How to find a Portal on any old planet?

[remid0d0s0]

How do I find a portal on a planet with no portal finding infrastructure? Fly for hours and hours? Unless I'm missing something, signal boosters don't work, planetary maps don't work (???), and exocraft sensors don't work.

[japp_02]

Some planets may not have a portal, but for sure there is one in every system. You need to find a Monolith and succeed the puzzle on it. Important: To be pointed towards a portal you must interact a second time with the same Monolith.

[flick]

I'm pretty sure that every single planet will have a portal.

[japp_02]

Originally posted by flick:

I'm pretty sure that every single planet will have a portal.

You will have to go to a monolith anyway to be pointed towards it. And in some cases you are pointed to another planet, how's that...humm...

[VulcanTourist]

Every single planet has a portal. If you can't physically find it, you can at least infer its existence and target it from another portal (ideally in the same system but not required) and perhaps cause the game to spawn one where you wouldn't have seen it if you had walked the same ground previously. If/when I find the first portal in a system, either by dumb luck or via a monolith, I exploit it to quickly locate and mark all the others; if I can't find even one, then I still record the inferred addresses and later use a portal in another system to locate and mark them. I now skip a lot of monolith hunting because of this. I still carry stacks of the faction items necessary to feed the monolith beasts and I keep them topped-up.

Again, I'm not certain this has always been true of the game, but it is true now. Anyone who claims otherwise simply hasn't made the effort to verify it, as I hadn't yet weeks ago when I myself was a naysayer.

[NMSPlayer]

get ten nav data, go to the station, by ten maps at a time. you're looking for ancient artifact maps, at least a couple of them will be artifact maps. make sure you have the right alien thing to find a portal -- a gek relic or whatever for that system. Go to ANY PLANET in the system and use one map at a time. ONE of them will be a monolith. You must clear each location, so if the first one is a plaque, go clear the plaque and use another map. This does work.

[TheBoot]

If you already know the location of one portal this might work: Create a small base near the portal you know about. Just needs to be a base computer, solar panel, battery and teleporter. Go to any planet you're looking for a portal on, take a screen shot using the in-game camera. In the lower left of the image are portal symbols. Write those down (they're not saved with the image), teleport back to your original portal and try the symbols. If it works you can drop a save beacon at the new portal or use your scan visor to learn your local lat/long. Write that down so you can find it again after travelling back thru the portal. Disclaimer, I have not tried this myself yet but I'm going to. Not even sure if the screen grab has all 12 portal symbols necessary.

[VulcanTourist]

Originally posted by TheBoot:

If you already know the location of one portal this might work....

You're making it more complicated than it needs to be. No base is required, it's superfluous to the process. You don't even need to land on a planet to know the portal codes of every planet in that system. The only work to be done is to match up the portal codes with their respective planet, and that is done by simply landing on each one and taking another photo. The galactic address is derived from a signal booster, and the last octet of the galactic address matches the first four digits of the portal codes with the insertion of the orbit number.

You don't need to find or visit portals to know exactly how to reach them when it's needed. I only locate and mark them now as a formality, and I've deferred the formality for some uncharted/uninhabited systems where no monoliths period exist to make location easy. I already know how to access the portals if the need ever arises, I just don't know precisely where on the planets I will step out. That hardly matters either, since I can't map the planets I explore and fully annotate the things of interest.

[Gumsk]

^ What VulcanTourist said. Just get the galactic address, go to another portal, and jump back to that address; now you know where the portal was. If you want to build there and get portal interference because you jumped in, drop a save point, beacon, signal booster, or refiner; come back to the planet the old fashioned way; go find the dropped equipment.

[remid0d0s0]

Originally posted by VulcanTourist:

Originally posted by TheBoot:

If you already know the location of one portal this might work....

You're making it more complicated than it needs to be. No base is required, it's superfluous to the process. You don't even need to land on a planet to know the portal codes of every planet in that system. The only work to be done is to match up the portal codes with their respective planet, and that is done by simply landing on each one and taking another photo. The galactic address is derived from a signal booster, and the last octet of the galactic address matches the first four digits of the portal codes with the insertion of the orbit number.

You don't need to find or visit portals to know exactly how to reach them when it's needed. I only locate and mark them now as a formality, and I've deferred the formality for some uncharted/uninhabited systems where no monoliths period exist to make location easy. I already know how to access the portals if the need ever arises, I just don't know precisely where on the planets I will step out. That hardly matters either, since I can't map the planets I explore and fully annotate the things of interest.

Octet. Sounds like someone who has read some ITU documents and/or spent some time laboring with the OSI model. Or someone who first encountered Ethernet in the 21st century. :)

Thanks for the description!

[SolOmen]

I put two bases near portals but the portals seem to have evaporated...

[japp_02]

Yes, very good solution for finding portals from Vulkan Tourist, but: that's for advanced players only. The simple method is finding and interacting with a Monolith, and I forgot to say that you can use the right map category of the Cartographer to scan for a monolith.

[VulcanTourist]

Originally posted by remid0d0s0:

Octet. Sounds like someone who has read some ITU documents and/or spent some time laboring with the OSI model.

Guilty.

[SolOmen]

It took alot of maps but I found a portal and stuck a base right next to it so I won't lose it. Now I just need to hunt a few more glyphs. Last few I nearly got scalded to death. I have S class heat resistance but the last two glyphs I found were on superheated tropical planets with fire storms that chewed through my shields in seconds. .

[VulcanTourist]

Originally posted by SolOmen:

It took alot of maps but I found a portal and stuck a base right next to it so I won't lose it. Now I just need to hunt a few more glyphs. Last few I nearly got scalded to death. I have S class heat resistance but the last two glyphs I found were on superheated tropical planets with fire storms that chewed through my shields in seconds. .

Dig yourself a makeshift cave to wait out the storm, If you can't do that in your ship or exocraft and there's no buildings nearby. Having terrain over your head in a tunnel should be sufficient protection (oddly even against temperature extremes).

I've had all the glyphs in this playthrough since Next, but now I keep stumbling over Traveller grave markers by accident without even talking to a Traveller. I would have expected the game to stop showing them to me since they serve no purpose at all now, but it still distracts me with them.

[Galactic Starman]

Originally posted by SolOmen:

It took alot of maps but I found a portal and stuck a base right next to it so I won't lose it.

Once you locate a portal by one of the means available (best method via a monolith using an exocar scanner) the portal icon remains visible on the hud screen. To additionally mark it for players in a group, use a signal beacon and colour it Pink or Purple (P=portal) or whatever colour you want to recall what the beacon marks, which helps distinguish it if you have more than one beacon on a planet.