Exploring planets?

[Jonnson]

From what i see online, its pointless to try and explore a whole planet. But, do these planets have things on them to explore?

Can you explore from the spaceship? How? I'm not seeing anything like scan for buildings, or caves, or whatever.

[Dazs]

Exploring with an Roamer is more interesting since you can scan for buildings, drop pods etc. I know there is a a lot of trolling about the Nautilon but sometimes I find a nice pretty water planet and spend time chilling underwater with a kitted out one and search for wrecks while I laser everything in sight for resources. IDK I find it relaxing.

[Zep Tepi]

Your ship can scan for buildings at a short range. The exocraft (land and sea vehicles) have better scanners. Your own personal scanner can't scan for caves directly but sometimes it picks up items that can be found in caves which will lead you to them. You can also buy maps from the space station but the results are somewhat random. Most planets have the same stuff on them randomly distributed. Once you find something useful you need to put down a save point beacon or a base computer so you can find it again.

[Jonnson]

Originally posted by Dazs:

Exploring with an Roamer is more interesting since you can scan for buildings, drop pods etc. I know there is a a lot of trolling about the Nautilon but sometimes I find a nice pretty water planet and spend time chilling underwater with a kitted out one and search for wrecks while I laser everything in sight for resources. IDK I find it relaxing.

ok, so the planets do have things on them to find?

[Jonnson]

Originally posted by Zep Tepi:

Your ship can scan for buildings at a short range. The exocraft (land and sea vehicles) have better scanners. Your own personal scanner can't scan for caves directly but sometimes it picks up items that can be found in caves which will lead you to them. You can also buy maps from the space station but the results are somewhat random. Most planets have the same stuff on them randomly distributed. Once you find something useful you need to put down a save point beacon or a base computer so you can find it again.

ok, so the planets do have things to find?
like rare items, etc?
guns, ships, armor, blah blah?

[Ziploc]

I just got the Colossus Exocraft today, and with a fully tricked out scanner it can detect various structures on the surface. I scanned for drop pods and spent the next couple of hours scanning, flying over in my starship, and adding to my exosuit inventory space.
The Minotaur can do the same for various features including distress signals, which might be crashed ships or freighters.
The Nautilus is great for underwater features including crashed freighters, which I found easier to loot then the surface ones as you only need to dig with the terrain tool to access the cargo pods.
You can fly your ship low over a planet and scan for buildings, or just visually look in 3rd person view.

[frazzled]

You can find new plants, animals and minerals. You can find and recover ancient relics. You can (in several ways) add to your vocabulary in different languages. You can learn much of the history of the different races and of the universe itself. You can find and salvage stuff from crashed freighters. You can find crashed ships, recover them, and either sell the for components and cash, or add them to your collection. You can explore worlds with greatly varying environments. You can explore under water. You can explore in caves. You can find abandoned and occupied buildings, in which you can obtain needed materials. You can build bases, or industrial mining operations, or farming or ranching operations.

You can do it all on foot. You can hop around with your starship. You can get access to exocraft (wheeled, legged, submarine, or hovercraft) and drive around in those.

I probably left a bunch of stuff out. But yah, there's stuff to do.

[DeadOrAlive]

the most useful vehicle is probably your roamer and you get him early in the game or cheap to buy.
fit him out with the best scanner technology and you can scan everything on a planet sourface.
you have to get the scanner-blueprints from the anomalie i think to remember. very usefull to find portals as well or at least the alien-structure to get the portal as well.

if you fly around with your ship close to the planet's surface, you'll detect as well some buildings. but only the things "in your far sight". you could use em as well to detect an trading-post.

[PeaceMaker]

Originally posted by Jonnson:

From what i see online, its pointless to try and explore a whole planet. But, do these planets have things on them to explore?

Can you explore from the spaceship? How? I'm not seeing anything like scan for buildings, or caves, or whatever.

I guess you don't have the game otherwise you could check for yourself.

1. You can do a personal or ship scan to reveal some items of interest, but it won't show everything.

2. You can buy map co-ordinates 'point of interest' at Station then fly to that. It don't show everything.

3. You can indeed just fly low level and check out what you see. In fact, it's my preferred method of exploring. I just fly low and slow, making sure to avoid any tall obstacles, keeping an eye on the ground until I see something. You can see lots (ruins, crashed ships, pods, creatures, etc) as long as you stay low and slow.

