I have explored a lot.
I've made over 5.5 billion credits from exploration. I've traveled half a million light years. I've found undiscovered biologicals of all sorts, found ringed earthlikes, stellar phenomena.
I think it's fair to say I'm pretty experienced as far as Exploration is concerned. I'd wager I'm easily in the top 1% of explorers.
In this time, I've noted some...lets call them issues with the exploration gameplay loop. And given there's been some recent effort on the part of FDev to rectify discrepancies like this in the game, I thought this might be the perfect time to propose ways to rectify the issues with Exploration.
First off: What are the issues?
1. Exploration is basically a slot machine simulator.
When it comes to basic exploration, the gameplay loop is pretty simple. You pick a route and jump into a system, and hope something lucky springs up. If it does, you fly to it and scan it; if it doesn't, you jump to the next system and repeat.
Yes, there is a certain degree of influence players can have over this process, but for the most part, this influence is just knowing how the game works. Step one, learn to sort by star class. Step two, maybe learn mass codes. Step three...there is no step three. At this point you're basically operating at 100% efficiency. The amount of actual skill and/or improvement that is possible is relatively minimal.
The sad part is, there are actually existing mechanics that could improve this. For example, the efficiency bonus could reward particularly skillful players with greater bonuses. Unfortunately, the current design, post-engineering, basically just means the player does exactly the same pattern every time, and since you'll never need more than about four probes for any worthwhile planet, you never need to worry about it. Alternatively, the full-system-scan bonuses could have offered opportunities for on-the-fly math, as players try to calculate whether or not fully scanning or even mapping a system might be worth it, but the answer there is very, very simple: No. It is never worth it.
This leaves you with a sad reality where all there is to do is pull the lever, again and again, hoping that this time, you'll find the new Collection of Wonders and can go make a reddit post about it.
2. Exploration payouts are wildly disproportionate to actual rarity and entertainment value.
There are a lot of cool things you can find out in the Black. There are a lot of things that pay(pretty) well to find. Unfortunately these things are not often in alignment.
A. Finding a Ringed Earthlike is EXTREMELY rare. ELWs alone are quite rare, and a ringed ELW is less than 1/100 of that. But a Ringed Earthlike, despite its rarity, pays just as well as any other ELW.
B. Finding Biologicals are also extremely rare. Searching randomly, you can go for hundreds of systems without finding a single one, and even searching purposefully for them can take much longer than simply searching for terraformable water worlds or earthlikes. How much do they pay out for discovery? 50k, same as any other codex discovery.
C. Finding Notable Stellar Phenomena are EXTREMELY rare. I've found dozens of biologicals in my explorations, but only maybe five stellar phenomena.
D. Finding a Black Hole is especially, phenomenally rare. I've never found a single undiscovered black hole. How well do they pay? About 25k each.
Meanwhile, every single terraformable high-metal world is worth an inexplicable 2 million credits. What POSSIBLE use does the bubble have for ANOTHER terraformable world 25000ly from the bubble, when they already must have millions in walking distance? Finding these and mapping them isn't exploration. It's not even mapping. At best it's coloring inside the lines.
Which is a pretty good descriptor of the current state of exploration as a whole. Exploration: the word evokes imagery of boldly striking forth, exploring things no person has ever seen! And yet the vast majority of what you ACTUALLY do is scan ten thousand identical terraformable planets because each one gives you that same two million credit payout.
Commentary
Now, don't get me wrong. If you can't tell from my time invested, I enjoy the Exploration gameplay loop. But that doesn't mean I think it can't be improved. Right now, it's basically a slot machine, but that slot machine could become blackjack, and the jackpot could go from being 20 bucks to 2000 bucks, really driving players to constantly search for those rare moments of unique discovery!
And there is definitely room for that improvement to take place!
Current statistics are something like this:
Mining Peak Income: 250m/hour
Combat Peak Income: 400m/hour
Exploration Peak Income: 25m/hour.
Now, this can be improved via the Li-Yong Rui bonus, but even after tripling your income, you're still only about a third the income rate of Mining, and with far greater risk besides. If a miner dies, they lose one load of minerals, and probably less. PVE-wise, combat players pretty much CANT die, because engineering makes ships so durable, and even if they do, they only lose maybe an hour of gameplay. If an explorer dies, they can lose hundreds or THOUSANDS of hours of play. It's no joke.
