Seen commanders showing these picks. What are they and where do you find them? I did see a post and that location was 10k light years out.
What are these and where to find
- Thread starter Glock_N_Load
- Start date
They're one of the more common types of life found in "Notable Stellar Phenomena"
You can find them across the galaxy in various places, often near nebulae. If you look in the Codex you'll likely find some locations in your current galactic region which have them.
You can find them across the galaxy in various places, often near nebulae. If you look in the Codex you'll likely find some locations in your current galactic region which have them.
Relatively rare, Notable Stellar Phenomena are among the coolest things to find. When I stumble on a system that has an NSP I always visit it. What is really weird is they are almost worthless.
- No first discovery. No reward for discovering. Universal Cartographics doesn't care. Nothing towards exploration rank.
- You can use research limpets to get samples from the floaty things that are sometimes amongst them, but they sell for very little.
- Vista Genomics (Odessey) doesn't care about anything that floats in space.
- Scanning them updates your codex (yay!), but that's really all you can get from them. Oh, and cool screen shots.
Yeah, the actual content is pretty good quality. Their looks are fine, and they are interactive - they move around and do stuff. Can even be dangerous, too. So, rather unlike the Odyssey flora, except the good looks.. However, for the most part, the distribution of NSPs is rather terrible, and their rewards are practically non-existent. Except...
If you're the first to discover a species, then you do get your name in the Codex for everyone, and in more noticeable places than "Odyssey flora #133 - Pink". So that's at least pretty good.
Or rather, it was pretty good, as there's probably only one so far undiscovered that should be there, there's nothing new to easily discover. It has been five years, after all. Maybe it's undiscovered because it's tucked away somewhere nobody looked yet, maybe it's undiscovered because it's bugged and doesn't actually spawn.
Oh, and if you meet up with others, you can play ball with some of the smaller stuff
(Most of the Anomalies will fight back if you get too close to them though)
As I've opined elsewhere, this is an awesome sandbox. But I'm not sure it's a good game. Mind you, five month noob that has only done exo and explo... but there's not much skill leveling or advancement for accomplishments, such as you mentioned. I've seen others say similar about bounty hunting, etc. Accomplishments that feel a little hollow from a game play perspective.
Well, if you want skill levelling you actually would need activities, which require skill.
Exploration require knowledge, not skill.
Example once you know, which terrain has higher chances for spawning plant X you cannot do anything more. Just go here and keep looking for.
About rewards- ultimate exploration reward is experience of exploration, views and screens.
Maybe data for freaks (like me) which love gathering and processing data, and sheets.
Not "exobiologist, elite 1049103 rank" with fancy new color for part of suit
Skill leveling in the gaming sense, not the literal sense. And I sorta disagree, exploration is a skill, or at least it could be if they designed it that way. Most games have an geometric or exponential skill ladder where the more you do an activity, the more access to more effective tools you gain.Well, if you want skill levelling you actually would need activities, which require skill.
Exploration require knowledge, not skill.
Example once you know, which terrain has higher chances for spawning plant X you cannot do anything more. Just go here and keep looking for.
About rewards- ultimate exploration reward is experience of exploration, views and screens.
Maybe data for freaks (like me) which love gathering and processing data, and sheets.
Not "exobiologist, elite 1049103 rank" with fancy new color for part of suit
Not here. The tools you have available to you are the same in the thousandth hour as they are in the first.
And I keep hearing people say that the experience is the reward. That's nice, and I agree its enjoyable, but that's generally not how games are designed. Hence my comment. And the "game's" sale ranking on Steam.
That very much depends on the genre - very common in RPGs, but much less common in other genres.
Some types of simulators or strategy games you might get access to more powerful options as you progress through the single-player campaign, but that's linear rather than geometric progression and it'll generally all be available either immediately or gated by a relatively linear in-match tech tree in the multiplayer options.
Any game type where you're not expected to have a multi-day persistent save state is very unlikely to have anything of that sort, of course - though playing the game for 100s of hours across multiple sessions will generally result in becoming better at it, certainly.
I wouldn't view ED as an RPG in the first place, so it'd seem a bit odd if my CMDR had an "exploration skill" that was unrelated to my personal ability to use the FSS / know how to survey plants efficiently / drive the SRV without spinning out / etc.
There is also a lack of advanced exploration equipment, yes - but on the other hand, the nature of exploration means that being three weeks out from the bubble and then discovering your loadout is wrong is considerably more frustrating than forgetting your limpets on a mining trip, so having exploration-useful equipment be a fairly limited and predictable set also feels better than the alternatives.
In addition to @Ian Doncaster comment, ED was designed such that the player gains skill. The character doesn't level up and gain character skills. I like this philosophy, where I can pretend to be the cmdr doing these activities. And it is my skills at building a good ship or finding good ways to do things that makes me a better cmdr. It is me that is getting better... not just an intelligence or wisdom stat that increases. Personally I would love it if the game went further requiring players to learn actual science stuff and apply it to our equipment and problem solving activities.
I believe 3rd party tools like Coriolis are really good for this. To transform a ship design from good to great it is fantastic for the player to use tools to understand the interplay and balance between design choices.
