Skyrun's guide to fast exobiology rank

Skyrun

S
This guide is for all who want to achieve Elite exobiology rank fast.

General tips:
Best is to use a small ship like the Dolphin(fuel scoop while charging FSD) or Imperial Courier(fast) as you want to land on any available spot as near as possible to the stuff you want to scan.
You don't need a SRV as you want to land with your ship best next to the scanning target. You are using your ship to fly between the 3 signals you want to collect.

Stratum Tectonicas
If you want to rank fast your exobiology rank a good way is to scan Stratum Tectonicas. Stratum Tectonicas gives top money (806k). It is quite common. It is easy to spot and it is normally in flat area so you can easily land next to it. Especially for exploraters outside the bubble this is a great way to rank up your Exobiology rank while exploring the galaxy.

If you collect already discovered Stratum it is a bit slower than water atmo. worlds. If you go a bit outside the bubble or somewhere in the black you can earn faster with undiscovered Stratum.

Where to find Stratum Tectonicas
Great chances are on planets with following attributes:
  • Planet type High metal content world
  • Atmosphere: Thin Ammonia/Thin Carbon dioxide/Thin Carbon dioxide-rich/Thin Oxygen/Thin Sulphur dioxide/ Thin Water
  • Surface temperature: 165 - 440 K
  • Landable

If there are no biological signals - bad luck. If there is only one signal - it could be Stratum or Bacterium - unfortunately often just Bacterium so skip it. If there are more than one biological signals Stratum Tectonicas is one of the biological types for sure. (I had 100% hit rate so far)

You can find such planets easily with Spansh body search. There are many around e.g. If I search with Spansh on my current spot I get 50 results in 50LY range.

There are better ways to get rich but if you want to rank up exobiology this is the good way.

Fly dangerous
Skyrun
 
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marx

marx
First off, that's a handy guide, easy to read and follow. Well done!

There's this part where you claim that just Stratum Tectonicas is the fastest that I would like to debate though:

Skyrun said:
There are better ways to get rich but if you want to rank up exobiology this is the fastest way.
Click to expand...
With already-discovered planets, I think that farming water atmo. worlds is faster.
Leaving out the Concha, Fungoida and Frutexa species that don't pay well, there's Cactoida Vermis (711.5k Cr), Clypeus (species depends on the body, 426.2k Cr - 711.5k Cr), Tussock Virgam (645.7k Cr) and often Osseus Discus (596.5k Cr). On rare occasions, Stratum Tectonicas can even be present on water atmo. planets as well, but often it'll be the low-paying Stratum Paleas instead. Even when some of them aren't present, you can still get more than one species during the time down planetside.
In other words, for the same amount of exobio points, you need to visit fewer bodies than if you stuck to just one species (Stratum Tectonicas, 806.3k Cr) only. This in turn means that you spend less time in supercruise as you go from one body to the next: all those minutes would add up and slow the pace down.
After all, to equal the points from one water atmo. body, a player would have to visit three Tectonicas-bearing bodies. (Or four, if the water atmo. was lucky enough to have Tectonicas too.) Then there's also that a landable water atmo. planet is pretty much guaranteed to have some bios, whereas you mentioned that Tectonicas candidate HMCs might turn out to have just bacteria or even nothing at all. Most likely due to having the wrong type of parent star.

Now, usually all these species can be covered in just one landing, there should be no need to go back to orbit and glide down again: one can just drop down to the edge of one zone, and once the species from there are sampled, fly over to the next to grab the remaining ones there. Having a fast and agile ship helps with getting this done faster, and a small landing footprint helps a lot with grabbing the Osseus. (Although I could see people just not bothering with those.)


Of course, there is something to be said for the simplicity of just dropping down to one bio per planet. (On the other hand, it's even more monotonous than farming water atmo. bodies is.) Is that the fastest way though? As I explained above, I have my doubts. Finding HMCs that house Stratum Tectonicas is easier though, but since we're using already-discovered planets anyway, finding water atmo. bodies is just as easy. There are just fewer to pick from, but since the first logging bonus doesn't matter for exobio rank, one can just stick to places that have lots of bodies uploaded close by already, such as Colonia.
 

MattG

MattG
marx said:
but since the first logging bonus doesn't matter for exobio rank, one can just stick to places that have lots of bodies uploaded close by already, such as Colonia.
Click to expand...
Wait, first-logged doesn’t count to rank? That can’t be right, that’d be a completely bone-headed decision?
 

marx

marx
MattG said:
Wait, first-logged doesn’t count to rank? That can’t be right, that’d be a completely bone-headed decision?
Click to expand...
Last time I checked, it didn't. Granted, that was several updates ago, and if it was changed, it wouldn't have been the only silent change that wasn't in the patch notes.

Even if it did count though, and you could get double the points, first logging one Stratum Tectonicas per body would still award fewer points than sampling already-logged species from a water atmo. body.
 
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Nadreck

N
One caveat that applies to all exobiology: if you don't have a reasonably high-spec PC, you won't spot plants from your ship.

...Because on low-spec PC's they're not rendered until you disembark, either on foot or in an SRV.

On numerous occasions, I've landed on an empty plain, waited through the period of blackness during disembarkation, and found myself right next to a patch of vegetation that definitely wasn't there before. I then have to use the SRV to travel to another patch.
 

Chaparral

Chaparral
Hate to ask for a meta grind list on this ala Road to Riches, but it seems like a bubble grind path could be optimized for this sort of thing.
 

Skyrun

S
marx said:
First off, that's a handy guide, easy to read and follow. Well done!

