TL;DR: ExoBio pays, but the time:pay ratio is far better doing CG ,wing missions ,etc. Scroll down for pretty pics.
*OK, the stuff everyone wants to know right off the bat:
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Went from Elite Explorer to Elite Explorer V
Received Elite Exobiologist
How many credits did I start with: 682,358,337
How many credits did I finish with: 10,763,157,910
How much was Exploration Data worth? 1,618,497,973 (<that’s pretty poor for a thousand systems and 2,500 + planets)
How much does Exobio pay? 8,462,301,600 (a decent payout, but it’s a lot of work)
Ok, so what does it take to make that kind of exobio payout?
How long was I “gone”: IRL: 1 year, 8 months, 28 Days. 1
How many game hours: I dunno. I’m not good enough with Excel to sort that out. Hundreds of hours.
How many jumps? Interestingly, 1,000 jumps on the nose.
How many Discovery Scans? 1,002
How many Detailed Surface Scans? 1,410
How many Full Spectrum Scans of systems? 2,568
Landings and liftoffs: 1,221
How many codex entries? 991
Distance: 70,000+LY
How many times did I have to disembark and board the SRV or Ship? 1,540 times
How many times did I scan an organic? 1,358 scans
Divide this by 3 gets about 452 different organics fully scanned. That number is going to be higher than the actual number I got paid for. I lost a couple thanks to the annoying “finished scanning” animation that has to complete that resulted in me mashing the “discard sample” button. I’d jump back in the SRV before it was done, blast off, make a few jumps, scan the next bio 3 systems later and already have the trigger down to scan without remembering that I forgot to let the animation complete. Stupid design. There are more than a few that I gave up on because I couldn’t find the 2nd or 3rd bio to scan and didn’t want to waste a lot of time looking.
Thoughts on the ship:
I built for jump range, not durability. My average jump was probably around 62 Ly. I took 2 AFMUs because they cannot self-repair, so I used one to repair the other. I used that ability several times. 2 SRVs because you can’t just run down to the local shipyard if you break one, and ending up 30,000+ Ly out exploring with no SRV is a bad place to be. I beat the heck out of these vehicles. Hauling ass across some surface and hitting a rock, landing a jump wrong, rolling it… lots of ways to take damage. Ship had no cargo, no weapons, and a big Fuel Scoop. The 7B is just right to make it around the corner of a star and wake out to the next system with a full tank.
The heat sinks are for when you get dropped between two stars by random chance, or when you screw up and your brain is numb after 75 jumps, you try to scoop off of a brown dwarf and end up emergency dropping because you hit the exclusion zone.
I used 2 heat sinks. Beats the heck out of being trapped. I was happy to have them.
I repaired quite a bit. Miscalculating my speed, dragging a wingtip, not checking the planet gravity, hitting the boost button at the wrong time…I’d have easily died out there or limped home with a burning ship if I didn’t have limpets and AFMU. The only thing that won’t repair is the power plant, and I came back with that at 93%.
The 2 AFMUs and Repair Limpets are mandatory. Maybe you want to try to find a DSCN carrier, but I didn’t want to have to rely on that chance.
What would I change about the ship?
If I could get the heat down more, that would be cool. The thrusters are sketchy sometimes on 0.5G planets and higher, gotta be careful. Otherwise, it’s been a great ship.
Thoughts on Exobiology/Exploration?
It’s a LOT of repetitive, mind numbing, monotonous work. You really aren’t “exploring”, there’s very little that’s unique or new to see to really qualify it as exploration. You’re just hopping from system to system trying to find the SOSDD.
The biggest danger of exploration is boredom.
“Maybe I could try kicking off flight assist?” “Hmm, this canyon looks fun!” “Maybe my SRV can make this jump?” Or just making dumb mistakes because of the mind-numbing repetition. You’ll crash into something. That can be devastating losing everything and maybe just cause you to quit the game entirely. You can make more money in less time by far doing wing missions, hustling on mining, etc. These have the attraction of breaking it up with combat, engineering, CG’s, etc.
Odds of discovery:
0-3000 LY out: Almost everything has been honked. Check the radar to see if it’s littered with planets. If not, it’s probably only been honked and not FSS. One of the best systems I found was 3500LY out and had 18 bio signs on planets that hadn’t been FSS’d, but the main star had been Discovered.
3000-5000 LY out: Lots of discovered systems still, but plenty of systems that are discovered only but not FSS, undiscovered systems increase rapidly.
5000-10,000 LY out: Rapidly increasing undiscovered systems to almost everything undiscovered.