Now I want to be clear here; my focus isn't primarily on income itself. Income is a means to an end. My objective is to make the exploration gameplay loop more interesting and engaging. But you can encourage this by making interesting things actually rewarding. If I find a ringed neutron star or a black hole, it should be exciting on MULTIPLE levels, in terms of the joy of discovery AND the excitement of a big credit payout. Adding the credit payout doesn't take away from the raw joy of discovery; much the opposite, it only compliments it, making it stronger than ever, driving each and every subsequent discovery.
Change 1: Dramatically alter the value of truly rare objects.
Finding a ringed object should multiply its value by a pre-set amount. A ringed gas giant obviously wouldn't be worth much more than a normal gas giant(though still more: mining is a thing, after all), but a ringed ELW should be more valuable in accordance with its relative rarity. A 10x multiplier wouldn't be uncalled for. Some of these bonuses would need to be manually set: Neutron Stars, for example, aren't particularly rare, but ringed neutron stars are very, very rare. The value wouldn't need to be that high even then, as a ringed neutron star has little in the way of functional value, but it might have tourism value or something of that ilk, so it should at least be worth as much as a standard ELW.
This would also apply to biological discoveries. Flying to a terraformable planet and scanning it takes about 3-5 minutes in most cases. Actually flying down to the surface and scanning a biological signal easily takes the same amount of time, and is both far more dangerous and far more rare. Therefore, it should pay out more than twice as well as scanning the aforementioned terraformable.
More than that, these rare discoveries should also have a substantial multiplier on the rest of the system. Exobiologists are going to want to know what kind of a system they're potentially setting up shop in, and will want the best experience possible. If there's an ELW there, they'll REALLY want to go to that system to do research, so the presence of the biological will multiply the value of the ELW. The same should go for Stellar Phenomena and Black Holes; they shouldn't just be valuable in themselves, they should also make the entire system more valuable. This leads neatly into the next suggestion:
Change 2: Adding a skill component by modifying the existing mechanics, such as the DSS, FSS, and Full-System Scan bonuses.
There are basically two mechanics in the game right now: The FSS, the DSS. Each of these are also capable of getting Full System Scan bonuses. Unfortunately, these bonuses are currently functionally irrelevant, because the bonuses they provide are so small they might as well not exist.
FSS - Full System Scan
If you fully scan a system, you get a bonus of 1000 credits per body. Lets take an example case; a system with 5 high-metal planets(worth 30k each to scan) and one icy body(worth 1300+full system scan bonus). After you've scanned all five HMPs, is it worth searching for the icy bodies?
Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock...BZZZT!
The answer is...no! Scanning that icy body, even with all those other planets already scanned, will earn you just 6300 credits. Even in this theoretically ideal system, you'll likely be losing credits to search for that last body.
This is the opposite of how it should be. The ideal system is one where players need to think about the optimal path, analyze the system, and figure out whether or not searching out that last body is worth the effort.
DSS - Detailed Surface Scanner
Now, how about the DSS? This has another mechanic that should, theoretically, reward skillful play, but unfortunately, it doesn't. This mechanic is the planetary scanning efficiency bonus.
The reason for this lack of complexity is because it always provides exactly the same bonus regardless of planet type, and it's easy to consistently get below the needed number of probes, after which, you just stop caring. For example, I could PROBABLY manage to scan most 6-probe planets with three probes, but why would I bother? I just launch four and be done with it. But 'being done with it', is the opposite of good, engaging gameplay.
This is why the bonus provided should adjust dynamically based on how efficiently the player is able to map the planet. If I map a 6-probe planet with 3 probes, I should get additional bonuses beyond the initial bonus, and even beyond the bonus for mapping it with four probes. This makes each planet different, because no two planets, even among the same probe count, are exactly the same size, and that means I need to evaluate its size and judge whether or not my probes in one formation will work, or whether I'll need to swap to an alternate formation, adjust my distance, compensate for my speed, and so on. It takes what was a very basic and dull mechanic and adds much-needed complexity.
Full System Mapping
Full System Mapping falls under exactly the same problem as FSSing, except about a hundred times worse. FSSing the entire system at most wastes a few seconds, maybe a minute or two for a particularly massive system. DSSing a entire system can take multiple hours. What reward do you get for this? 10k credits per body!
Frankly, this is the one that bugs me the most. It's almost insulting. Why even bother offering such a paltry sum? Fully mapping a system with 12 icy bodies would take an hour and pay you a glorious 180k credits.
Now, don't get me wrong; I don't think you should ever want to map a system with 12 icy bodies. But right now, you never want to fully map anything; the bonus might as well not exist.
