Returning commander needs help

[schlowi123]

I decided to take night vision.

Also: i've tried again with finding biological stuff and once again I can't find anything even after flying close to the surface for half an hour. Not in the mood to get into orbit again and try another spot … sigh

 

[varonica]

I decided to take night vision.

Also: i've tried again with finding biological stuff and once again I can't find anything even after flying close to the surface for half an hour. Not in the mood to get into orbit again and try another spot … sigh

Depends what you are looking for, if it's grass, Tussock or Frutexa one of my primary strategies is simply to land in the area and step out of the ship, often I will have landed directly on a patch, you can rarely spot it while flying. Stop, hover about 20mtrs up, fire up the free cam (make sure it's set up to scroll around first) and use that to search the area around the ship close to the ground, other stuff, well there are rules for that, they aren't all written down so feel free to ask for a particular bio.

Easy to find bio, Stratum, Tubus, Aleoida, Clypeus, Electricae, Fonticulua, Fumerola, Recepta, Cactoida. Hard to find, Tussock, Frutexa, Fungoida (sometimes,) Bacteria, Osseus (again sometimes,) Concha.

Start with the easy ones first, the "sometimes" ones have variants that are hard to find and variants that are easy to find, experience does make it easier.

 

[athulin]

Also: i've tried again with finding biological stuff and once again I can't find anything even after flying close to the surface for half an hour. Not in the mood to get into orbit again and try another spot … sigh

If you're in the wrong spot, you can search forever. Had that kind of thing yesterday: Tubus well inside its blue 'no-heat-map', no elevations or messy terrain, ... shouldn't be a problem. But no Tubus to be seen. So, back up, just over DRP height, slow down, switch to DSS view, and look back for a better place to land. I find it usually is shown with a tinge of green/teal, the deeper the better, but views seem to differ on this. It is often more visible going up than coming down. And there they were. That is, you don't need to get all the way back into orbit, just enough that the DSS scanner view starts working again.

'Close to the surface' ... it seems to be related to graphics configuration, and just under what condition exobios render on your system. Over some height, they don't render at all. Below, they won't render with high-speed movement. But less than 20 m up, and less than 20 m/s seems pretty safe starting suggestion ... unless you're looking for something that appears in widely spaced single-plant colonies. I can identify larger stuff like Stratum or Tubus at about 150-200 m height coming down, but only at fairly low horizontal velocity. And sometimes when I see a single colony and land, I find there were dozens of them around, along with things like Tussocks in vast colonies that seemed to have to have been be visible from air, but just didn't show up before when my viewpoint was moving .

This is one of the things I wish Frontier would add tutorial/benchmark game play for: known species, known conditions, but allow the player to experiment with graphics settings, and flight conditions.

 

[schlowi123]

Such useful answers that I haven't seen in any of the several tutorial videos.
The particular problem with the last attempt was that it was Bacteria I tried to find. In addition was I flying too fast and I have to use the lowest graphic quality.
Well … next try … aaand it works once one is looking for not so rare stuff … just like varonica said: I landed and was standing in Stratum (and to my surprise was there Tussock right next to it).
Thank you so much

 

[varonica]

Such useful answers that I haven't seen in any of the several tutorial videos.

It's this, watching videos on how to lay bricks will indeed teach you how to lay bricks in a rough manner, even how to insert door and window frames, but it takes a lot of practice to do it well, but to do it masterfully you need to learn from people who have been doing it for decades, and in some cases players here have indeed been looking for stuff on planets for nearly a decade. The original guardian ruins, had to fly across the surface of planets looking down to find them, geo sites, unmarked except by a tiny blue spot, maybe a couple on an entire planet, again flying around looking for tiny blue spots on the radar and little plumes of ejected gas. The the Horizons bio, same deal, no POI or marker, search the planet.

As years go by we get given easier and easier ways to find bio and geo, right up to the big yellow POI circles that tell you exactly where to go, then they changed the entire system...again, and once again flying across the surface of planets looking for little things became, in many cases, a necessary skill, some of us already had those skills. Sometimes you need to just step out and look around, tussock can be impossible to see from a moving platform, sometimes night vision will actually help see patterns in mountainous areas when looking for that elusive fungi. The new Odyssey bio are more difficult to find than the old Horizons with the big yellow POI, but not impossible. Tutorials are for the basics, everyone need to remember that, you can't learn a lot of new stuff in a 10 minute video.

Always feel free to ask for advice.