What is your exploration strategy?

[rrobes]

I'm confused. The only mass tag deletion I'm aware of was back in like 2015 when the game officially came out of beta and everything got reset. But surely no reasonable person would still be salty about that all these years later! Indeed, the fact that FDev have been careful to preserve discovery tags the whole time since then illustrates to me that they recognize the significant value players attach to them. So I'm curious, has there been another major snafu with discovery tags since that time that I'm not thinking of?

If my recollection serves me correctly, the tags were removed with exploration revamping, there's this:

Lost all my discoveries in the codex

after new update i thought i would check out the codex and have a look in the galaxy a new place to travel to to add to my discoveries. and it looks like i have not been anywhere. this is not good as i have been exploring for the last 12 months and found so many planets that gave me confirmed...

forums.frontier.co.uk

Best not to assume that I'm in the least bit reasonable, would hate to disappoint.

 

[Maolagin]

If my recollection serves me correctly, the tags were removed with exploration revamping, there's this:

Lost all my discoveries in the codex

after new update i thought i would check out the codex and have a look in the galaxy a new place to travel to to add to my discoveries. and it looks like i have not been anywhere. this is not good as i have been exploring for the last 12 months and found so many planets that gave me confirmed...

forums.frontier.co.uk

Best not to assume that I'm in the least bit reasonable, would hate to disappoint.

Aha. Usually I understand "discovery tags" to refer to the "First discovered by..." names in the system map. Those were unaffected by the exploration revamp, they simply added the "First mapped by..." tag as a second chance to put your name on an object. And given that many of the famous systems still have their tags from the first generation of explorers (Allitnil in particular comes to mind...) it seems safe to say that those discovery tags have been unperturbed since right after the game released.

The Codex is a whole different thing, still affected by a variety of frustrating bugs. It would be really nice if FDev would decide what they want it to be, and make it actually work. Grrr...

 

[Arindor]

Coffee. Lots of it. And breaks because the rinse and repeat same old discoveries can wear a bit thing after the n'th time.

 

[Red Anders]

My strategy would be to ask for this thread to be moved to the exploration forum where you'll probably get more useful replies.

 

[rrobes]

The whole thing of individual "discoveries", even though the system had been visited, and even developed, by any number of someone elses and not appearing on "your" map requires some head-scratching.

 

[Drelthar]

The whole thing of individual "discoveries", even though the system had been visited, and even developed, by any number of someone elses and not appearing on "your" map requires some head-scratching.

It's updating the information universal cartographics have, not giving them new information - in those cases.
I feel like truly new discoveries should have a larger rewards in comparison to these "updates" but - I guess gameplay or something.

That's how I deal with it.

 

[Hyper Recursive]

My strategy would be to ask for this thread to be moved to the exploration forum where you'll probably get more useful replies.

I'd like to! Is anyone able to do that?

 

[Sapyx]

I'd like to! Is anyone able to do that?

If ever you find a thread, either one of your own or someone else's, that you think ought to be moved to a different subforum, just click the little "Report" link at the bottom of one of the posts in that thread, and put in the "Reason for report" box that you think the thread should be moved.

I've just done this in your post, so you shouldn't have to do this to to this thread now. The mod team will move it if they think it necessary.

 

[Sapyx]

I see they've moved it now.

As for my own answer to the thread title's question: I'm afraid it won't answer your more specific questions in the OP, since I choose not to aim for the "rare stars". Filling in the Codex checklists are very much a secondary goal for me.

The "how" of my exploration technique is sector surveying. Before I depart, I will plot out the location of the eight corners of the cubic sector I intend to survey. and bookmark the stars closest to the corners. This gives me a "survey grid" within which I will be operating. I will then fly out to the sector being surveyed, starting at one of the aforementioned corners. I will then set the star filter to B and L class stars, and pick a random spot on one of the opposite faces of the cube, and fly a transect across it. Repeat until the required number of stars of those two classes have been scanned, then switch to A class stars and repeat. Continue until M class stars are complete, then return to sell the data. My goal is to systematically survey 7000 stars this way; I am currently up to 6383.

As for "why" I do this, I am compiling statistics on the likelihood of finding certain planet types around the seven most common star types (BAFGKML). I normally use Fastest rather than Economic route plotting while flying transects, as I am interested in overall statistics for the sector and want to get a good random sample; staying too long in a certain subsector may give biased data as it seems likely from data gathered so far that certain subsectors are more "fruitful" than others.

Earth-likes are, of course, the primary motivation for the search, though I'm also interested in the other rare planet types. Finding one of the super-rare planet types, such as Glowing Green Giants, Helium Giants or Terraformable Metal-Rich worlds, is a worthy if almost-certainly-unattainable goal as well.

There is some advice we can give to optimize the finding of the most valuable planet types - for example, you want to stick to A and F stars for the best chance of finding Earth-likes, terraformables and Ammonia Worlds. But those super-rare planet types are simply scattered about at random, or at least there are so few of them found so far that we don't have a good enough sample size to offer meaningful statistical analysis.