The natural solution to this is to extend the above DSS enhancement to the entire system, but on a more profound level. For example, each probe under the efficiency rating might boost the value of the system as a whole by 3-5%. For example, scanning a 6-probe body in 3 probes would boost the value of the entire system by 9-15%.
This has an interesting side-effect! It means that for the first time in history, Gas Giants might actually become worth mapping! In fact, gas giants become fairly significant boosts to income, because a single gas giant can have a probe count of 20 or above, meaning that one planet might increase the value of the entire system by 30-50%.
At this point, fully mapping a system becomes a complex puzzle. You need to account for travel time, total number of bodies, mass, radius, the value of valuable bodies in the system, and other factors, to judge whether or not a system is worth fully mapping. Maybe that distant gas giant might not be worth scanning, but - what's this? It has a terraformable moon? Suddenly everything changes!
What was once a completely meaningless mechanic, ignored by everyone, becomes a significant enhancement to the enjoyment and depth of exploration.
Now I know some will wonder why, from a lore perspective, would scanning a system with less probes result in a better payout?
The answer is simple! Once you have put probes on every body in the system, they will release a full-system scanning pulse, linking every probe in the network. The less overlap there is between probes, the less interference these probes will experience, and the higher quality the scan becomes! This allows them to pinpoint sources of resources with high accuracy, dramatically increasing the value of the system, as they can plan around these things before leaving the bubble, rather than needing to go scan the entire thing again and potentially not finding what they're looking for!
Simple! For the interests of saving dev time, there will be no visual depiction of this taking place, but you'll see the results at the payout screen!
Change 3: Remove the Li-Yong Rui Exploration Bonus.
Last and hopefully least, this should have happened ages ago, honestly. Players are functionally forced into pledging to Li-Yong Rui to make any appreciable income on exploration. It's the difference between making 1/3rd as much as a miner, versus making 1/9th as much as a miner.
Buff everything else up 3x as compensation. There is literally no downside to this; you're saving players from doing meaningless hauling for a power they don't care about, you're saving the power from players who are probably hauling to the wrong place and causing no end of trouble, it's a win-win. Replace it with 25% better fuel efficiency or something.
Anyways, these are the ideas of someone who has clearly spent far too much time exploring, and has probably gone space-mad ages ago.
I'd love to hear people's opinions on them.
I've made over 5.5 billion credits from exploration. I've traveled half a million light years. I've found undiscovered biologicals of all sorts, found ringed earthlikes, stellar phenomena.
I think it's fair to say I'm pretty experienced as far as Exploration is concerned. I'd wager I'm easily in the top 1% of explorers.
In this time, I've noted some...lets call them issues with the exploration gameplay loop. And given there's been some recent effort on the part of FDev to rectify discrepancies like this in the game, I thought this might be the perfect time to propose ways to rectify the issues with Exploration.
First off: What are the issues?
1. Exploration is basically a slot machine simulator.
When it comes to basic exploration, the gameplay loop is pretty simple. You pick a route and jump into a system, and hope something lucky springs up. If it does, you fly to it and scan it; if it doesn't, you jump to the next system and repeat.
Yes, there is a certain degree of influence players can have over this process, but for the most part, this influence is just knowing how the game works. Step one, learn to sort by star class. Step two, maybe learn mass codes. Step three...there is no step three. At this point you're basically operating at 100% efficiency. The amount of actual skill and/or improvement that is possible is relatively minimal.
The sad part is, there are actually existing mechanics that could improve this. For example, the efficiency bonus could reward particularly skillful players with greater bonuses. Unfortunately, the current design, post-engineering, basically just means the player does exactly the same pattern every time, and since you'll never need more than about four probes for any worthwhile planet, you never need to worry about it. Alternatively, the full-system-scan bonuses could have offered opportunities for on-the-fly math, as players try to calculate whether or not fully scanning or even mapping a system might be worth it, but the answer there is very, very simple: No. It is never worth it.
This leaves you with a sad reality where all there is to do is pull the lever, again and again, hoping that this time, you'll find the new Collection of Wonders and can go make a reddit post about it.
2. Exploration payouts are wildly disproportionate to actual rarity and entertainment value.
There are a lot of cool things you can find out in the Black. There are a lot of things that pay(pretty) well to find. Unfortunately these things are not often in alignment.
A. Finding a Ringed Earthlike is EXTREMELY rare. ELWs alone are quite rare, and a ringed ELW is less than 1/100 of that. But a Ringed Earthlike, despite its rarity, pays just as well as any other ELW.
