So I was watching Pavehawkers stream last night and he repeatably placed a Thargoid probe into a Guardian tower.
When the obelisks are scanned the probe will shoot out or teleport near by.
Pave did this several times in several towers some with the relic already in.
So this is like the reverse of taking Guardian tech and putting it in the Thargoid mother ship.
My question is, has this been tested before?
I've never seen anyone try it.
A quick check on forums and youtube and canonn didn't show me anything but maybe I missed it.
Is this new? Surely someone must have tried this in the past...
The tinfoil hat thinking on the steam last night was fill up all 7 towers with a probe, do the obelisk in the correct order, and then something happens that we havent seen before...
Erm the 3rd link to his clips shows him putting it in just like you do to get the guardian blueprints(when using the relic) or when dropping thargoid sensors/probe/link into the goid mothership.
It's intriguing to be sure. I can't help thinking tho' that if the Guardian base was going to have a reaction to Thargoid stuff that it would do so if your drop it into the ground hole in front of the "altar" instead of the usual Relic or Key. Putting stuff "into" the tower seems a bit random, even for Frontier.
Good bit of "science" tho' - who knows, it stil might be a thing!
If the sensor/probe in the tower lost integrity or was ejected at a random time then yeah its bug or random. The fact it ejects or teleports when you activate an obelisk... well that left us all thinking it might not be a bug.
To clarify teleport - in the vid example i first linked you see the probe disappear - it was found 200 meters away or so. Pave did this several times, one time he found it 2km away. Thing is it never died, never lost integrity and only ever moved/teleported when he did something with the obelisks.
Just want to preface this with "I want this to be something of note". The fact the probe disappears could be a couple mundane things in my mind, as is the "insertion"... but I'm not here trying to poo-poo the whole thing, rather, throw up some scenarios which might need disproving. With that said...
puts his eternal cynic hat on
So, a few initial things of note not specifically related to the relic-tower things:
- The items "...not losing integrity..." is entirely normal for SRV-jettisoned objects. Cargo only loses integrity when it's jettisoned from a ship, in space, so I wouldn't put much stock in that as being indicative of anything.
- I don't think the Thargoid Link turning red is anything significant. It's hard to tell without any footage preceding the link being blue. Basically, I think the Link has received an "activation" earlier in the video, and it changes red as the activation finishes. I describe "Activations" more in the spoiler.
Firstly, Probes and Sensors have a two-phase cycle:
Purring (inactive)
Lit up and Active (when they're transmitting either the octal information about the planet (probes), or the morse wireframe of the nearest ship (sensor)
When Probes and Sensors light up, they "scream" as a kind of pre-amble to sending the message.
However, the Link stays Red unless it's "Activated" by an external event, at which point it lights up blue while it responds in-turn, and then turns red again when it deactivates. The things which make a Link "Activate" are:
The Probe and Sensor "Screams", which make the Link activate and echo the "scream" in-kind.
Playing the Unknown Signal causes the Link to activate, and either play an octal signal giving triangulation data of the Thargoid Structure it relates to, or it points it's laser beam to the location of the Thargoid Structure in-system
tl;dr I'm fairly confident it's the tail-end of an activation which is not included in that video.
Now, to the whole Probe/Relic Tower thing. There's two main points here.
- So far, any mechanics to "insert" an item (be it the use of an Ancient Relic/Key to activate the Guardian Data... thingy) have needed relatively inaccurate alignment to deposit the item. I had a look at that video where he inserts the Relic, and it's clear he's been trying a few times, and trying to get the precision just right. This suggests to me that the jettison is just spawning the item inside the relic tower, which is hollow. The fact the Relic (in that video) proceeds to "slip" suggests it's not actually locked in to anything, and is just a regular item spawn, eventually succumbing to the physics engine.
- Why does the Probe disappear? This is, well, complicated. The very short version is this:
The probe disappears roughly after the time it would take to receive a message from Ram Tah with a decryption, or a "failed decryption" message; that timing is a regular rhythm in elite for anything that needs to go check something with the server for whatever reason (in this case, if they have the ram tah mission, and what message should be received based on game conditions). This likely triggers an "instance redraw" of sorts, but since the probe is in a location where it doesn't really fit/is kinda glitched into the tower, the redraw fails.
If you care for the not-short version, read on.
Default behaviour of most rendering algorithms when they fail to draw something in the correct location is to either try and find a location it can draw it and do that (thus; "ejecting" it) or, if that doesn't work for whatever reason, draw it somewhere valid but off the play environment (thus; "disappearing" it). I'd hazard the mechanics for ejecting don't respect the same rules when spawning an item from jettison. Of course, you could ask "But I can't glitch objects through terrain like I can with this", but that gets into a whole other discussion about different object types which would make this post much larger than I want it to be; tl;dr the tower isn't terrain, so spawning it inside works.