4. Sometimes I just jog it if I'm in the mood and the land is nice enough. But it's a very long way to do things as the worlds are huuuuge. It's like trying to run around earth in real life!

[Galactic Starman]

Originally posted by Jonnson:

From what i see online, its pointless to try and explore a whole planet....
Can you explore from the spaceship? How? I'm not seeing anything like scan for buildings, or caves, or whatever.

Online is full of misinformation. It's not pointless at all. Without exploring nothing will be seen and memorable discoveries will not be made nor will interesting places for a place a base computer and many other things like nanite farms be found, it's as simple as that. Some planets are far easier than others to scan all the creatures for thousands of nanites and with only maybe two landings throwing bait most of them will be found.

If you have a fast PC that will render quickly and populate the planet with things to be found like buildings, volcanoes, mountains, caverns, crashed freighters, crashed ships, resource nodes and so on, you can fly low and scan from the ship which will highlight buildings. Fly slow enough and you will be able to spot nodes or creatures or surface features. If your CPU is not great you may need to circle for things to appear.

Exploration frigates in space can be landed on and once you speak to the captain you can scan for ruins to collect valuable fossils and spot them with an icon to follow.

During night time flight on the dark side of any planet, it becomes easier to see brightly lit nodes or storm crystals, sodium plant, player bases lit up and so on.

Using a space ship is not always the most efficient way to explore if you are serious in quickly exploring, or I would always land and use Exocar Sacnners (they have different areas of expertiese) or use purchased maps or the signal booster. The signal booster is free and takes seconds to use while on foot. There are many things to discover in the oceans too ideally best navigated with a Nautilon submersible.

[Lindy Bomber]

Originally posted by Jonnson:

From what i see online, its pointless to try and explore a whole planet. But, do these planets have things on them to explore?

Can you explore from the spaceship? How? I'm not seeing anything like scan for buildings, or caves, or whatever.

Planets have a limited number of flora, fauna, resources and points if interest copied and placed all around the planet. It would taken many 100s of hours to explore the entire surface of a planet, but you can find all the flora and fauna in just a few hours.

Most planets have 8-15 species of animals and 20-30 species of plants. Once you have scanned and uploaded them to the discovery server you receive credit for discovering them. When other players scanning them they will see you discovered them on such and such date. Once you have scanned everything and collected what ever resources you need at the moment it's best to move on to the next planet.

[Zep Tepi]

As far as treasures go, you might find crashed ships that you can claim. You might find a rare multitool in a minor settlement, the small trade posts. You could find curious deposits, which give mould that can be refined into nanites. Some planets have salvage or bones that can be sold for a lot of credits. Once you get an upgraded scanner from the anomaly, you can search for power or mineral hotspots where you can place a mine. And each planet has a portal on it somewhere.

[Mr. Bufferlow]

Originally posted by Jonnson:

From what i see online, its pointless to try and explore a whole planet. But, do these planets have things on them to explore?

Can you explore from the spaceship? How? I'm not seeing anything like scan for buildings, or caves, or whatever.

Exploring planets is fun, but generally trying to fully explore a single planet would be kind of boring. The planets, and everything on them, are procedurally created and placed so If you find a particular POI, there are probably tons more of the exact same POI all over the planet. POIs are never unique at a planet level.

Caves, water features, and how the planet is mapped can lead to pretty interesting differences but unlikely to be enough difference to warrant trying to explore an entire planet completely.

How? you can use your scanner to ping icons that might be interesting to check out. You can also buy maps (but I never use them) that will ping specific POI types. I enjoy flying low and slow over a planet and picking out interesting things by eye.

If you want every planet to be chock full of wild stuff you have never seen before, you will run out of those after about 20 to 30 hours. If you can appreciate the differences at a granular level, you will be always finding differences from one planet to the next.

I have been exploring for 4100 hours and I still run into new and never seen that before moments on rare occasion. Not that long ago, I ran into the largest cave system I had ever seen. So big you can fly around in parts of it with your ship. Even has weather inside the cave because the "rooms" are so large.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2580609052

[Jonnson]

Originally posted by Galactic Starman:

Originally posted by Jonnson:

From what i see online, its pointless to try and explore a whole planet....
Can you explore from the spaceship? How? I'm not seeing anything like scan for buildings, or caves, or whatever.

