Silicate vapour geysers
- Thread starter Rudolphus
- Start date
..or you can wait 3.3 where you can find them just probing the planet.
Yep, right now it's a pain in the bum trying to find geysers on a planet - with 3.3 we get to reverse that.
There are many kinds of blue dots of different sizes and configurations, but only one at which you will find vulcanism. Set your radar to max spread and watch for a little tiny blue dot, that's the only one that matters, ignore the rest. If it's a vulcanic blue dot coming down on the dot will put you in the middle of the voclanic field, there's no driving around needed, so if you are driving around it's probably the wrong one.
In my experience, ship's radar is pretty much useless. The geysers sites are clearly visible to the naked eye long before radar starts picking the signal, regardless of the zoom setting. My advice is to ignore it. Just climb to few km altitude and fly over canyons and craters. And just look around. Oh, and select the smallest planet with volcanism you can find. In any case, unless you are very lucky, you will need to fly hours before finding something. It is a frustrating experience and i would wait for the Q4 update when finding such object will much easier.
The dots are a help but should not be depended upon. I didnt notice any dot in the video. First study the planet in the system map. You are looking for colour changes, small to mid impact craters and depth (low elevation). When you find combinations of these markers that is a place start searching, so for example if you find a crater that overlaps a coloured depression there would be a good place to check. It takes time but you start to get a feeling of where they are are going to be be. Oh yeah one more thing
cheat. Install EDdiscovery and it will tell you if the plant is major or minor volcanism. Minor volcanism can be extremely hard to find and i have heard that it can manifest as a single geyser all on its own. Very difficult.I for one will be a little sad when you can just be led to these sites. Nvr mind
Edit: BTW they have a quite distinctive sound in the SRV scanner. Its almost like a whistle kettle boiling but its fairly short ranged and not much use as far as i can tell. Flying, especially just plaing flying with the camera on for maximum field of vision can yeild results. Its all about "getting your eye in" more than following dots
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Deleted member 38366
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The tiny blue dot is often your only indication. Just don't forget to set the zoom to maximum, otherwise you'll easily miss it.
Visually, some sites stand out - but many aren't visually apparent until you approach as little as 2.5km. Basically gets worse in rough terrain and on the dark side of a Planet/Moon.
When it comes to finding them... just wait until V3.3 drops.
It's the difference of spending hours or even days to find 1-3 Sites - or none at all - and deploying a few Probes and get upto 20 locations conveniently pop up in your NAV Panel within a Minute.
Essentially, the oldschool ways of finding Volcanism will be dead very soon. You can still do it the old way then, but you'll be operating at or below 0.0001% efficiency compared to Probes.
Visually, some sites stand out - but many aren't visually apparent until you approach as little as 2.5km. Basically gets worse in rough terrain and on the dark side of a Planet/Moon.
When it comes to finding them... just wait until V3.3 drops.
It's the difference of spending hours or even days to find 1-3 Sites - or none at all - and deploying a few Probes and get upto 20 locations conveniently pop up in your NAV Panel within a Minute.
Essentially, the oldschool ways of finding Volcanism will be dead very soon. You can still do it the old way then, but you'll be operating at or below 0.0001% efficiency compared to Probes.
Pre-3.3 the ships radar is vital, I have found hundreds of sites and can assure you of this.
i often find a single outcrop when i do this.... just trial and error and keep going
3.3 Beta is wonderful for plantside PoIs may as well wait a few week for that!
yeah and pre 3.3 we would have spent hours chasing Outcrop POIs on that planet!
Sorry, but i disagree.
After searching for a geyser site for hours i finally found one. Just to be sure i made several approaches to it and every time i was able to see it with my eyeballs Mark I before the radar started picking up the signal. Absolutely the same happened with the second such site on another planet. I gave up after that.
And yes, i changed the radar zoom settings, it didnt help. Usually i fly at 3-5km altitude when searching.
They're much easier to find in 3.3 since a mapping scan displays all the Geological POIs.
Because you are flying between 3 and 5 klms when searching, that's the old slow method. Vulcanism isn't visible until either you get quite close or you are travelling slow enough for the gas vapours to become pronounced and visible from a long distance, but the blue POI for vulcanism is visible sometimes up to 40klms above the surface where you have no chance of spotting by eye and you are travelling at 2500mps so no time for the vapours to build up, so you search in glide mode using the radar. In pre-3.3 I have found in 15 sites on one body using the glide and POI method, an impossible task to do in normal travel.
You can indeed see the vapours from around 14klm away if you let them build up, and the edge of the radar isn't that far away so using that method you can see them before they appear on the radar, but that's a very inefficient method because you can only cover a tiny area of the body you are searching, using the glide and POI method you can cover much more area and once you understand how the radar works you rarely get rocky outcrop POI's confused with volcanic POI's. I can assure you the glide and radar method is far easier and quicker to use to find vulcanism pre 3.3.
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as Varonica mentions you can see them that low, but using Glide to search for PoI you typically sit at 40km sometimes higher depends on the planet, your altitude marker "blips" then you know the blue dots will appear on radar, i've been on planets orbiting at 60km with the radar working before.
you cover more ground that way, after your first landing though you may aswell SC at 5-10km above ground and usually you can see the areas - my pet hate whit this was the blue marker showing your position on the planet would magically disappear from the surface map while in SC
Geysers you can see from further out, volcanism / brain trees etc. nope! you can be 1km above them until they "render" sometimes! but finding then pre 3.3 was a real sense of discovery albeit difficult & time consuming in comparison to other gameplay in ED