To elaborate on the "Instance Redraw"... I think this is something that's only been in the game ever since the ability to re-scan obelisks without restarting the game has been a thing. How I've observed it is at Thargoid Structures. In the early days of goid structures (before this change) I used to "prop the door open" on a structure by jetting a Thargoid Link/Probe/Sensor at the door. I could then go in and out, dumping two items at a time. Using this technique, you could clear out a whole thargoid structure very quickly. When I recently did this, I found it wasn't working anymore... the door would be open when I dropped my prop, but eventually I'd try to come back through and the door would be closed. Long story short, after a seemingly fixed amount of time, the door would close, but my prop would still be exactly where it was. I'd need to scoop it and jet it again, or scoop it and leave/re-enter the "door opening" zone. Enough playing around with item positions and coming/going gave me some insight into the probable door mechanics and what was going on. Elaboration on this in the spoiler
I think two sorts of "Instance Redraw" events; an event-based redraw when something which changes the state of the instance occurs, and a time-based "Instance redraw" which just confirms everything is where it should be, if an event-based redraw hasn't happened in a while. I've seen this happen elsewhere on occasion when roaming around installations. Items in the wrong place will "pop" into the air slightly and drop back down... it's weird when you see it.
The way the Thargoid door mechanics work (I think) is as follows:
When a thargoid item transitions from outside the door activation zone to inside it, the door opens.
When the thargoid item is no longer inside the door zone, the door closes.
The "door opening" triggers an event-based instance redraw, because something's changed in the instance (e.g that redraw then occurs for wingmates too, if present)
But there's a bug in this logic. If the item "disappears", the door will close, but if it reappears, without transitioning from outside to inside the zone and isn't "spawned" (i.e is just redrawn), it will trigger the door close, but the door won't reopen. That's why, if I scoop it, the door still won't open; I haven't transitioned from outside the zone to inside the zone... I need to leave it and re-enter. Jettisoning works, because it goes through the whole process of ensuring any zones in the area it spawns are aware that it's now in that location; this doesn't occur with just a redraw.
As a comparison, under the old logic where my prop would hold the door open indefinitely... if I scooped it in my SRV, the door would close and reopen. That's because at a low-level, the flow of events is:
Item in door zone (door is open)
Scooping destroys[1] the item temporarily (door closes)
Item appears in my inventory (door opens)
[1] destroy, in the programming sense
The relevance here is that scanning the obelisk triggers redraw event after the usual "timing" having reached out to the mission server and verified whether or not you have the mission active and, if so, whether or not you have the correct items. If you have the correct items, it deactivates the obelisk, if you don't, it temporarily disables the obelisk for a short period before reactivating it. Either way, the state of objects in the instance changes, and so it needs to be redrawn, and the location of the item "inside" the tower is invalid, so it ejects, or disappears it.
Again, I'm not trying to just rubbish this... if you're having fun exploring this, don't let me get in your way, and definitely try to prove me wrong I'm hinging this off some big assumptions of fairly esoteric mechanics... unfortunately I can't stop doing what I know how to do, so just trying to help by providing potential explanations for what's being observed.
EDIT: Flicking through some of the other videos, certainly seems to align with my observations e.g this one where Pave considers it being a "time thing" when the probe, which is clearly having some physics issues, disappears.
It doesnt go bang though, he used the same probe in several towers and he always found it once it disappeared. It was always close by.
You can leave it in the tower for as long as you want, it only moves or disappears once the obelisk is scanned.
Paves initial thought was its just a bug or just nice placement as Jmanis says above.
Its the trigger of scanning an obelisk, the fact the probe never takes damage and always reappears near by which made everyone watching the stream think hang on, this might be something.
You might be right its just a redraw..... but maybe a combination of objects placed in the towers will generate something. The towers have a secret i believe. They are not at those sites just to give you a relic, you dont have 7 towers 5 of which seems to have control obelisks just to give a player 1 relic to get the orb machine working.
The other thing that makes me think this might be something is you can take the guardian stuff to the thargoid base and there is a reaction.
You can take guardian stuff to a thargoid and they have a reaction - give me it or i will kill you.
You can place a link next to a relic and it will turn red - try it.
So if all that in game action happens taking guardian stuff one way, surely there is a reverse where you take goid stuff to the guardians and get a reaction.
Given FDevs record of meticulous QA, I’m 99.999% sure (five nines sure) that this is either a bug or if not an outright bug, an unintended behavior that was never considered or tested for.
Given FDevs record of meticulous QA, I’m 99.999% sure (five nines sure) that this is either a bug or if not an outright bug, an unintended behavior that was never considered or tested for.
It took them months to acknowledge the Open/PG relogging to light up different obelisks at a guardian site was actually a bug... yet we probably would never have discovered all 101 entries without the bug...
It took them months to acknowledge the Open/PG relogging to light up different obelisks at a guardian site was actually a bug... yet we probably would never have discovered all 101 entries without the bug...
I'm hinging this off some big assumptions of fairly esoteric mechanics... unfortunately I can't stop doing what I know how to do, so just trying to help by providing potential explanations for what's being observed.