Outside of 10,000 LY: It’s kind of a surprise to find something already discovered, but this is where the hardcore explorers are. If it’s discovered, chances are it’s been gone over completely. DSS, FSS, everything will have been done.
The above is subject to the direction of travel. Well traveled routes are going to have a far higher rate of already being explored.
What I desperately want for Exploration: DANGER. UNIQUE SIGHTS!
Real phenomena. Fictional phenomena. Where are all the Sarlaac pits? The ice worms attracted to your arrival on icy planets? Why are there not clusters of bizarre life around thermal vents on volcanic worlds? Why is Audrey II not snapping at me when I try to grab a sample? Lava pits you have to avoid.
All Exo life in ED:O is sedentary and boring (other than ‘goids). Different colors of the same thing over and over. We need close binary stars siphoning material off each other. Proto-planetary disks. Broken up moons with massive chunks. Surfaces being actively cratered with meteorites. Yes, ED makes beautiful planets and surfaces…but it’s yet another case of Galactic width at only a few inches deep.
The best things I saw exploring were not the crystalline structures floating in space left there to be found by mathematical chance…the best things were the things I wasn’t supposed to see. The “mistakes” in the generation algorithm. The planets that were far too close together. The hot Jupiter too close to the star. The moon so close to the ring you could see the rocks whiz by. Those are the best sights.
Final thoughts on Exobio and exploration:
This is not a quick way to make money. It’s weeks driving out to unexplored space, thousands of light years out, thousands of honks, scans, landings, samples, jumps, etc. It’s monotonous and it can’t really be broken up. When you get tired of it, it’s hundreds of jumps to get back.
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I’m highly ambivalent about it.*
I love being out in the dark. Wondering what the next system will hold. Wondering, maybe, this is a system that will have something interesting. Odds are bad…probably less than 0.005 of systems had something I wanted to go out of my way and visit.
I despise the monotony. I miss CG’s. Every NSP has been picked off somehow (gotta be a software “hack” for that, I don’t see how some folks repeatedly manage to find all the goodies). Can’t break it up if you suddenly get sick of it.
MUST HAVE TOOLS!
Must have. Tells you so much information about a system. Body payout, lifesigns, landable, rings, logging, notes, distances…so much valuable info. Absolute must have for explorers.
I added on several of the tools, but the most important will be BioInsights and Signal Monitor. Set them up to voice alert to you when something worthy pops up. Truly wish I'd had this on my other exploration runs, no telling what I passed up because I didn't know it was there.
Lastly, my vacation photos:
(Read no further unless you want to hear me gripe a little)
Things I think ought to be added or fixed:
The aforementioned boring life types.
Could we please get a box laser-painted or whatever on the surface under the ship’s SRV dock? So I know exactly where to park instead of having to creep back and forth a little to fit the SRV in some undefined space? Why does the ship always make my SRV face backwards?
The rubberbanding of the SRV drives are irritating. Doesn’t go…doesn’t go…Spinning Wheels Like Crazy!!11 Any way this can be corrected to have I dunno…traction control? Instant, correct torque? Irritating.
MULTI-SAMPLE genetic sampler. I don’t care…make it an engineering add-on or something. I lost track of how many samples I passed up or lost because I couldn’t re-locate the one I passed up 20 minutes before to complete the 3-sample requirement. Irritating as heck, and costly in both time and credits.
Closely related to the previous – Surface Markers!!! Find something you need to return to? Run across a bio you want to remember? Drop a quick surface marker so you know where to return to it! I’d forego the previous (grudgingly) if we could put a surface marker down. Same for Surface scans – Osseus over here, but Fungoida is a tiny patch a quarter the way around the planet. Drop a marker so you know where to fly. Maybe they vanish after departing the system?
Could we get a DELETE SAMPLE (Y/N)? instead of just a press of the button? I lost samples because of being forced to watch the completion of the sample sending animation and mashing the ‘collect sample’ button immediately after hopping out of the SRV. A (Y/N) would prevent accidental deletion. Probably cost me 40 million just because I got into a groove and mashed the button without thinking.
Follow me for the SRV. Get out, walk, select “follow me” for the SRV in the suit menu, and it stays 6 meters behind you so you can walk wherever with the SRV close by.
Pick me up for the SRV. Walk a good distance away from the ship. Select “pick me up” from the suit menu, the SRV drops and drives over to you.
1 I skipped a LOT of bio. I was in it for seeing new stuff before I stepped away, not the same old boring tufts of grass. Even after the pay bump I left plenty of Bio unscanned. Too hard to find, too far to fly, only one signal, etc. I probably only collected 15-20%% of the total exobio I found.
