How to find all fauna on a planet?

[Wallop]

How can you do it? Theres allways 1 that you cant find anywhere.

[Yorith]

Hi !
There's a bunch of threads that'll give you good advices if you search a little.
I'll try to give a comprehensive list of those, but I may forget some.

-Try to go to another place in the place, I've read that some species are coded to appear far from the spot you are, like go to the opposite side of the planet (kind of experienced it myself, don't know if it was luck or a feature)
-There's always 2 (maybe 3 ?) species in water
-Same in the air
-Some species only appear during night
-Some species only appear during storms
-Some species only appear inside caves (those are a pain to find, at least for me, as not all the caves have a clear entrance, some don't even have an entrance)
-I've experienced some bug where creatures would spawn inside the terrain
-RNG will be your friend (or not !)

I've come to only try and search for all the species on planets that have water, as it's a quick and easy spot to find some of them (2/3 species).
Some planets have only like 4/5/6 species, while other can have more than 14/15, you may want to focus on planets that don't have that much species to discover, up to you.

/Not sure about this !/
Also, can't tell if it's a thing, as I didn't do a thorough study about it, but maybe (some other players will prove me wrong) some species could appear like during night storms in cave, or day storms in cave, and so on.

Otherwise the most useful thing I did was simply to move on to another planet when I've found myself frustated not being able to find the last species on a planet.
And from times to times I warp back to a planet where I'm missing 1 or 2 species and let the luck do its thing.
I was stuck for a while for my very first full planet discovery, I just moved on and continued do to so everytime the last species was a pain to find, now I may have 15 planets on which I've found all the species, by heeding those advices.

Good luck hunting them last species !

[Mr. Bufferlow]

Some times they come fast...some time you just have to move on. If it quits being fun, I search for greener pastures.

Remember it is a game, and there are so many planets you can skip a few 100% and be just fine.

On 264 and trying for 300.

Happy hunting Traveler

[Wallop]

nothing helps. Spent 10 days on this stupid planet with 5 species

[_Xan_]

264 wow, I can't get past 2.... lol

[dmeister]

Originally posted by Zoon:

nothing helps. Spent 10 days on this stupid planet with 5 species

I feel your pain, especially since Next it seems a lot harder to get 100% of the animals, there's usually one animal that's impossible to find. I've gotten a few 100% but mostly been one short despite hours and hours of looking on each planet.

They definitely should add something to make it a little easier to find undiscovered animals. Something on the discoveries tab indicating what kind of terrain or time of day, etc to find it. Or a portable scanner that can put out a waypoint that when you reach it will spawn the animal you're looking for somewhere in the area. Or a baited lure you can put out to spawn something. Anything would be better than aimlessly wandering around hoping you get lucky and see a red dot. :/

[dashiichi]

Dusk and dawn are good times to keep an eye out for new species. There may be carnivores that only show up then.

Water can now only be searched by diving in. No more fly low and trigger photo mode. :-(

At some point, just make a note of the system/planet and come back to it later. Since "later" may be after you've installed several S-class upgrades to the scanner, "later" may also mean "more units per animal." But at least until you run out of teleport slots (how many are there, now?) coming back to it once or twice a session may do the trick.

[Wallop]

I bailed that planet. Was on the other planet with 5 animals and very quickly discovered 5 of them...the thing is it still shows 4/5 tho theres 5 animals below it!

[scimuse]

the game has species families? not sure how to say. you can find more than one representative of a species sometimes. on a planet with 10 species you might scan 12 scannable animals. the little blue info box will tell you if something you scanned belongs to the same species or not.

anyhow, i had theory about something and i still have not proven it true or false yet. those random save spots out in the middle of nowhere, it occured to me they might be spawn points for animals. they may not be there for that reason but they seem to operate that way.

the biggest mistake i see streamers make when looking for animals, they move too fast. animals spawn behind me all the time. also i use my ears a lot. i hear them before i see them a lot.

[dmeister]

Originally posted by scimuse:

the game has species families? not sure how to say. you can find more than one representative of a species sometimes. on a planet with 10 species you might scan 12 scannable animals. the little blue info box will tell you if something you scanned belongs to the same species or not....

As I recall back when No Man's Sky launched they actually had it so male and female versions of the same animal were separate scans as far as the green/red dots went. So you'd scan a male, for example, but the females would still all be red. Since then though they patched it so that when you scan any animal of a species it counts for scanning both the male and female varieties as well as children and adults.

However, as Scimuse said above, there do appear to still occasionally be rare subspecies off-shoots that will appear as red dots even after you've scanned the main species. You'll get money for scanning them and they'll appear on your discoveries tab as a new listing but they will not count toward you "X out of Y" scan count for getting 100% of all the species on a planet scanned.