First time, finished the game, Burning question

[Tom-ahawk]

How many discoverable star systems are there total? Is there a limit? The actual travel size of the map is HUGE compared to the area you interact with in the story. Why is that?

My girlfriend was playing her own version of the game alongside me and she found these two stars way out of bounds, like 3 times the distance away as the width of the story area. I went to the same areas and found nothing.

Real curious how it all works?

Thanks :)

[CaptainPOCK]

I didn't explicitly count them, and I also don't have an exact number for the current build but two builds before, but here is what my map looked like in the Icarus build:

https://i.epvpimg.com/92WNcab.jpg

I'd assume we have a lot more star systems by now and I would assume by the looks of it that the developer is going for a standard spiral galaxy with a few rogue stars sprinkled in-between.

Several star systems are placed randomly, others are spawned in when certain requirements are met. I also didn't really like this mechanic as I feel like a player would feel ripped off when they already visited an area and suddenly a star spawns there.

[shiantar]

Kepler added a bunch of stuff.

There does appear to be some complete "randomness" for certain encounters. To wit -- Hello World + Posguul, Ancient Orbiter(s) x (one or two), Junk Heap, Tomb of Ock Juk, Ringworld, etc. , probably because they don't strictly form a constellation with other stars using Flingers. I think when I last pondered this in a separate thread, the game logic would be like taking grid-square shapes in TETRIS and trying to fit them together, which is (esp. for debugging) orders of magnitude more difficult than putting the main story on rails.

This is in turn separate from the notion of a required story element which is also eligible for 'randomness' but can be in any of the fixed-placement or random-placement stars. To wit -- you can essentially encounter Imperial Floral Blight just about anywhere, but the nature of the encounter seems to limit this to perhaps Oceanic, Terrestrial, maybe Greenhouse planets, but excludes Desert, Rocky, Lunar, etc.

I would agree that in Icarus through Kepler, the placement of the major constellations from Beyond the Gateway through to Sepharia are fixed.

This is one we can put to @justkevin --
- Are the placements of some stars, encounters, derelicts, etc. etc. dependent solely on timers or other random factors, and therefore are independent of map placement? ; and
- Consequently, there's no guarantee that a player will encounter all the game content within X of the game start, unless they stay within X of the game start? (Myself, for example, hell of a time getting full completion on Flotsam and Jetsam before returning to the Alpha universe for the first time and it's roughly 50-50 hit-or-miss on Green Berries before completion of the entire game)

[justkevin]

For most regions, the game adds them at specific coordinates either at the start of the game or when some conditions are met. In either case, the proc system will not place them somewhere that is already defined. Visiting (or coming close to) a sector defines it as empty. So if you visit 51 x 13 and then later a region tries to be placed there, the proc system will do a spiral walk to find the nearest "clean" place it can put the region.

So you should not find sectors appearing where you've already explored.

Some regions (and other objects) get placed near the player when traveling in the void, following the same constraints.

Regarding mission related anomalies, these should get placed soon after triggering, but require at least finding the correct planet type (e.g., the berries won't show up on an ice planet).

[Tom-ahawk]

Thank you for the great detail. Clears up a lot! :)

[shiantar]

^ Interesting. So I guess ... if we're missing something like Trial by Ordeal and we've thoroughly surveyed all planets around all stars we can detect ... the only way to cause more stars to spawn (if they're going to) is to do a spiral walk outward from the explored areas