Nope, it's exploring. We are given a rough idea where to find stuff, then we need to explore the planet to pinpoint it.
Personally, I find it far superior and much more fun then what we had, which was given to us on a plate.
What the heck kind of heat map is this?!
- Thread starter insane golgotha
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Personally, I find it far superior and much more fun then what we had, which was given to us on a plate.
Instead of another key bind I think it should fade off like the pulse wave does on asteroids
Having been on several expeditions in real life, yeah it's generally how things go down. You have a vague idea of where a species is, and you wander around until you stumble on it.
My issue with heatmaps is they generally just cover the entire planet, a few mountains exluded.
And I do find that kind of insane to expect players to explore the entirety of a planet to find stuff. Planets, as you can well expect, are bloody massive. I don't have time to travel an entire planet surface all the way around.
And I do find that kind of insane to expect players to explore the entirety of a planet to find stuff. Planets, as you can well expect, are bloody massive. I don't have time to travel an entire planet surface all the way around.
The Alpha heatmap was color-coded by population density, so you could identify the areas of the planet where you would almost certainly find what you were looking for. Unfortunately, it wasn’t working consistently since the new planet tech wasn’t fully integrated. And they would have also needed to do something for people with color blindness. Had they sorted all of that out, it would have been brilliant.
Instead, they removed it in favor of what we have now; allegedly because a lot of people complained about it being confusing. (I’d love a source for that, if anyone has it).
You can see them all, but the smaller ones can be hard to spot if you don't know what you are looking for, flying to fast or to high. Obviously you aren't to high, keep speed between 50 and 100, fly a ship that allows you to look down and left/right because sometimes they take a few moments to pop in and if you are just looking directly ahead you will probably miss them. I do all my bacteria hunting from the ship flying around 7-10mtrs up at around 40-50mps, typically I have 3 samples in a couple if minutes.
That's with my setup though with settings on Ultra, I can't say the same for anyone else's card or settings of course so you will need to check your own experience.
That's because what you are looking for covers the entire planet, I haven't had an issue once where I have landed and not been able to find what I was looking for in a couple of minutes, but you need to leverage your knowledge of plants and habitats, for instance Concha like to populate the bottoms of ravines, so if you land in a flat spot to look around for them you are probably not going to find them, land next to a ravine and walk down. Tubus like flat desert so if you come down among rocky ridges surrounded by desert you may not find them until you move to the desert.
My above example of the vulcanism was the bottom of a large sandy crater with criss crossing rocky valleys, in the desert there was nothing, you could drive all day across it and not find vulcanism even though the entire crater bottom was blue, flew to a rocky valley and found it immediately. Another time I was scanning Tubus and Ossius in a desert, there were supposed to be bushes around as well but I saw none at all until I checked the top of one of the rocky ridges that crossed the desert because I knew this species liked high rocky places.
So with experience you know if you drop into a desert crossed by rocky ridges and valleys this species will be on the flat desert, that one will be on the rocky ridges, this other one will be in the ravines and valleys, but they will all be there.
I like the system because it leverages player knowledge and experience, people who like arrows pointing to stuff? Well there's actually a lot of them around but I can't help them, I can only do what I do!
Try to find brain trees. Sometimes you can immediately. Sometimes it is 30 minutes. Total rubbish system. Prove me wrong for finding brain trees - please!
Posted this on another thread but fits here as well :
I thought the MK I eyeballing stuff would be a fun killer for me.
Turns out I really like skimming and boosting through valleys in my ship. It also turns out that I love using my SRV. In Horizons I landed next to where I need to be, picked up stuff, got in my ship and left. Yesterday was the first time my SRV actually started to run out of fuel.
I do wish the heatmap was a bit more heatmappy and a little less "Oi it's somewhere over there mate".
I thought the MK I eyeballing stuff would be a fun killer for me.
Turns out I really like skimming and boosting through valleys in my ship. It also turns out that I love using my SRV. In Horizons I landed next to where I need to be, picked up stuff, got in my ship and left. Yesterday was the first time my SRV actually started to run out of fuel.
I do wish the heatmap was a bit more heatmappy and a little less "Oi it's somewhere over there mate".
