Three Days of Searching...

[Mohenjo]

The composition scanner flashes the same as Horizons. I personally use my ship looking for bacteria, flying below 100m at 25% throttle. I usually spot them by eye, but on some surfaces you can’t easily see them so you’re reliant of the scanner.

Exactly, but because they're so few and far between, finding one with the scanner is almost impossible too.

 

[Galafrey]

Fly at 15m at around 25% or less on the light side of the planet , bacterium often look like roundish shadows at distance.

 

[HRDiagram]

Sometimes the bacterial colonies are the same colour as the surrounding terrain: a few times I've come across these, but they are a pain to spot with the current (lack of) tools. When that happens, I just skip them, or move to a different terrain (if available and showing a positive on the DSS) so that the difference in colour is evident.
In the almost totality of the cases (in my experience), however, the bacterial colonies are of a sensibly different colour, so it's not hard to spot them (even if it might take a while to get all 3 samples, admittedly).

I always use the SRV to track plants, but for bacterial colonies, I too love hovering with my ship.

 

[Mohenjo]

Fly at 15m at around 25% or less on the light side of the planet , bacterium often look like roundish shadows at distance.

Did you look at the pictures I posted? You can't see those at ANY distance.

 

[photomankc]

I have to ask... is it a completionism thing? Why punish yourself hunting bacteria cow patties?

 

[Zador]

Regarding lighter/darker blue areas, as far as I was aware that's just the landscape tinting the blue mask. There's just blue, and not blue, no gradations, they removed that because they thought it was misleading.

The wave scanner in the SRV that's used to detect objects etc. did not show anything for me for biologicals last time I tried.

 

[Mohenjo]

I find them.

So do I, but it's absurdly difficult. Again, check out the pics I posted.

 

[Mohenjo]

Looking between you legs doesn’t give you the best chance to spot them. Pointing your nose, and sensors, towards the ground makes detection of even those colonies which are hard to see easier. - you also get a better view using the upper canopy.

And when you get out use the secondary trigger to highlight the colony on the ground.

Ya, I fly a keelback, so I have lots of visibility. I often fly inverted, but I find that a bit awkward. Highlighting the colony on the ground isn't the problem, I know how to do that (that's the pulse mentioned earlier). It's finding the thing on the ground in the first place. Unless I know to land and DO a ping...

 

[Tharrn]

Youngsters. Back in my days we did beige patrol planets for barnacle sites without even knowing if that particular planet even had one (and it often was ONE on a whole planet). Can't even tell how many hours I spent flying across planetary surfaces upside down and loving it

P.S.: We didn't have shoes either and had to go uphill both ways.
P.P.S.: Never found any new ones myself. Ever.

 

[Valorin]

So, found a planet with one biological signal on it, a Bacterial Colony.

I don't know if you've ever tried to locate these things, but allow me to describe the last three days of my gameplay.

I was in orbit, and had scanned the planet. The whole thing lit up blue, but there were a few areas of darker blue, and a few areas of ever so slightly lighter blue... almost invisible, in fact. But, knowing what I'm looking for, I descended from orbit, aiming at the lighter area.

Now, it's not a flat, plain lighter area, it's tiny dots of lighter colour, mixed with the base blue, so it's difficult to know where to land, especially when the colour overlay DISAPPEARS as you get close to the ground (you know, where it would be of the most use). So, I get to about 100m above the ground, and start slowly flying around the area, at about 6-10m/s.

I'm looking for the bacterial colonies. Now, they don't appear as actual 3d objects, like the plants or geysers. No, these are just small differences in the textures, with no 3d effect. From a distance, they don't actually look like anything, because they just kind of blur, especially if they're the same colour as the ground. You have to be pretty much RIGHT on top of them. They also don't appear in large areas or groups, the way plants or geysers do. No, they appear as single tiny tiles, usually only one in the span of a hundred miles. With no sensor equipment in the game to allow us to detect them at any distance, you HAVE to spot them with your eyes only... which means you have to more or less stumble upon them by sheer luck.

So, I spent 15 hours the first day, just cruising around the area slowly. I disembarked a couple of times, fooled by the shadows of invisible objects that disappeared as I got closer to them, and my suit's genetic scanner's sensor pulse is so short range, that even wandering so far from my ship that it dismissed itself yielded no readings.

So, I went to bed, and logged back on the next day. I spent 12 hours the next day doing exactly the same thing. Slowly wandering around hoping to accidentally stumble on one of the signals. I never did, so I went to bed.

Today, I got up, and started my quest for a bacterial colony once again. It only took me 10 hours of the same thing, slowly wandering around in my ship, hoping to spot something, being misled by shadows of things that weren't actually there, or sudden shifts in the textures of the whole surface, to random changes in the lighting... until I finally spotted a blur off to one side. I landed, and approached to find the first of the three I would need to scan. I walked up, pulled out my sampler tool... and discovered I had ALREADY SCANNED THIS. Apparently, I'd already surveyed this planet.


There are three planets in this system with biological samples, you see. Before this latest odyssey, I had already spent days searching one of the other two. I thought I'd moved to the second before logging off, but apparently not. There's no way, you see, to know which planets you have already surveyed. No way to mark them or flag them or anything... no way to know.

So, I've now spent nearly 5 days in this one system scanning ONE PLANET (though I thought it was two).

Devs, this is not any fun. It just isn't. It's tedious and frustrating, and that's not good gameplay.

That's weird. These things are basically everywhere. I keep running into them without even looking for them. Oo

You also know that you can toggle filters in the DSS, right? To look for specific kinds of life.