The developers of Elite Dangerous should really investigate Star Control 2. Elite's galaxy is devoid of alien life. Even Elite Plus had alien races (though you didn't interact with them outside of trading). If the Milky Way is that barren, then the Universe is a very gray place indeed! Instead of fighting over ship interiors (which I'd like to have), people should crave a more vibrant universe with Aliens to discover and interact with. Star control 2, a game with just a few Megabytes did it awesomely, back in 1992.
Great tip about checking the codex for the required distances for biological diversity. Very helpful video for those of us who've just picked up Odyssey.
They've turned this into a "find a needle in a haystack" thing. Biologicals are fairly easy as they tend to be all over the place. I've been on planets reporting 3 geologicals and in a hour of driving around, only ever found ocassional, single rock. Nothing else. I've actually taken to launching in Horizons to do surface mining for materials.
While I like the idea of it being a little more of a search and not finding super concentrated amounts of stuff, I used to like the hotspots - they made for good screenshots and had a nice ambiance. Also farming raw mats were one of the few things that wasn't a total grind, it was relaxing and gameplay oriented even if you did re-log and you could fill up relatively easily, no wonder they got rid of it 😕
Exploration used to be lots of fun. You could quite easily explore 10-15 planets in an hour or two. But now it's boring and tedious with only 50/50 chance of finding anything in a reasonable timeframe. Thanks for the video though, I learnt a couple of things!
No worries, glad the vid helped :) I like it's easier to explore planets now,. quick FSS scans shows what's there and if nothing interesting, whoosh off you go :)
You might be doing something wrong then. It's far quicker to explore planets than it was when I started playing years ago. You used to basically have to land on each one to know if it had anything worth exploring. Also there are regions of space in the game filled with star types that typically don't support suitable planets. When I was a newbie I'd find myself unknowingly finding myself in the middle of one of those regions wondering where all of that planets were. Then I started noticing the types of stars I was coming across in those regions.... used a little real world science knowledge and figured out why lol.
@@captainnebulous2918 Perhaps you know something I don't. Exploring planets used to be a DSS, target one of the Geo or Bio signals, landing on the planet near the signal source, then doing a Composition scan of the source. Now, you can't target the signal source, instead you get a "heat map" of the regions where sources are then land and go looking for 3 samples of it.
Thanks for this excellent video. First time out in the depths to explore for biological and not sure what to do. Have watched some other videos by 'pros', but you came up trumps. Cheers. o7 CMDR.
Although I hate the way they've made it more difficult to find geologicals, I must admit I'm enjoying logging the Biologicals in an 'Old Man Fishing' type of way. I differ slightly because I drop the SRV and search for new plants with that. I've found that the planets which have biologicals on them generate the most breath-taking views in the game, which is always a pleasant distraction.
@@Fireytoad oh, I agree with adding the bios to the srv scanner. Mind you, I'm having trouble finding the guardian sites in Odyssey now. I hate it they took them out.
Very helpful video I enjoy messing around with exploration and checking stuff out. Haven't tried this yet hoping it will be a little fun check out. Only being able to scan one at a time might annoy me quite a bit. At least let ya do 2 come one. Subscribed
Bloody huge step backwards. There was nothing wrong with being able to select the area of geological's you wanted to go to. Now with this it's garbage, the biologicals should be a totally different colour, I just can't even make out the differences now on the heat map! FML.
Thank you for this. Finding biologicals is painful but this is how I do it too. It would be so much easier if we could swap the canisters in the scanner so we can scan different things in a single location, a bit like reloading really. I'm on a long excursion do I aim to collect as much as I can within reason. If a location becomes a ball-breaker to find anything then I just bug out. Frustrating too that you can only use the DSS when in supercruise so if you want to switch between different filters you have to take off, go to SC, DSS, change filter blah, blah, blah. Should be able to filter out from one of the internal panels. Oh well, onwards and upwards. Cheers CMDR o7
Thanks muchly for this no nonsense video. found my first biological using this guide {an Electricae Pluma n less lol) As you say its a bit meh to do this regularly unless you are a completionist, but still, another aspect to the game!
you are an Absolute star, thank you. Altohugh i do have an issue not sure if you have ran across it, on the DSS the cental point move where it did not before, this shaped bar 0-------!!, so now i can not place probes right, i am in VR and using Joystick but it never did that before last coppule of patches ?
thanks for the video on this, I mainly explored in Horizons and have been wondering about this new mechanic... looks boring as hell to me so I don't think I will be getting an Elite rank in this one.