I have already have, dropped down, got in SRV, there they were right in front of me. Next time, dropped down, couldn't land because the things were all over the ground under my ship. Any other requests?
That's about the only complaint I would have about the current system of finding bio and geo. My thoughts in finding the exact same bio galaxy wide, well I've posted them elsewhere already!
Yeah... going back to flying on sight and mapping with pen and paper in 3307... makes totally sense!
A "heatmap" that simply turns the entire planet blue is absolutely useless. You can skip this step and might as well go on foot in the first place. Ridiculous! DSS is superfluid now.
I don't get why they're not simply changing to different colours for each type of hotspots. Also flying to orbit just to get an overview is simply annoying and stupid.
Edit: Oh and to clarify... I really like the idea of the heatmap. It is just the poor and near useless implementation that drives me mad. I really hope, they will improve things (a lot).
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The idea of "looking for things" is an improvement for me. Having a POI for anything wasn't really deep gameplay imho.
BUT:
BUT:
- The need to switch to a combat mode during exploration is dumb. The ships should have Analysis Mode and Normal Flight Mode. Combat mode is actually an undeveloped feature because it shows nothing specific to combat, it's not even highlighting ISS's with Highest Threat or Wanted Ships. It is just a regular mode with all the typical information. If FDEV wants to have a Combat mode they should first develop something specific for it, like they did with Analysis. So once this is done we would have 3 modes: "Analysis, Normal Flight, Combat".
- The color choice for the heatmap is not intuitive and there's no legend. FDEV should choose the colors more wisely (in the current state it seems that they tease ELW instead) with specific palettes for biological and geological, and then provide a legend on the side of the screen that explains what color is the highest concentration.
Not knowing that you can browse through several heat maps is the most likely reason for the OP's disappointment. It took me a while to realize I can actually change the map with A and D.
Oh, I know that and it is still useless for the reasons I mentioned above. Also, you can switch through blue, blue and blue... Thank you for the hint, though.
Ah, ok, sorry. It sure was an issue for me, always looking at blue marbles and swearing about the heatmap. Until I noticed.
The planet filter should come with ALL and NONE as standard so we don't have to switch to combat mode. I would not even call them heat maps, they are height maps.
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So you would prefer a map that didn't actually show where the plants are you are looking for, just a couple of little tiny spot where you can find them and ignore the rest of them all over the planet? How is that even a map? You know that's just a request to have the old POI system back right? You know that thing we just got away from, that completely unrealistic idea that on an entire planet millions of square kilometers in area there will be just one patch of grass? So an arrow if you will, pointing directly at what you are after so you can just fly there and do nothing else.
It’s not 3307 you know, it’s 2021…
It’s a game, almost everything about it is unrealistic. Flying our own ships, seriously? The moon landing didn’t even have a fully manual flight system.
Exo has an entire Elite rank dedicated to it, learning where certain species like to hand out is the skill associated with it.
The technological progress seems weird in ED. "Last year" the scanner could point you to, say, geysers. "This year" the "new and improved" scanner can't. I'm fully aware that this is a game, and that some of it is not 100% accurate, like the G-forces you are exposed to when accelerating in SC would instantly kill you. On the other hand, I find it ruins my "immersion" when the SCA (the 3307 version of cruise control) demands that you open a window and search through menus, just to enable it, even if you have already selected your destination. That seems like something added to the game just to keep players busy (I wonder why).
Furthermore, if you follow the line of thought, that this is just a game, made to entertain, you could ask: Is the best entertainment flying over the surface of a planet for hours without finding what you're looking for? Couldn't it have been designed better? I recently wanted to find strong geysers to try and use them to get into orbit on foot. I searched several planets for days, planets that according to the system mad had those, but found none. Then one morning, after giving up the day before, and leaving my ship on a planet surface, when returning to the game, the ship was surrounded by geysers. Finding those is "gameplay" I guess, but the entertainment I was looking for were running into geysers.
I wouldn't mind if the game was much more realistic. Superluminal travel speed seems to break the laws of physics, but it's actually possible. The problem is that accelerating to the speed of light demands infinite energy, but I would find it perfectly reasonable that between now and 3307, someone found a way to bend (not break) physics. Before the Wright Brothers, it was obvious that a machine with a higher density than air would never fly.
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