Where is the science?

[LtKillPuppy]

Alright, cool, release. New game. Explore!

5 hours in, and I've found exactly two science rocks and both only gave me ~400 science. I can find tons of the little 20-60 science givers, but the caves are nearly empty.

Resources aren't the problem, I am drowning in stuff, I just can't find science underground.

Where has it gone?

[Mharr]

I've circumnavigated my starting world finding no interesting research objects, and have now resorted to centrifuging and smelting dirt into ceramic for 900 bytes per canister. It drains a lot of power, but what I did find was batteries, turbines and solar panels.

[Mr. Fibble]

On the surface you need to either look for the small blips on plants & rocks for a minor trickle or the pyramid cases that usually need power (found a couple that want laterite but as its not a surface mineral backtracking is a case of F that) these give 400 ish a time.

Some plants drop small amounts of byte-able things but again its a trickle.

The regular pods that you put into the station seem to have been nerfed pretty heavily, presumably to push folk into aimless wandering but downside is the pace is almost too slow and you have to spend a long time wandering to get the basics unlocked. They do go up in value depending on where you got them from, so deeper down or the "rocky" terrain gives more but not by much.

[Saber Hayashi]

dont devour the small pods, be sure to put them in the research machine, drastically improves the payout.

[LtKillPuppy]

The small science-givers will give you anywhere from 60-100 if you backtrack and drop a bunch in the researcher, but since it only takes one at a time and takes 1-2 minutes per giver -- it is super-tedious to do so.

I did not know you could get bytes out of smelted ore, though. Welp, time to strip all the dirt off the planet and turn it into science I guess?

[Daeburon]

Originally posted by Saber Hayashi:

dont devour the small pods, be sure to put them in the research machine, drastically improves the payout.

but then you have to micromanage the crap out of the research chamber. im not convinced its more productive to stay at base and keep swapping in new ones than it is to just be out adventuring. the little consumable bytes are so common, youd probably get more just exploring and consuming than you would staring at the chamber.

[Mharr]

Originally posted by LtKillPuppy:

Welp, time to strip all the dirt off the planet and turn it into science I guess?

I'd say so. The exo-corp pyramids were intriguing at first, but proved to have a consistent reward of, to my mind, half a canister of dirt. Not even worth the time it takes to power them up.

[LtKillPuppy]

Yeah, Ceramic gives you 300 bytes per unit. The two big science rocks I've found gave me around ~400. No brainer on what to do. (Fast track to big buggies/mine head/crane and strip-mine the entire planet's worth of surface soil.)

I am going to test the rest of the stuff you can centrifuge. Unless I find something that gives me more bytes, then I am going to be one HELL of a scientific expert on Ceramic.

This is worse than the trading station balancing issue from many versions ago. (Why leave the base, when I can just trade dirt for Titanium?)

Update: Mharr is right. Dirt > Clay > Ceramic. 3x per canister, 300 bytes per ceramic so a total of 900 science. Most bang for your buck. It's tedious shifting the resources around, but far more fruitful than combing miles of tunnels or surface, or collecting little science dingies.

[Mharr]

There is a bit of shuffling, but you can just shift click to cycle dirt into the centrifuge, so that's nice. With the machines side by side it's pretty painless. Multiple research cradles recommended.

[Xiox]

How have you only found 2 Research Pods in 5 hours?????

For me, I was 2 hours in and drowning in pods, I even stopped collecting them because I now have over 25,000 Bytes and still have a storage full of pods.

[Martin]

Originally posted by LtKillPuppy:

Alright, cool, release. New game. Explore!

5 hours in, and I've found exactly two science rocks and both only gave me ~400 science. I can find tons of the little 20-60 science givers, but the caves are nearly empty.

Resources aren't the problem, I am drowning in stuff, I just can't find science underground.

Where has it gone?

I've found resources are best, until you find the locked chests.. some of the better ones drop tech pods to research worth 2-3k each. Hell if i can remember the name.. aluminium raw is worth about 450.. and is pretty quick. even compound is 100, 4 research modules.. that's pretty easy research. The avg pods, esp seeds i find are like 250-350 ish. And you can only carry em one at a time. resources you can carry a load at a time.