Used to love exploration, haven’t found but a few new organics since odyssey. (Lots of first foot falls trying) it’s very tedious and slow going. Miss the signal source way of doing things. Odyssey has just been one big disappointment for me.
I like it and hate it at the same time. I like it because it's no longer an arbitrary process like just finding signal sources. But I hate it because it's still only a point and click feature. Would be nice if there was something that actually required brain cells that we had to do. And no, I don't mean a stupid mini-game LOL
Ok … I’m a return player and I’m way out in the black . It has been a few years since i played so I have had to relearn EVERYTHING. oh man… I am about 350 jumps from the bubble. I do not have that scanner you have. I destroyed my SRV. So asp explorer and on foot and I want to work my way back to the bubble to upgrade my exploration rig. Just having a hard time. Can I still find and log biologicals without that Artimus thingy?
You need to edit a config file, open settings.xml in the following location: %LocalAppData%\Local\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous\Options\Graphics\settings.xml and change the number between xx - My FoV is 85
@@Fireytoad Wow. 4,500+ hours into this game and this is first time I've come across this edit. It makes the Asp Explorer a wonderful choice over the Anaconda for the next journey into the black. Many thanks for this awesome tip Sir👍
@@Fireytoad Thanks buddy. I'll take a look at that as a potential build. The Phantom is my firm favorite anti Xeno ship. so a long distance version sounds very nice ✌
Still not really sure how you find the sites short of just getting lucky though. I spent 6 hours farming mats yesterday and didnt see a single geological site. I spent about an hour on each planet I visited doing a mix of SRV driving and low flybys, and never once did I encounter a geological hotspot even though the planets were completely covered in blue. Every time I would spend 15m searching and turning up nothing, I would return to orbit and try a new location. I don't understand how this isn't just guess and check. Pure RNG. And when I do find hotspots, they never ever have g4 materials. Always just piceous cobble and the occasionally crystalline shards or clusters--never needle crystals. It took me 4 full days of grinding (8-12 hrs a day) to find a single source for a g4 mat I was looking for even though I was only searching planets that allegedly had it in relatively high percentages.
Geological's will show on the SRV wave scanner, so you can use that to locate them., This may help too www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/vta5jz/polonium_tellurium_antimony_and_yttrium/
@@Fireytoad Well yeah, but it has pretty limited range. Most times I land on the planet, I get no hits on my wave scanner, and if I do, it's just some random outcrops. I never find places that have actual geological activity, and if I do, it's never grade 4. Just not sure how to do this short of getting extremely lucky.
Composition scanner ahhhh my man ty ty I'm sitting at a geo site w no srv cuz of weight and jump distance and I'm like wtf I can't do nothing w these sites lol
Frontier attempts challenge "try not to make an actually good feature of your game absolutely awful for no good reason" Difficulty: impossible Seriously, the geological sites were FINE in Horizons why did they RUIN IT?!
Absolute bollocks...All this trouble for a bit of cheap materiał? Lol...was Good The way IT was B4. Easy located and farmed. Good thing you can get em by laser mining top. Cant be bothered with these mechanics. Thanx for The vid though.
@@moontrooper2587 currently doing that right now. Trying to get to the top of a crater for an awesome sunset. The star will begin to set as 2 gas giant cross in front. Will be epic.
@@timesthree5757 Yeah, but that’s exploring. For people who’re looking to grab some materials for either synthesis or engineering, it’s a painful slog. I just spent 2 hours getting out to Outotz LS-K d8-3 to get myself some yttrium, only to have to fly around the planet looking for various _individual_ crystalline shards which cannot be scanned. After 3 hours, I was finally able to get 2 sulfur, because most of the shards either spawned in the ground, or were indestructible. There’s no way of telling what you’d get, and considering that there’s only 1 randomized fragment per square kilometer, I don’t think I’m getting 150 anytime soon. Also, the draw distance for the surface features is so low that for some ships you literally have to drag your nose across the ground for anything to render.
