How do people find those secret secret stuff?

[Yboo]

By "secret secret stuff", I mean stuff like the fancy barnacles or the fancy structures. I'm at least, under the assumption that it's regular players who find them. How do they do so exactly? Say on my recent trip to find the thargoid structures in a solar system, I wanted to drop in and kinda look for them myself, but found that I had no idea what to look for on what happened to be several dozen planets to land on. Do they get some, random secret message giving them exact coordinates and a system, or are they just incredibly good/lucky at what they do?(As a note, the solar system I visited did report having the structure)

[TiberiuS]

I'm asking that myself, too.
Chances are just so incredibly small to find things like that. You really have to know exactely where you have to look for it. Even if you know the exact planet, that's still a HUGE area to kook for something the size of a football field (barnacles).

[Solar_Flare]

Being the first to find them is actually pretty hard if not impossible if your going in blind. A lot of the stuff is found by people actively hunting them, through clues and pooling group resources. if your looking to simply visit a site, it can be a bit tough. I recently visited a few sites for the first time and it took a bit of searching. Totally worth the hunting though.

[Frank K]

There is player group out there of dedicated Commanders, they scour the galaxy investigating and analyzing the mysteries and pass that knowledge onto the rest of us. They have the requisite skill set to decode the messages imbedded in alien probes, artefacts and such, turning audio files that appear gibberish to us into readable intelligence, using advanced maths to guide them to discoveries, and biscuits. They are known as Canonn Research.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRNMRRSMT7E&t=45s

[morph113]

It depends. The first ancient guardian ruins site for example was found because the site was visible in a trailer video for the 2.2 guardians update and a clever player used the stars visible in the sky in the trailer to triangualate the position of the planet shown. After a lot of search on possible planets, the first guardian site was finally found.

With the new Thargoid structures, after the recent patch new listening posts appeared giving out informatino as to where to got. So it didn't take long to find the first Thargoid structure. By now we know that with the unknown link you can find more sites, because each site is sending out signals leading to another site. That's why we are up to almost 40 sites now.

I can't remember how the first barnacles were discovered. I think the unknown artifact suddenly changed it's signal and instead leading to a vector graphic of your ship, it resulted in giving away Merope 5C so players were searching that planet until someone found the first barnacle site.

A lot of this is community work put in by the canonn group in which everyone can participate.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/355713-Alien-archeology-and-other-mysteries-Thread-10-The-Canonn