"How far do I have to go to find a new system?" This question comes up from time to time, and answer tend to vary a lot. Specific numbers seem to be mostly anecdotes, so I was curious if we could glean some insight into this from the EDSM data. Moreover, to see how this has changed over time, to see the rate at which systems might be "running out".
The biggest weakness there, of course, is that of course not all systems are uploaded on EDSM, so any numbers have to be experimentally verified. There's another important thing to consider: in the EDSM data dumps we do have, the system's timestamp is when it was last updated (with more precise coordinates), not when it was first added. Unfortunately, we don't have the latter in them. However, we do have the EDSM ID number, which is incremental, so at least we can guess fairly well if a system was added recently, or added way back and updates recently. Thanks to Orvidius for this idea, originally I ignored and stripped out the IDs.
Plotting the IDs over time shows rather large gaps, with actually new systems being the closest only once a week or so. Still, over the grand total, that's good enough.
So, with that in mind, the results were surprising, and enough to make me want to go back to the bubble and see for myself. The data is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-9mcezzhktEkcBfkS1LdsxPDzFojF7vy43fGLv5zWXs], and I'll link shots of the charts here later.
The point is: these days, on EDSM data, you have to go 250-270 ly to find an unreported system. This was slowly but steadily increasing from 150 ly in 2017. April. (There are some downward spikes that are far too close: those outliers tend to be some populated systems in the bubble getting updated.)
Being highly sceptical that you could actually find a new, entirely untagged system so close, I set out to see how close I could actually get. I picked one of the less popular directions, into the brown dwarf layer. The results: new untagged bodies started appearing around 300 ly out, but my first entirely untagged systems were some 550 ly away.
So, with that, I added a 2.5 multiplier to the data as well, just to note this. I was more curious about the rates of increase, to see how quickly the distance increases. Well, as it turns out, very slowly.
Now, bear in mind that these are strictly new systems, and not cherry-picking: most of them were mass code A, only a couple of mass code B, M dwarfs. The rest were L, T, Y. No non-dwarf stars, no higher mass codes. But the question was how far to go to find a new system, and not how far to a new mass code D system and so on.
If you were to look for ELWs, you'll likely have to go somewhere between 600-800 ly to find a new one.
To put things better into perspective, we should also look at how many jumps these are, and how that changed over time. Going by my thread on how they changed over time, viewed on the case of an Asp Explorer, it's around nine jumps (for the multiplied distances, rounded up). Over time, this changed even less, although the biggest range increase with the introduction of Engineers happened before the data range we have here.
So, there we have it. The answer to how far you have to go isn't in thousands of lightyears, but hundreds instead. Or in terms of time, roughly ten minutes of gameplay. (Unless you stop to scan already-discovered systems.)
Of course, if you start cherry-picking things and filter out stars, then you'd likely end up with results farther than these - much farther for a fresh mass code D system, for example. Those might be worth looking into too, but I'll leave that up to others, as I'm looking into what I find more interesting stuff these days.
Plus this is all very much directional: if you zoom in on heatmaps (especially EDAstro's Alt. Heatmap), it's plain to see. The usual advices of "don't pick a popular direction, fly off the plane" still apply, naturally.
The biggest weakness there, of course, is that of course not all systems are uploaded on EDSM, so any numbers have to be experimentally verified. There's another important thing to consider: in the EDSM data dumps we do have, the system's timestamp is when it was last updated (with more precise coordinates), not when it was first added. Unfortunately, we don't have the latter in them. However, we do have the EDSM ID number, which is incremental, so at least we can guess fairly well if a system was added recently, or added way back and updates recently. Thanks to Orvidius for this idea, originally I ignored and stripped out the IDs.
Plotting the IDs over time shows rather large gaps, with actually new systems being the closest only once a week or so. Still, over the grand total, that's good enough.
So, with that in mind, the results were surprising, and enough to make me want to go back to the bubble and see for myself. The data is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-9mcezzhktEkcBfkS1LdsxPDzFojF7vy43fGLv5zWXs], and I'll link shots of the charts here later.
The point is: these days, on EDSM data, you have to go 250-270 ly to find an unreported system. This was slowly but steadily increasing from 150 ly in 2017. April. (There are some downward spikes that are far too close: those outliers tend to be some populated systems in the bubble getting updated.)
Being highly sceptical that you could actually find a new, entirely untagged system so close, I set out to see how close I could actually get. I picked one of the less popular directions, into the brown dwarf layer. The results: new untagged bodies started appearing around 300 ly out, but my first entirely untagged systems were some 550 ly away.
So, with that, I added a 2.5 multiplier to the data as well, just to note this. I was more curious about the rates of increase, to see how quickly the distance increases. Well, as it turns out, very slowly.
Now, bear in mind that these are strictly new systems, and not cherry-picking: most of them were mass code A, only a couple of mass code B, M dwarfs. The rest were L, T, Y. No non-dwarf stars, no higher mass codes. But the question was how far to go to find a new system, and not how far to a new mass code D system and so on.
If you were to look for ELWs, you'll likely have to go somewhere between 600-800 ly to find a new one.
To put things better into perspective, we should also look at how many jumps these are, and how that changed over time. Going by my thread on how they changed over time, viewed on the case of an Asp Explorer, it's around nine jumps (for the multiplied distances, rounded up). Over time, this changed even less, although the biggest range increase with the introduction of Engineers happened before the data range we have here.
So, there we have it. The answer to how far you have to go isn't in thousands of lightyears, but hundreds instead. Or in terms of time, roughly ten minutes of gameplay. (Unless you stop to scan already-discovered systems.)
Of course, if you start cherry-picking things and filter out stars, then you'd likely end up with results farther than these - much farther for a fresh mass code D system, for example. Those might be worth looking into too, but I'll leave that up to others, as I'm looking into what I find more interesting stuff these days.
Plus this is all very much directional: if you zoom in on heatmaps (especially EDAstro's Alt. Heatmap), it's plain to see. The usual advices of "don't pick a popular direction, fly off the plane" still apply, naturally.
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