When are the planets for any given system created?

[DanielKT]

I'm mind-numbingly still jumping towards Colonia and I was wondering a couple things. Actually has taken long enough to get there that I forgot why I'm going there lol

What is the contents of a star system and it's planets first created? Upon the first arrival of the first player to the system?

Is there a database somewhere with the Devs that lists stuff like "the fastest orbit in the galaxy" or "the highest mountain" ect?
It would, I think, be interesting to know some of bits of trivia like that without knowing the location so players can look for it.

 

[Sapyx]

It's not a gigantic database, and it's not "generated when you arrive". They are procedurally generated.

It's kind of like the billionth digit of pi. The digits of pi might "look random", but they're not - they're procedurally generated. You "generate" that billionth digit by running an algorithm that calculates the digits of pi. But you didn't create that billionth digit when you ran the algorithm, it was "always there", baked into the universe itself by the laws of the universe since before the creation of the universe, it just needed someone to run the algorithm in order for you to see it.

So it is with ED's procedurally generated star systems. They are made by a super-fancy version of that digits-of-pi-calculating algorithm. Each star system is generated with a unique ID number, and when the game wants to find out what planets, moons etc are in that system, it simply runs the planetary system generator algorithm for that number. If I'm playing the game and enter that same star system, the same algorithms are on my computer too, so it can generate that exact same star system, without having to download the details of what you just discovered from a database.

It's the only way to create a 400 billion star galaxy without either having to create a 400 billion entry database, or have it such that star systems generate randomly each time (which would be inconvenient for explorers, and players generally, if star systems always looked completely different each time you visited them).

This does mean that the devs have absolutely no clue as to what is still hidden in their own galaxy. They can't tell you exactly how many Earth-like planets there are, for example - because it's entirely dependent on the algorithm, not on a database they can search. You can search a database, but you can't search an algorithm's output without sitting down and running the algorithm 400 billion times. Which would take time; you've seen how long the hyperspace loading screen takes every time you jump? Part of that is running the system-generating algorithm for the system you're about to arrive in, so it knows where to put stars, planets etc. Much of that time is actually taken up with skybox generation, so it doesn't really need the entire 30 second jump sequence to generate the planets and moons. But even if it took just a tenth of a second each time to run the algorithm then run an automated check to examine the resultant star system for whatever it is you want to search for, 400 billion tenths-of-a-second would take 1268 years.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Is there a database somewhere with the Devs that lists stuff like "the fastest orbit in the galaxy" or "the highest mountain" ect?

For fastest orbit

• Mitterand Hollow orbits at an average speed that nothing procedurally generated can or should match
• the World of Death at periapsis is also incredibly fast (though far slower in the rest of its orbit) while being at least temporarily gravitationally plausible. There's a few other similar worlds but I think they're a fair bit slower.

Highest mountain is very hard to measure as switching between "height above ground" and "height above baseline surface level" (itself a bit arbitrary on planets without oceans) requires some careful flying. There are probably numerous candidates depending on exactly how you define it.

 

[Esteban]

I recommend a visit to Miterrand Hollow. I happened upon the system by coincidence the first time, realizing that I had arrived in "that famous system" after scratching my head about why the name was familiar.

I won't spoil the fun. I'll just say that it took me a few minutes to form a strategy for "catching up" to the fast-moving planet and making a landing. What fun!

Happy travels!

 

[Sapyx]

Just be aware that Mitterand Hollow is a "bug". It's in a hand-coded system, and when they transposed the moon's statistics from the prequel FE2 game to ED, they forgot to change the units. FE2's unit of measurement was "AU", ED uses Ls, and there are about 500 Ls to the AU. So they accidentally programmed the moon to fly 500 times closer to the planet than it "ought" to have been. This would have put the moon "orbiting" deep beneath the planet's surface, so the game disallows that and places the moon orbiting at the Roche limit instead. So the orbital distance is "normal-looking", but the orbital radial velocity is still the same as if it were orbiting a few hundred km away from a tiny Earth-mass black hole. It's a "bug", but a bug that's been defined as "cute" rather than "game-breaking", so it hasn't been fixed. But it does mean that, unless you actually do find a planet that's orbiting a few hundred km from a black hole/neutron star/white dwarf, you won't find any other planet moving as fast. And the star system generator makes it excessively difficult, if not impossible, to place a procedurally-generated planet that close to a black hole. At least, we've searched tens of thousands of black hole systems and we've never found one. The closest you can get is a close planet in a highly eccentric "cometary" orbit, like the World of Death.

And just a note on this, in respect to my earlier comment about there being "no database" for star system contents. There is, of course, a database involving all the hand-coded stars - it contains about 100,000 star systems, according to ED. Essentially, any star system that does not have an algorithm-generated system name (such as Proo Pha AX-B c1-1503) is hand-coded. The star-system-generating algorithm is designed to take into account these hand-coded systems, and is supposed to not generate too many additional systems in their vicinity. The main goal was, always, to make the night sky as seen from Sol look exactly the same as the night sky you'd see by getting up from your computer and walking outside at night, and it wouldn't have been possible if the algorithm generated a red giant just a few LYs from Sol.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

What is the contents of a star system and it's planets first created? Upon the first arrival of the first player to the system?

Technically it has to generate some of the contents of the system when it displays the system on the galaxy map to get all the info about what types of stars are present.

There's no database, except for what's visited and has been FSS'd to show up as unexplored on just a discovery scan for other players.

There's also some sort of database/cache for stuff in an area near Sol where route plotting is faster.

Is there a database somewhere with the Devs that lists stuff like "the fastest orbit in the galaxy" or "the highest mountain" ect?

Probably not since generating and storing 400b systems with trillions of planets would be too resource intensive without a good reason, but https://edastro.com/records/ is worth a look for the explored bits - systems for some records can be interesting because the conditions that create them will be on the extreme end.

The Devs probably know what the exact fixed limits for those things are and with that many systems/planets it's very likely those exist somewhere.

 

[Sapyx]

Technically it has to generate some of the contents of the system when it displays the system on the galaxy map to get all the info about what types of stars are present.

There are two different but connected procedural-generation algorithms at work here. The first is the star generation algorithm, which designs the galaxy as a whole and plots the XYZ location of every star system, and generates some basic facts about the system such as the mass and age of that star system. The primary star's star type is calculated from the mass and age. Then there's the system generation algorithm, which only activates when you visit the system (or when you fire up the system map for that system when you're someplace else). It takes that basic star data generated by the first algorithm (age and mass), and extrapolates an entire star system's worth of secondary stars, planets and moons from that data.