I'm so confused and in a way sad as to why they made it unprofitable. A whole expansion and not a single activity that allows you to profit. Just time and grind sinks.
What a load of rubbish this is compared to what we had before.... i don't mind a heat map. But this implementation looks like it's done with some AliExpress thermal camera with 2 pixel resolution.... Screw this, ill just go back to horizons 3.8 when i need some mats.
@@Fireytoad Yes, i heard it was a heat map to begin with and they changed it because people couldn't understand it.... Nothing wrong with your explaining or video i just don't like the way they changed the game and i was getting frustrated yesterday trying to get some mats. (I haven't played in a while). If it showed the biological locations as hot spots like a mining map or even wave like scanner in the ship and you have to fly at a certain alt to use would have been better than "blue bits + mk 1 eyeball".
Best Tutorial I have seen so far. In fact the only one worthy of the name. Even Down to Earth Astronomy didn't really do a good one.
Wow, thank you, that's most kind of you to say :) Are there any other tutorials you'd like to see?
Wow, thanks! That is hands down the most comprehensive explanation of Odyssey´s exploration mechanics I´ve seen so far. Great!
You're welcome, glad it was of help :)
The developers of Elite Dangerous should really investigate Star Control 2. Elite's galaxy is devoid of alien life. Even Elite Plus had alien races (though you didn't interact with them outside of trading). If the Milky Way is that barren, then the Universe is a very gray place indeed! Instead of fighting over ship interiors (which I'd like to have), people should crave a more vibrant universe with Aliens to discover and interact with. Star control 2, a game with just a few Megabytes did it awesomely, back in 1992.
Well there are two alien races, even though one is extinct
Too much alien life would be unrealistic. I prefer realism, being that life is likely going to be rare.
Great tip about checking the codex for the required distances for biological diversity.
Very helpful video for those of us who've just picked up Odyssey.
After a while, you'll start remembering some of them and thanks:)
They've turned this into a "find a needle in a haystack" thing. Biologicals are fairly easy as they tend to be all over the place. I've been on planets reporting 3 geologicals and in a hour of driving around, only ever found ocassional, single rock. Nothing else. I've actually taken to launching in Horizons to do surface mining for materials.
I've found with the bio's it's hit or miss. But yeah the geo's are a pain, least you can use the SRV scanner to find them tho.
Great tutorial. Being a convert from console this was of great help. Thank You
Thanks, glad it was helpful :)
While I like the idea of it being a little more of a search and not finding super concentrated amounts of stuff, I used to like the hotspots - they made for good screenshots and had a nice ambiance. Also farming raw mats were one of the few things that wasn't a total grind, it was relaxing and gameplay oriented even if you did re-log and you could fill up relatively easily, no wonder they got rid of it 😕
Exploration used to be lots of fun. You could quite easily explore 10-15 planets in an hour or two. But now it's boring and tedious with only 50/50 chance of finding anything in a reasonable timeframe. Thanks for the video though, I learnt a couple of things!
No worries, glad the vid helped :) I like it's easier to explore planets now,. quick FSS scans shows what's there and if nothing interesting, whoosh off you go :)
You might be doing something wrong then. It's far quicker to explore planets than it was when I started playing years ago. You used to basically have to land on each one to know if it had anything worth exploring.
Also there are regions of space in the game filled with star types that typically don't support suitable planets. When I was a newbie I'd find myself unknowingly finding myself in the middle of one of those regions wondering where all of that planets were. Then I started noticing the types of stars I was coming across in those regions.... used a little real world science knowledge and figured out why lol.
This actually looks fun to me.
@@captainnebulous2918 Perhaps you know something I don't. Exploring planets used to be a DSS, target one of the Geo or Bio signals, landing on the planet near the signal source, then doing a Composition scan of the source. Now, you can't target the signal source, instead you get a "heat map" of the regions where sources are then land and go looking for 3 samples of it.