I suspect that if the game carried this philosophy much further (or the next level) many people would complain the game is much too hard. Many gamers want entertainment in the form of mindless fun. Traditional gaming activities involving mini-games, hand-eye-coordination, and reaction time.
Edit: Apologies, I really zoomed off topic here.
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Good luck CMDR Glock_N_Load
elite-dangerous.fandom.com
Just past NGC 3199 is the fattest patch of NSPs I've ever seen. Go check em out!
Notable Stellar Phenomena
Notable Stellar Phenomena are a type of signal source found in certain star systems, at stellar or planetary lagrange points or in Planetary Ring Systems. Each instance usually features a colorful Lagrange Cloud surrounding various organic or inorganic entities. These entities can be scanned by...
elite-dangerous.fandom.com
Just past NGC 3199 is the fattest patch of NSPs I've ever seen. Go check em out!
Well, when I refer to skill leveling I mean the availability of additional technology or hardware purchases that make you better at what you do. For exobiology, for instance, a scanner that sees flora that the default DSS scanner cannot, or a hand sampler with a longer scan range, or a computer that helps you identify good landing candidates (like BioInsights and the plug-ins). That kind of thing.
Well, exploration is my main activity (actually, I think that it covered more than 50% of my playtime since 2018), and I disagree.
Exploration require very little skill.
And I very appreciate fact, that only skill which I gather is being better pilot, with more knowledge.
Not gaming like skill, where after scanning 100 earthlikes cmdr hellrider has perma boost 5% of range, or 12% less fuel consumption
Or idea "scanner with range 1000ls now, scanner with unlimited range after elite V"
It could be terrible for exploration.
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True, exploration requires little in the way of player skills. What one can improve in the space part of it is how fast they grind through the FSS and/or the DSS; it's not possible to fail either of those minigames. (Nor to get better results out of them.) At least before them, a skill required was pattern recognition, and it was possible to fail that - simply by not recognizing from the visuals that there was something interesting in the system, and jumping out without scanning those, having no records to analyze later.
Speaking of which, while now it's still possible to fail to recognize interesting stuff after scanning it, even if you do that you'll still have your tag on the body and more importantly, all the information stored in the journal. Thanks to that, one can use Observatory to automatically look for possibly notable space finds, so that recognition skill can be automated away. Not that I mind this, and it's good that you can check through all your earlier logs too.
Exploration gameplay shouldn't be "hey, there might or might not be something interesting here, do this timesink to find out if there really is, and if yes, then here is its exact location, now you can fly straight to it", but instead "hey, there is definitely something interesting here, but you'll have to find where it is yourself". In other words, this is why Odyssey's planetary exploration gameplay works much better than almost all of Horizons' space exploration does. The core gameplay of ED is flying your spaceship, after all. Flying and visual recognition makes for more involving gameplay than having another timesink minigame to grind through. (Speaking of which, that reflex-based minigame to sample plants in the alpha... ugh.)
There are two things that can be failed with space exploration though. One is failing to endure the monotony and the time required to get back to the bubble, and pressing the self-destruct button However, the other actually goes back to the original topic: it's failing to recognize the interesting contents of the NSP. I see it regularly that people find some Albulum Gourd Molluscs in the Inner Orion Spur (the bubble's region), but they only notice the filler content there, usually the Metallic Crystals. They fail to realize that there's better stuff there, and move on without seeing it.
Although frankly, that failure is more on Frontier, because they designed the static filler content to be much larger (and trivial to notice) than the active important content, which one has to fly around and look for... and the game doesn't tell you that there's more than just a bunch of passive stuff in there.
Speaking of which, while now it's still possible to fail to recognize interesting stuff after scanning it, even if you do that you'll still have your tag on the body and more importantly, all the information stored in the journal. Thanks to that, one can use Observatory to automatically look for possibly notable space finds, so that recognition skill can be automated away. Not that I mind this, and it's good that you can check through all your earlier logs too.
Exploration gameplay shouldn't be "hey, there might or might not be something interesting here, do this timesink to find out if there really is, and if yes, then here is its exact location, now you can fly straight to it", but instead "hey, there is definitely something interesting here, but you'll have to find where it is yourself". In other words, this is why Odyssey's planetary exploration gameplay works much better than almost all of Horizons' space exploration does. The core gameplay of ED is flying your spaceship, after all. Flying and visual recognition makes for more involving gameplay than having another timesink minigame to grind through. (Speaking of which, that reflex-based minigame to sample plants in the alpha... ugh.)
There are two things that can be failed with space exploration though. One is failing to endure the monotony and the time required to get back to the bubble, and pressing the self-destruct button
However, the other actually goes back to the original topic: it's failing to recognize the interesting contents of the NSP. I see it regularly that people find some Albulum Gourd Molluscs in the Inner Orion Spur (the bubble's region), but they only notice the filler content there, usually the Metallic Crystals. They fail to realize that there's better stuff there, and move on without seeing it. Although frankly, that failure is more on Frontier, because they designed the static filler content to be much larger (and trivial to notice) than the active important content, which one has to fly around and look for... and the game doesn't tell you that there's more than just a bunch of passive stuff in there.