You can also carry the medium storage, so with backpack thats around 18 or so resource items per run, which is often much faster than waiting for centrifuge to spin up/down, plus all the time you spend digging dirt.. much faster just to get resources directly.

[Martin]

Originally posted by LtKillPuppy:

Yeah, Ceramic gives you 300 bytes per unit. The two big science rocks I've found gave me around ~400. No brainer on what to do. (Fast track to big buggies/mine head/crane and strip-mine the entire planet's worth of surface soil.)

I am going to test the rest of the stuff you can centrifuge. Unless I find something that gives me more bytes, then I am going to be one HELL of a scientific expert on Ceramic.

This is worse than the trading station balancing issue from many versions ago. (Why leave the base, when I can just trade dirt for Titanium?)

Update: Mharr is right. Dirt > Clay > Ceramic. 3x per canister, 300 bytes per ceramic so a total of 900 science. Most bang for your buck. It's tedious shifting the resources around, but far more fruitful than combing miles of tunnels or surface, or collecting little science dingies.

That has to be about the most boring way imaginable of playing the game, but whatever floats yer boat.

That said, would be nice if resources autoloaded onto research modules. I'm finding them very fiddly to get the resources to clickin.

You'll still need to leave the planet to get the resources to make the scrapper and the trader.. so you won't be trading dirt for titanium any time soon. I'm sure you'll get everything researched.. if you can find copper to make the solars or a nice windy spot.. (yeh i saw you said you found them, I've found a few as well, not as many as I'd like and not as good as a solar farm)

[LtKillPuppy]

Another hour searching the cave, and two more science rocks. ~400 bytes apiece. So, I can either do 800 bytes/hour exploration for science, or just sit here and grind out enough science to get a shuttle and get my a$$ somewhere more interesting and hopefully with more damn science rocks.

If other people are finding science more readily, then there's something whack with the resource generating system. I've never had a problem in prior versions with getting a "bad seed," I was always able to make it work no matter where I started from.

[Slie]

I've had the opposite experience. Right off the bat I came across a gazillion pods before I even had a researcher. None of them came from caves though. They where all in trees or perched atop small rocks/mountains. Also a gazillion of the tiny pods too, everywhere I look.

It feels like they made it 100x easier to find research with this update.

[Daeburon]

Originally posted by Slie:

I've had the opposite experience. Right off the bat I came across a gazillion pods before I even had a researcher. None of them came from caves though. They where all in trees or perched atop small rocks/mountains. Also a gazillion of the tiny pods too, everywhere I look.

It feels like they made it 100x easier to find research with this update.

no, its an illusion. you used to find research objects that would give you 1500 bytes easy. sometimes cool ones that would be like 3,000 or more.

the crappy ones in the trees are worth like 300.

easier to find them, maybe...but you used to really easily find 3-4 pods in a cave, haul them up and be good for a while. now with these crappy 300 joke pods you have to micromanage the crap out of the chamber and do more lame busy work.

[Mama Cel]

A lot of times there are big research objects underneath the ones that have the little research objects attached to them... They aren't visible but it will have a little tooltip pointing underneath that indicates a research object there... You just press the grab/pick-up button (Y on the gamepad) and you grab it out of the ground. I've also found some in the trees: there are some trees that have a hole through the trunk and there's a research object sitting in the hole. And then there are research objects sitting on top of some rock pillar type thing, they look like big boulders with purple or green gemstones sticking out of them, usually around the foothills of the mountains for those. And in the caves, there are research objects that look like deformed gelatinous cubes I guess... Just big blobby green shapes.

But I've found tons of them overall, I have a big pile of like 10-12 of them sitting next to my research device waiting to go, and I run across tons more while I'm out and about exploring.. I usually ignore them because they are so easy to find, so I really don't need to stockpile more than a few at a time. But I haven't found any that were worth 12,000 bytes and such like there used to be... Most I've found are between 300-500 bytes.

Also, hazardous plants drop small research objects when you destroy them... They also drop seeds, but the research parts look different, and they don't always drop, but usually so for me...