@@timesthree5757 it is kinda fun because you feel like you're actually making discoveries of alien life forms, but time consuming at the same time.
Great video :)
It's shame that we can have only one sample at the time
Yeah, it's a shame. If they'd allowed the suit tool to be upgraded by engineering, that would have helped.
Nice video and also nice HUD-colors 😁
Thanks :)
@@Fireytoad would you share the HUD- colors?
@@madelk-snpx Sure, My hud colours are arkku.com/elite/hud_editor/#theme_0_0.75_2_-0.56_0.77_-2_2_1_1
@@Fireytoad Thank you very much!
Bravo! 👏👏👏 Codex , scanner use, and switch to combat mode to change map view! 🙌🙌 Changed my game play immensely, can't thank you enough!
You're very welcome :)
Thanks for this excellent video. First time out in the depths to explore for biological and not sure what to do. Have watched some other videos by 'pros', but you came up trumps. Cheers. o7 CMDR.
No worries, good to know it was useful :)
Check for Geological Sites on rough ground, along ridges and bottoms of hills/mountains within the heatmap not on flat open areas
Yeah, some can be there, I've also found them on flatter ground. Depends which type they are. Handy tip tho :)
Although I hate the way they've made it more difficult to find geologicals, I must admit I'm enjoying logging the Biologicals in an 'Old Man Fishing' type of way. I differ slightly because I drop the SRV and search for new plants with that. I've found that the planets which have biologicals on them generate the most breath-taking views in the game, which is always a pleasant distraction.
The views are great. Just wish the bio's would show up on a scanner, everything else does.
@@Fireytoad oh, I agree with adding the bios to the srv scanner. Mind you, I'm having trouble finding the guardian sites in Odyssey now. I hate it they took them out.
Very helpful video I enjoy messing around with exploration and checking stuff out. Haven't tried this yet hoping it will be a little fun check out. Only being able to scan one at a time might annoy me quite a bit. At least let ya
do 2 come one.
Subscribed
Thanks, glad it was helpful :) Yeah, hopefully it'll change, would be great if we could engineer the suit tools.
Bloody huge step backwards. There was nothing wrong with being able to select the area of geological's you wanted to go to. Now with this it's garbage, the biologicals should be a totally different colour, I just can't even make out the differences now on the heat map! FML.
Yeah I know, it's a PITA now. Just hit or miss if you find anything.
Not a huge step backwards but I agree with the color thing.
Thank you for this. Finding biologicals is painful but this is how I do it too. It would be so much easier if we could swap the canisters in the scanner so we can scan different things in a single location, a bit like reloading really. I'm on a long excursion do I aim to collect as much as I can within reason. If a location becomes a ball-breaker to find anything then I just bug out. Frustrating too that you can only use the DSS when in supercruise so if you want to switch between different filters you have to take off, go to SC, DSS, change filter blah, blah, blah. Should be able to filter out from one of the internal panels. Oh well, onwards and upwards. Cheers CMDR o7
You're welcome :) IKR, let us engineer the suit tools as well.
Your video helped a lot thank you by the way what ship is that I don't recognize the view or console
Thanks. It's and Asp x,I changed the FOV to 85 as well as the hud colours.
thumbs up because you actually have a mic
Thanks lol.
Thanks muchly for this no nonsense video. found my first biological using this guide {an Electricae Pluma n less lol) As you say its a bit meh to do this regularly unless you are a completionist, but still, another aspect to the game!
No worries, glad it was of help :)
It would be nice if the heatmap stayed unless you were below a certain altitude
Indeed it would
Well you could still use the rover to move around looking for biological and dismissthe ship, is more practical and you can disembark from it as well.
You can do and I do, however for the larger colony ranges, it's quicker to fly :)
you are an Absolute star, thank you. Altohugh i do have an issue not sure if you have ran across it, on the DSS the cental point move where it did not before, this shaped bar 0-------!!, so now i can not place probes right, i am in VR and using Joystick but it never did that before last coppule of patches ?