B. Finding Biologicals are also extremely rare. Searching randomly, you can go for hundreds of systems without finding a single one, and even searching purposefully for them can take much longer than simply searching for terraformable water worlds or earthlikes. How much do they pay out for discovery? 50k, same as any other codex discovery.
C. Finding Notable Stellar Phenomena are EXTREMELY rare. I've found dozens of biologicals in my explorations, but only maybe five stellar phenomena.
D. Finding a Black Hole is especially, phenomenally rare. I've never found a single undiscovered black hole. How well do they pay? About 25k each.
Meanwhile, every single terraformable high-metal world is worth an inexplicable 2 million credits. What POSSIBLE use does the bubble have for ANOTHER terraformable world 25000ly from the bubble, when they already must have millions in walking distance? Finding these and mapping them isn't exploration. It's not even mapping. At best it's coloring inside the lines.
Which is a pretty good descriptor of the current state of exploration as a whole. Exploration: the word evokes imagery of boldly striking forth, exploring things no person has ever seen! And yet the vast majority of what you ACTUALLY do is scan ten thousand identical terraformable planets because each one gives you that same two million credit payout.
Commentary
Now, don't get me wrong. If you can't tell from my time invested, I enjoy the Exploration gameplay loop. But that doesn't mean I think it can't be improved. Right now, it's basically a slot machine, but that slot machine could become blackjack, and the jackpot could go from being 20 bucks to 2000 bucks, really driving players to constantly search for those rare moments of unique discovery!
And there is definitely room for that improvement to take place!
Current statistics are something like this:
Mining Peak Income: 250m/hour
Combat Peak Income: 400m/hour
Exploration Peak Income: 25m/hour.
Now, this can be improved via the Li-Yong Rui bonus, but even after tripling your income, you're still only about a third the income rate of Mining, and with far greater risk besides. If a miner dies, they lose one load of minerals, and probably less. PVE-wise, combat players pretty much CANT die, because engineering makes ships so durable, and even if they do, they only lose maybe an hour of gameplay. If an explorer dies, they can lose hundreds or THOUSANDS of hours of play. It's no joke.
Now I want to be clear here; my focus isn't primarily on income itself. Income is a means to an end. My objective is to make the exploration gameplay loop more interesting and engaging. But you can encourage this by making interesting things actually rewarding. If I find a ringed neutron star or a black hole, it should be exciting on MULTIPLE levels, in terms of the joy of discovery AND the excitement of a big credit payout. Adding the credit payout doesn't take away from the raw joy of discovery; much the opposite, it only compliments it, making it stronger than ever, driving each and every subsequent discovery.
Change 1: Dramatically alter the value of truly rare objects.
Finding a ringed object should multiply its value by a pre-set amount. A ringed gas giant obviously wouldn't be worth much more than a normal gas giant(though still more: mining is a thing, after all), but a ringed ELW should be more valuable in accordance with its relative rarity. A 10x multiplier wouldn't be uncalled for. Some of these bonuses would need to be manually set: Neutron Stars, for example, aren't particularly rare, but ringed neutron stars are very, very rare. The value wouldn't need to be that high even then, as a ringed neutron star has little in the way of functional value, but it might have tourism value or something of that ilk, so it should at least be worth as much as a standard ELW.
This would also apply to biological discoveries. Flying to a terraformable planet and scanning it takes about 3-5 minutes in most cases. Actually flying down to the surface and scanning a biological signal easily takes the same amount of time, and is both far more dangerous and far more rare. Therefore, it should pay out more than twice as well as scanning the aforementioned terraformable.
More than that, these rare discoveries should also have a substantial multiplier on the rest of the system. Exobiologists are going to want to know what kind of a system they're potentially setting up shop in, and will want the best experience possible. If there's an ELW there, they'll REALLY want to go to that system to do research, so the presence of the biological will multiply the value of the ELW. The same should go for Stellar Phenomena and Black Holes; they shouldn't just be valuable in themselves, they should also make the entire system more valuable. This leads neatly into the next suggestion:
Change 2: Adding a skill component by modifying the existing mechanics, such as the DSS, FSS, and Full-System Scan bonuses.
There are basically two mechanics in the game right now: The FSS, the DSS. Each of these are also capable of getting Full System Scan bonuses. Unfortunately, these bonuses are currently functionally irrelevant, because the bonuses they provide are so small they might as well not exist.
FSS - Full System Scan
If you fully scan a system, you get a bonus of 1000 credits per body. Lets take an example case; a system with 5 high-metal planets(worth 30k each to scan) and one icy body(worth 1300+full system scan bonus). After you've scanned all five HMPs, is it worth searching for the icy bodies?
Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock...BZZZT!
The answer is...no! Scanning that icy body, even with all those other planets already scanned, will earn you just 6300 credits. Even in this theoretically ideal system, you'll likely be losing credits to search for that last body.
This is the opposite of how it should be. The ideal system is one where players need to think about the optimal path, analyze the system, and figure out whether or not searching out that last body is worth the effort.
DSS - Detailed Surface Scanner
Now, how about the DSS? This has another mechanic that should, theoretically, reward skillful play, but unfortunately, it doesn't. This mechanic is the planetary scanning efficiency bonus.
The reason for this lack of complexity is because it always provides exactly the same bonus regardless of planet type, and it's easy to consistently get below the needed number of probes, after which, you just stop caring. For example, I could PROBABLY manage to scan most 6-probe planets with three probes, but why would I bother? I just launch four and be done with it. But 'being done with it', is the opposite of good, engaging gameplay.
This is why the bonus provided should adjust dynamically based on how efficiently the player is able to map the planet. If I map a 6-probe planet with 3 probes, I should get additional bonuses beyond the initial bonus, and even beyond the bonus for mapping it with four probes. This makes each planet different, because no two planets, even among the same probe count, are exactly the same size, and that means I need to evaluate its size and judge whether or not my probes in one formation will work, or whether I'll need to swap to an alternate formation, adjust my distance, compensate for my speed, and so on. It takes what was a very basic and dull mechanic and adds much-needed complexity.
Full System Mapping
Full System Mapping falls under exactly the same problem as FSSing, except about a hundred times worse. FSSing the entire system at most wastes a few seconds, maybe a minute or two for a particularly massive system. DSSing a entire system can take multiple hours. What reward do you get for this? 10k credits per body!
Frankly, this is the one that bugs me the most. It's almost insulting. Why even bother offering such a paltry sum? Fully mapping a system with 12 icy bodies would take an hour and pay you a glorious 180k credits.
Now, don't get me wrong; I don't think you should ever want to map a system with 12 icy bodies. But right now, you never want to fully map anything; the bonus might as well not exist.
The natural solution to this is to extend the above DSS enhancement to the entire system, but on a more profound level. For example, each probe under the efficiency rating might boost the value of the system as a whole by 3-5%. For example, scanning a 6-probe body in 3 probes would boost the value of the entire system by 9-15%.
This has an interesting side-effect! It means that for the first time in history, Gas Giants might actually become worth mapping! In fact, gas giants become fairly significant boosts to income, because a single gas giant can have a probe count of 20 or above, meaning that one planet might increase the value of the entire system by 30-50%.
At this point, fully mapping a system becomes a complex puzzle. You need to account for travel time, total number of bodies, mass, radius, the value of valuable bodies in the system, and other factors, to judge whether or not a system is worth fully mapping. Maybe that distant gas giant might not be worth scanning, but - what's this? It has a terraformable moon? Suddenly everything changes!
What was once a completely meaningless mechanic, ignored by everyone, becomes a significant enhancement to the enjoyment and depth of exploration.
Now I know some will wonder why, from a lore perspective, would scanning a system with less probes result in a better payout?
The answer is simple! Once you have put probes on every body in the system, they will release a full-system scanning pulse, linking every probe in the network. The less overlap there is between probes, the less interference these probes will experience, and the higher quality the scan becomes! This allows them to pinpoint sources of resources with high accuracy, dramatically increasing the value of the system, as they can plan around these things before leaving the bubble, rather than needing to go scan the entire thing again and potentially not finding what they're looking for!
Simple! For the interests of saving dev time, there will be no visual depiction of this taking place, but you'll see the results at the payout screen!
Change 3: Remove the Li-Yong Rui Exploration Bonus.
Last and hopefully least, this should have happened ages ago, honestly. Players are functionally forced into pledging to Li-Yong Rui to make any appreciable income on exploration. It's the difference between making 1/3rd as much as a miner, versus making 1/9th as much as a miner.
Buff everything else up 3x as compensation. There is literally no downside to this; you're saving players from doing meaningless hauling for a power they don't care about, you're saving the power from players who are probably hauling to the wrong place and causing no end of trouble, it's a win-win. Replace it with 25% better fuel efficiency or something.
Anyways, these are the ideas of someone who has clearly spent far too much time exploring, and has probably gone space-mad ages ago.
I'd love to hear people's opinions on them.
![[PS4] Lorenzo Waringos](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/234/234580.jpg?1612617334){kind=avatar}