There's this part where you claim that just Stratum Tectonicas is the fastest that I would like to debate though:


With already-discovered planets, I think that farming water atmo. worlds is faster.
Leaving out the Concha, Fungoida and Frutexa species that don't pay well, there's Cactoida Vermis (711.5k Cr), Clypeus (species depends on the body, 426.2k Cr - 711.5k Cr), Tussock Virgam (645.7k Cr) and often Osseus Discus (596.5k Cr). On rare occasions, Stratum Tectonicas can even be present on water atmo. planets as well, but often it'll be the low-paying Stratum Paleas instead. Even when some of them aren't present, you can still get more than one species during the time down planetside.
In other words, for the same amount of exobio points, you need to visit fewer bodies than if you stuck to just one species (Stratum Tectonicas, 806.3k Cr) only. This in turn means that you spend less time in supercruise as you go from one body to the next: all those minutes would add up and slow the pace down.
After all, to equal the points from one water atmo. body, a player would have to visit three Tectonicas-bearing bodies. (Or four, if the water atmo. was lucky enough to have Tectonicas too.) Then there's also that a landable water atmo. planet is pretty much guaranteed to have some bios, whereas you mentioned that Tectonicas candidate HMCs might turn out to have just bacteria or even nothing at all. Most likely due to having the wrong type of parent star.

Now, usually all these species can be covered in just one landing, there should be no need to go back to orbit and glide down again: one can just drop down to the edge of one zone, and once the species from there are sampled, fly over to the next to grab the remaining ones there. Having a fast and agile ship helps with getting this done faster, and a small landing footprint helps a lot with grabbing the Osseus. (Although I could see people just not bothering with those.)


Of course, there is something to be said for the simplicity of just dropping down to one bio per planet. (On the other hand, it's even more monotonous than farming water atmo. bodies is.) Is that the fastest way though? As I explained above, I have my doubts. Finding HMCs that house Stratum Tectonicas is easier though, but since we're using already-discovered planets anyway, finding water atmo. bodies is just as easy. There are just fewer to pick from, but since the first logging bonus doesn't matter for exobio rank, one can just stick to places that have lots of bodies uploaded close by already, such as Colonia.
Click to expand...
Water worlds are also a very good way to rank up exobiology. Water worlds with Cactoida Vermis are great spots but not all water worlds have Cactoida Vermis.
The Osseus Discus need too much time to collect.
In worlds with Stratum Tectonicas there are also sometimes more than just Stratum, there can be also some other decent bio signals in the same region as Stratum which you can collect when you are landing for the Stratum but this effect is rather minor compared the number of good signals on water atmo. worlds.

The main advantage compared to water worlds is that this type is much more common so you can collect a bit outside the bubble undiscovered bio signals. Undiscovered bio signal give twice the amount of money and rank. There are many discovered worlds which have undiscovered signals to collect. This is much harder with water atmo. worlds as there are not so many and more percentage collected already.

If you collect already discovered Stratum it is a bit slower than water atmo. worlds. If you go a bit outside the bubble or somewhere in the black you can earn faster with Stratum.
 

Skyrun

S
Nadreck said:
One caveat that applies to all exobiology: if you don't have a reasonably high-spec PC, you won't spot plants from your ship.

...Because on low-spec PC's they're not rendered until you disembark, either on foot or in an SRV.

On numerous occasions, I've landed on an empty plain, waited through the period of blackness during disembarkation, and found myself right next to a patch of vegetation that definitely wasn't there before. I then have to use the SRV to travel to another patch.
Click to expand...
Yes, I think the right graphic settings are important for effectively search for bio signals.
 

SlothOfDoom

SlothOfDoom
Not sure I buy this is faster....after visiting 20 planets selected by these criteria I have found....2 bacteria. Sure, if we had a R2R type map it would be faster, but needing to jump and scan all of the useless crap is terribly slow.
 

InfernalMousse

InfernalMousse
marx said:
Last time I checked, it didn't. Granted, that was several updates ago, and if it was changed, it wouldn't have been the only silent change that wasn't in the patch notes.

Even if it did count though, and you could get double the points, first logging one Stratum Tectonicas per body would still award fewer points than sampling already-logged species from a water atmo. body.
Click to expand...
The first scanned bonus does indeed count towards rank progression and was actually quite important to me. I completed Elite in Exobiology about a month ago and was quite surprised by this.
 

Skyrun

S
SlothOfDoom said:
Not sure I buy this is faster....after visiting 20 planets selected by these criteria I have found....2 bacteria. Sure, if we had a R2R type map it would be faster, but needing to jump and scan all of the useless crap is terribly slow.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the feedback and sorry to hear. I did this search criteria based on my experience (did 90% of my Elite rank with Stratum) and the data from the Cannon database. I did a small check with around 15 planets afterwards and I had decent results 70% of planets Stratum. The 30% without Stratum seemed to me ok as you just jump into the system and check with discovery scanner and afterwards on the system map you can see the number of bio signals.
After your feedback I did another check around Col 359 Sector CA-X c2-0. There were 25 planets in 19 systems found. After checking only 8 had Stratum Tectonicas - only 32%. Out of the 10 planets with 1 bio signal only 1 had Stratum - that is really bad compared to my former experience - I would have guessed that around 50% such planets had Stratum.

I have done some updates of the inital post. I think if water worlds are available - water worlds are faster. I think it is still a decent way to push your exobiology rank while being out on exploration as you can easily check this in system view while hunking through the systems.
 

Ski'Thor

Ski'Thor
Is there any official statement, what you have to do in order to get the new suits?
I now have a green and blue metallic suit for ranking up exobiology, but I only "discovered" these "rewards" by accident ^^
 
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