You're very welcome. I've not noticed it myself, but I'm not playing in VR. Might be a VR thing?
@@Fireytoad it did not happen before odyessy and just after its release.
Last few patch is when it started
Very informative thank you
Glad it helped :)
So that heat map is supposed to be blue for the things you want and the white parts are just empty?
Pretty much, some species do prefer certain types of terrain however.
thanks for the video on this, I mainly explored in Horizons and have been wondering about this new mechanic... looks boring as hell to me so I don't think I will be getting an Elite rank in this one.
You're welcome. Yeah it ain't everyone's cup of tea for sure.
Used to love exploration, haven’t found but a few new organics since odyssey. (Lots of first foot falls trying) it’s very tedious and slow going. Miss the signal source way of doing things. Odyssey has just been one big disappointment for me.
@@silentjay3272 Hopefully they'll listen to feedback and things will improve :)
I like it and hate it at the same time. I like it because it's no longer an arbitrary process like just finding signal sources. But I hate it because it's still only a point and click feature. Would be nice if there was something that actually required brain cells that we had to do. And no, I don't mean a stupid mini-game LOL
This actually looks cool. I think I'll go exploring. Looks fun.
Ok … I’m a return player and I’m way out in the black . It has been a few years since i played so I have had to relearn EVERYTHING. oh man… I am about 350 jumps from the bubble. I do not have that scanner you have. I destroyed my SRV. So asp explorer and on foot and I want to work my way back to the bubble to upgrade my exploration rig. Just having a hard time. Can I still find and log biologicals without that Artimus thingy?
Welcome back, sadly no. You need a Detailed surface scanner to map the bodies and the Artemis suit to scan the exobios
(Sigh) ok I will jump scoop FSS back to the bubble as fast as I can then. Thanks for your help
@@cafespy6906 Welcome, and have safe jumping :)
ED Copilot is quite useful for playing Elite Dangerous in all aspects. IMHO.
I have a problem, I can completely scan the planet but it won’t mapp it or show the bluish zones
Two stupid questions, 1) Are you in Odyssey? 2) Does the planet have biological's on it?
@@Fireytoad 1 Yes I am in odessy and 2 I just realized by myself that the planet I scanned, hadn’t any biological data, but thanks for answering
Do you have anything special that is giving you such a high FOV? It looks higher than the max. I want it :)
You need to edit a config file, open settings.xml in the following location: %LocalAppData%\Local\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous\Options\Graphics\settings.xml and change the number between xx - My FoV is 85
@@Fireytoad nice thanks!
@@Fireytoad Wow. 4,500+ hours into this game and this is first time I've come across this edit. It makes the Asp Explorer a wonderful choice over the Anaconda for the next journey into the black. Many thanks for this awesome tip Sir👍
@@cmdrablearry3815 No worries, I've swapped to a Krait phantom now as I can fit a hull repair limpet:)
@@Fireytoad Thanks buddy. I'll take a look at that as a potential build. The Phantom is my firm favorite anti Xeno ship. so a long distance version sounds very nice ✌
Still not really sure how you find the sites short of just getting lucky though. I spent 6 hours farming mats yesterday and didnt see a single geological site. I spent about an hour on each planet I visited doing a mix of SRV driving and low flybys, and never once did I encounter a geological hotspot even though the planets were completely covered in blue. Every time I would spend 15m searching and turning up nothing, I would return to orbit and try a new location. I don't understand how this isn't just guess and check. Pure RNG. And when I do find hotspots, they never ever have g4 materials. Always just piceous cobble and the occasionally crystalline shards or clusters--never needle crystals. It took me 4 full days of grinding (8-12 hrs a day) to find a single source for a g4 mat I was looking for even though I was only searching planets that allegedly had it in relatively high percentages.
Geological's will show on the SRV wave scanner, so you can use that to locate them., This may help too www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/vta5jz/polonium_tellurium_antimony_and_yttrium/
@@Fireytoad Well yeah, but it has pretty limited range. Most times I land on the planet, I get no hits on my wave scanner, and if I do, it's just some random outcrops. I never find places that have actual geological activity, and if I do, it's never grade 4. Just not sure how to do this short of getting extremely lucky.