Online is full of misinformation. It's not pointless at all. Without exploring nothing will be seen and memorable discoveries will not be made nor will interesting places for a place a base computer and many other things like nanite farms be found, it's as simple as that. Some planets are far easier than others to scan all the creatures for thousands of nanites and with only maybe two landings throwing bait most of them will be found.

If you have a fast PC that will render quickly and populate the planet with things to be found like buildings, volcanoes, mountains, caverns, crashed freighters, crashed ships, resource nodes and so on, you can fly low and scan from the ship which will highlight buildings. Fly slow enough and you will be able to spot nodes or creatures or surface features. If your CPU is not great you may need to circle for things to appear.

Exploration frigates in space can be landed on and once you speak to the captain you can scan for ruins to collect valuable fossils and spot them with an icon to follow.

During night time flight on the dark side of any planet, it becomes easier to see brightly lit nodes or storm crystals, sodium plant, player bases lit up and so on.

Using a space ship is not always the most efficient way to explore if you are serious in quickly exploring, or I would always land and use Exocar Sacnners (they have different areas of expertiese) or use purchased maps or the signal booster. The signal booster is free and takes seconds to use while on foot. There are many things to discover in the oceans too ideally best navigated with a Nautilon submersible.

Thx brother, thats helpful)

[Jonnson]

Originally posted by PeaceMaker:

Originally posted by Jonnson:

From what i see online, its pointless to try and explore a whole planet. But, do these planets have things on them to explore?

Can you explore from the spaceship? How? I'm not seeing anything like scan for buildings, or caves, or whatever.

I guess you don't have the game otherwise you could check for yourself.

1. You can do a personal or ship scan to reveal some items of interest, but it won't show everything.

2. You can buy map co-ordinates 'point of interest' at Station then fly to that. It don't show everything.

3. You can indeed just fly low level and check out what you see. In fact, it's my preferred method of exploring. I just fly low and slow, making sure to avoid any tall obstacles, keeping an eye on the ground until I see something. You can see lots (ruins, crashed ships, pods, creatures, etc) as long as you stay low and slow.

4. Sometimes I just jog it if I'm in the mood and the land is nice enough. But it's a very long way to do things as the worlds are huuuuge. It's like trying to run around earth in real life!

I am playing the game. When I wanna learn something, I minimize the screen and ask.

A game like this one has alot to it, and vets tend to forget that they learned things as the game was developed, update at a time. I am still figuring out how to map my keys, yaknow, which ones do I use the most and whats most fluid for my fingers on the keyboard. There is alot of keybindings to things that are not revealed to me yet, for example.

I do youtube and google research in order to determine what games I am interested in, then visit the forums to see what the crowd has to say. There was alot of heat on this game for quite some time, but it looked good, so I needed to pull some triggers to get to the bottom of it.

It's kinda cool, because I imagine myself lifting off out of subnautica into no mans sky...the games are very similar in graphics, and mood, style. I am disappointed in the fauna though, considering its about exploring 18 Quintilian planets...and they are worse than what spore offered, and spore is very, very old.

I appreciate the info you gave me, it helps to understand things better. From what I see atm, it looks like you just fly in a straight line until the waypoints show up. Run around one of them and grab the scans. Then move on. This is why i was asking if there was something more to explore, ofc at the time of posting I knew less than I know now.

[Jonnson]

Originally posted by Lindy Bomber:

Originally posted by Jonnson:

From what i see online, its pointless to try and explore a whole planet. But, do these planets have things on them to explore?

Can you explore from the spaceship? How? I'm not seeing anything like scan for buildings, or caves, or whatever.

Planets have a limited number of flora, fauna, resources and points if interest copied and placed all around the planet. It would taken many 100s of hours to explore the entire surface of a planet, but you can find all the flora and fauna in just a few hours.

Most planets have 8-15 species of animals and 20-30 species of plants. Once you have scanned and uploaded them to the discovery server you receive credit for discovering them. When other players scanning them they will see you discovered them on such and such date. Once you have scanned everything and collected what ever resources you need at the moment it's best to move on to the next planet.

This confuses me mang, You are basically confirming what i was seeing when I posted this, but from what others say, there are crashed ships, for instance on the surface, and I have found the waypoints as well. Are you saying that looking for these things is a waste of time? just grab the nanites from scans, and move on? What would I be moving on to? What else is there? like, what are you doing? If that came out wrong, I just mean to pick your brain for info.