 

[Rooster Podunk]

Mine is pretty simple. Plot a star, any star, 10k LY away, and then ignore that plot except for general direction. I fly star by star by picking something that might be promising along that general direction. No rhyme, no reason, no codex handwringing, just point, hit the gas, and go see what is 'over-that-a-way'. It might take me 10 ly from where I am, or 60. The rat race is for the bubble-dwellers.

 

[[PS4] Lorenzo Waringos]

I tend to make a plan and 3 jumps later completely change everything about it. Rinse and repeat. This is why I was pretty bad at passenger missions and why I could never offer my FC as a Bubble <-->Colonia ferry.

 

[LifesAJourney]

Mine is pretty simple. Plot a star, any star, 10k LY away, and then ignore that plot except for general direction. I fly star by star by picking something that might be promising along that general direction. No rhyme, no reason, no codex handwringing, just point, hit the gas, and go see what is 'over-that-a-way'. It might take me 10 ly from where I am, or 60. The rat race is for the bubble-dwellers.

This! I explore using the same tactics. I just filter out some star types since I prefer less common ones. The rarer the better, actually. It may be surprising, but it's quite a powerful searching mechanism. Eyeballing stars in the GalMap set to appropriate zoom level is quite efficient. It takes very short time to check surroundings in 200-250 Ly radius for interesting systems.

 

[WhoCares]

I pick a star ~500-1500ly away and hop along, usually with OBAF filter + rares (WD, N, S, BH, WR), in scarcely populated space I add G and sometimes also K. Every couple of jumps I then go to the galaxy map and check for rares in the current vincinity. Should I come across something interesting like an ELW, I might check further in the vincinty for systems of the same boxel+mass code (<sector> <boxel-ID> <mass code>xx-yy, like for my current system Nyeakoae PX-P c7-0, basically looking for other systems with a different last digit. The assumption is, that systems of the same boxel/mass code often generate similar systems. Sometimes it actually works, like on my current trip I twice found 3 ELWs in ~10 jumps with this method.
I also switch to realistic view and look for (super) giants or nebulae. Sometimes, when looking to fill the codex with the bigger ones (O, BH, WR) I might also search for systems named <sector> AA-A Hx.

And OP, good luck searching for (not yet discovered) DBZ white dwarfs, as these are among the rarest (procedually generated) bodies of the galaxy. EDSM seems to currently have a total of 256 of them listed.

 

[marx]

Guys, it's nice that you are sharing your general exploration strategies, but the OP asked for something different:

I am on my first exploration trip and was wondering how rare stars are explored and what is the best strategy to find specific undiscovered star.

For example, I am currently searching for DBZ type white dwarf. The questions that I have are:

1. How do I find a sector of the region of the galaxy where chances to find one are maximal?
2. When in such region, how do I search for the target?

Having looked for specific white dwarf types while looking for molluscs in the Ovomly sector myself, unfortunately I haven't really found whether there's more to it than random chance. Judging by your two edits, it seems that you already know all there is to it.

However... Why DBZ specifically? Looking through the EDSM data dumps, it would seem they are very rare: 253 DBZ out of 203,853 total WDs. Thankfully, all but one of them are from entirely proc. gen. systems,

 

[iain666]

Guys, it's nice that you are sharing your general exploration strategies, but the OP asked for something different:

And that's why you should make the title match what's in the post, if you make the title a question people are going to just answer that without looking at other or supplementary questions in the body...

My strategy is to draw shapes on the map in EDDiscovery, there are things I'm on the look out for but I never filter my routes or actively go looking for specific things - just fly around and see what I find. So I'm no help on finding things that aren't obvious or searchable on the galmap or already in EDSM.

 

[Jackie Silver]

1) plot route to destination on the Galmap
2) replot route to destination by going well above the plane and neutron jumping, saving 100 jumps
3) queue up the hours long super gay music mix playlist I'm putting together
4) jump, jump, (...) jump
5) scan one system and turn around

 

[GroG79]

Use the galmap to see the types of stars in a system. I have found quite a lot of dbz; people are just not interested in them I guess. WDs are deadly and loads of people have... lets say negative experiences with them

Elite:Dangerous

Elite:Dangerous

nosuchwebpage.com

 

[Drelthar]

 

[Rudi Raumkraut]

My strategy is to draw shapes on the map in EDDiscovery

ah! you are the one doing this naughty stuff

 

[Hyper Recursive]

Guys, it's nice that you are sharing your general exploration strategies, but the OP asked for something different:


Having looked for specific white dwarf types while looking for molluscs in the Ovomly sector myself, unfortunately I haven't really found whether there's more to it than random chance. Judging by your two edits, it seems that you already know all there is to it.

However... Why DBZ specifically? Looking through the EDSM data dumps, it would seem they are very rare: 253 DBZ out of 203,853 total WDs. Thankfully, all but one of them are from entirely proc. gen. systems,

DBZ was the one I'm missing, found all other types in the sector. And they indeed seem to be quite rare. However, GroG79 might have a point.

Thank you for all the advice in the thread. I've learned a lot, looking forward to learning even more.