@@ADeadlierSnake Unfortunately, luck is all we have :( With bio's you just have your eyeballs, which makes it even harder in some cases.
Well done sir. Much obliged. 07
You're most welcome.
Composition scanner ahhhh my man ty ty I'm sitting at a geo site w no srv cuz of weight and jump distance and I'm like wtf I can't do nothing w these sites lol
No worries, hoe it helps :)
The system That I have found is "BINGAIT " and it's Loaded..I meant LOADED with Biological and Geological Things..!!
Don't play the game to make credits but enjoy myself.
so it's the blue you aim for :-) thanks much for this, i was going insane.
No worries, it's a bit confusing to begin with ;) Light blue = flatter ground.
Frontier attempts challenge "try not to make an actually good feature of your game absolutely awful for no good reason" Difficulty: impossible
Seriously, the geological sites were FINE in Horizons why did they RUIN IT?!
Absolute bollocks...All this trouble for a bit of cheap materiał? Lol...was Good The way IT was B4. Easy located and farmed. Good thing you can get em by laser mining top. Cant be bothered with these mechanics. Thanx for The vid though.
Yeah, not my cup of tea either. Hopefully it'll get better over time. No worries :)
I love this. Looks fun. Not interested in farming just playing to have fun.
Sucks so much in comparison to Horizons when it comes to gathering materials…
Aye, least we still have Horizons 3.8 :)
Pokemon vegetable edition :D
Gotta scan em all!!
This is BS, can't find anything now.
Yeah, it's kinda pot luck atm. Hopefully it'll get better over time.
Then explore.
@@timesthree5757
2 hours of walking across barren wasteland is not what I’d call ‘engaging gameplay’.
@@moontrooper2587 currently doing that right now. Trying to get to the top of a crater for an awesome sunset. The star will begin to set as 2 gas giant cross in front. Will be epic.
@@timesthree5757
Yeah, but that’s exploring. For people who’re looking to grab some materials for either synthesis or engineering, it’s a painful slog.
I just spent 2 hours getting out to Outotz LS-K d8-3 to get myself some yttrium, only to have to fly around the planet looking for various _individual_ crystalline shards which cannot be scanned. After 3 hours, I was finally able to get 2 sulfur, because most of the shards either spawned in the ground, or were indestructible. There’s no way of telling what you’d get, and considering that there’s only 1 randomized fragment per square kilometer, I don’t think I’m getting 150 anytime soon.
Also, the draw distance for the surface features is so low that for some ships you literally have to drag your nose across the ground for anything to render.
I'm so confused and in a way sad as to why they made it unprofitable. A whole expansion and not a single activity that allows you to profit. Just time and grind sinks.
Yeah, for the time invested in it, it's not that profitable. Maybe things will change like it did for exploration.
That... looks incredibly tedious.
It can be. Most times you fiind them relativily close, but there are times I've given up.
What a load of rubbish this is compared to what we had before.... i don't mind a heat map. But this implementation looks like it's done with some AliExpress thermal camera with 2 pixel resolution.... Screw this, ill just go back to horizons 3.8 when i need some mats.
This isn't even a heat map, more a dispersion map, it's there somewhere :(
@@Fireytoad Yes, i heard it was a heat map to begin with and they changed it because people couldn't understand it....
Nothing wrong with your explaining or video i just don't like the way they changed the game and i was getting frustrated yesterday trying to get some mats. (I haven't played in a while).
If it showed the biological locations as hot spots like a mining map or even wave like scanner in the ship and you have to fly at a certain alt to use would have been better than "blue bits + mk 1 eyeball".
@@chris746568462 Oh I get it, there are a few things they could do to make it better.
I'll just load Horizons when I want to farm mats. This new system is asinine.
Make the most of it, this'll be coming to Horizon's at some point.
I promise I'm not trying to be mean but I can't understand half of the things you're saying, your accent is a bit thick.
It's the only one I have :)
Terrible