- moved Selenium from G2 to G4 (the material trader massively overpays for it)

So at this point, there were three separate schemes, introduced at different times for different valid reasons, and not reconcilable. Unfortunate, but not really fixable without doing something more unpopular (invalidating old exploration data, making engineering harder by replacing easyish G4 raws with G5 manufactureds, or inventing a lot of extra mostly useless raw materials to take up space on the trader grid)

But... for no obvious reason, the display grade of a material in the right panel of your ship doesn't consistently use any of these schemes. Polonium and Technetium are both G4 geologic and trade, G5 engineering ... but Polonium is G5 right-panel and Technetium is G4. Zirconium is particularly bizarre - G2 geologic and trade, G3 engineering, but somehow ends up as G4 right-panel. This one is hopefully just a bug.

Fixing the display grade to be one of the other grades (I think the "trade" grade would be the best choice) would at least make things a bit clearer.
 

Quorgyle

Q
Thanks for the detailed explanation. Seems like Frontier made it too complicated to solve this one out that easy. It's still a bit confusing why it is the way it is now, especially as I've mentioned above showing me I still have space left for Antimony and Polonium ( 100/150 ) but not be able to gather anymore due to inventory space being already full.
Also sorry if you already had to explain this, I wasn't able to find it while trying to "google search".
 

Dagwit

Dagwit
I stuffed myself with G4s (except Selenium) on a tour of the Crystalline Shards.

Selenium can be had in abundance on a pleasant drive round Shinrarta Dezhra AB 2 j.

Everything else I trade down for (don't tell anyone, but the material traders never do better than break even, and mostly trade at a loss when trading down, based on the values calculated for mats from mission reward rates).

Yes, the raw material system is crazy but thankfully I don't have to think about it.
 

Quorgyle

Q
Yep, that's how I did as well. There's CMDR Exigeous guide on how to farm G4 mats, which I followed as you can see from my screenshots above. Now I'm doing Selenium which isn't covered in the guide. But looking at the icons and inventory space, I got kinda confused on what is what there so made this thread here.
 

Dagwit

Dagwit
It would be nice if the icons in what I believe we're now supposed to call the internal panel matched the grades in the material traders. But I daresay that if Frontier tried to do that we'd find that our weapons would no longer deploy or an impenetrable barrier would cover all the mailslots.
 

photomankc

photomankc
Dagwit said:
It would be nice if the icons in what I believe we're now supposed to call the internal panel matched the grades in the material traders. But I daresay that if Frontier tried to do that we'd find that our weapons would no longer deploy or an impenetrable barrier would cover all the mailslots.
Click to expand...


I LOL'ed.
 

Navigare Necesse Est

Navigare Necesse Est
I'm even more confused than before. Mats are different grades at the same time? No wonder players need out of game documentation to get anywhere with this mess.
 

cmdr milesred

cmdr milesred
some time back frontier had a weekend where they made the material traders easier or more beneficial to players and they never changed it back.
 

Aashenfox

Aashenfox
The worst part of this is that selenium is in g2 position in recipes and gathering nodes, yet trades as a g4. I don't think it needs o be complicated and could be fixed easily. Hardly a priority, but one of the many immersion breakers that has slipped by over the years and become accepted as 'acceptable'. I would actually relish the opportunity to redesign this for them.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Aashenfox said:
The worst part of this is that selenium is in g2 position in recipes and gathering nodes, yet trades as a g4. I don't think it needs o be complicated and could be fixed easily. Hardly a priority, but one of the many immersion breakers that has slipped by over the years and become accepted as 'acceptable'. I would actually relish the opportunity to redesign this for them.
Click to expand...
I'm curious - how would you go about fixing this? All of the obvious fixes I can see have side effects worse than the plain inconsistency.

(You say "worst part", I say "really easy G4 to gather for downtrading", but it depends how you collect your materials)
 

Factabulous

Factabulous
Ian Doncaster said:
I'm curious - how would you go about fixing this? All of the obvious fixes I can see have side effects worse than the plain inconsistency.
Click to expand...
The easy fix is surely just ... don't display the grades. Some things are then 'just harder to find' or ''dumber to trade'. Personally I never noticed the inconsistencies because I just gather what I can, and trade for anything I need.

I'm sure Aashenfox will have a better solution :)
 

Aashenfox

Aashenfox
Ian Doncaster said:
I'm curious - how would you go about fixing this? All of the obvious fixes I can see have side effects worse than the plain inconsistency.

(You say "worst part", I say "really easy G4 to gather for downtrading", but it depends how you collect your materials)
Click to expand...
I'm happy with my selenium gathering method. I'm averse to long trips out so I only do the shard sites once every so often to fill up, and don't trade those for selenium. I use regular old prospecting on prthi 2a, it's the only time I ever use the srv any more, so it's usually a fun distraction.

To describe how I would redesign it, would take 10k words. From top to bottom, including everything from drop chances from combat, up to rebalancing the recipes.
 
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