You can also use your mining laser to hollow out any mounds or stacks you come across, too. Which are also helpful ways of hiding from the sentinels as well…
Another things that seems to have changed is asteroid yield. I’m never willing to sacrifice storage on my early, small ships for a mining beam, so I “asteroid mine” with a photon cannon (which also has the benefit of not using fuels). That’s become less effective post-patch; each asteroid produces much less material than it used to – I don’t know if that’s true if you’re using a beam or not.
I’ve tried this for several hours now, and I’ve never gotten a distress call from an Operations Center or Manufacturing Facility–only from Transmission Towers, which you can’t search for and seem to have to luck into. Anybody got a secret for finding either the Transmission Towers or the crashed ships themselves?
Damn, I was sure that was the way it worked for me.
Steam thread here on finding ships:
Looks like its a matter of luck depending on the planet but there are some ideas on how to find them:
Spadonium is only found in barren biomes, like deserts. Not barren planets. It is obtained from dried-out cactii.
While that’s true, it’s rare enough that if barren isn’t the primary biome of the planet, you may be looking for a long time. Assuming you’re hyperdrive-capable, the easiest way to find it is to keep jumping into systems, scan every planet, and land on the ones that actually scan as containing Spadonium. I’ve found one about every other system, so they’re not incredibly rare. So far as I know, this is the only time you’ll ever need that particular “element,” so once you’ve got your science terminal, you can just sell the rest.
Guess I got lucky, then. First jump after loading my save was to a system with a claimable base on one planet and another planet that’s comprised almost entirely of desert. Cactii everywhere, including ones that contain spadonium.
There’s a third planet that’s almost literally barren: no plants, no animals, no points of interest, very little in the way of resources, and a life support draining thin atmosphere. Not a place where one will find spadonium.
You know, I’ve played the game since the week after launch, and I tend to agree with what Beef said. The idea of the game is exploration and continuing to follow the Atlas. It’s odd that I’m expected to keep hopping back to my old base. I’m looking forward to finally scraping enough money together to buy a decent freighter, which seems more in line with the whole “constant movement along the Path” than having a home base. From what I understand, however, the freighter customization isn’t nearly as good as the base. That does seem to be more along the lines of the Hello Games guys retrofitting the base building concept because it worked in other games that didn’t piss the consumer base off.
Having a base on a lush planet with a lot of resources is great because you can just teleport back to it from the space station in whatever system you are in, restock, and teleport back to your frontier. The excitement of building and having a cool looking base wears off quickly, but the utility of a single location to pop back to for most of the resources you will ever need can’t be overstated.
Also, because you cannot currently teleport to or from a freighter, a base is even more valuable and practical.
Not to mention that the first blueprint the construction NPC gives is a remote teleporter and teleporting brings your ship with you. I assume teleporting from a different system saves a warp core.
Plus bases can worked by NPCs other than the constructor. Science was mentioned upthread and I’ve run into an armorer offering his services.
Slight spoiler, maybe, but you should be doing the “quests” that your base workers give you fairly early in the game, including obtaining the various other workers (and doing their quests). There are several fairly basic technologies from the pre-patch world that are now given out only as base-construction worker task rewards.
I’m still looking for a good place to put that remote teleporter.
Don’t I know it. Before I planted down my base, I had just left a Vykeen system with an armorer. Now I built the armorer station and I’ve hit seven or eight Gek or Korvax systems in a row. Grumblegrumblegrumble.
Yes, teleporting between systems requires no ship resources.
There’s also a farming specialist you can hire to teach you how to grow resources within your base, such as: gravitino balls, candensium, fervidium, mordite, spadonium, coryzagen, coprite, and albumen pearls.
Also, you know all those Korvax Cubes and Gek Charms that you used to throw away or sell before the patch? You will be asked for them during certain quests you are given by your “workers”, so you should now keep them…unless you relish searching the globe for them.
Okay, where the heck can I find radioactive biomes?
Check a few systems, radioactive planets aren’t particularly unusual. I’m not sure a radioactive biome can even occur on a non-radioactive planet. Scan for the exotic (Candesium, maybe?) from space.
My problem of the day/week: Where are the ()&#@(& hyperdrive upgrades? These used to drop like candy from every ship-tech producing source, but I’ve now done the entire base quest tree for every class up to the ones that start requiring resources from red or green stars. I’ve been in dozens of systems, checked abandoned buildings, op centers, manufacturing facilities, Polo and Nada, the quest givers at stations, etc., and don’t have even a single hyperdrive (as opposed to pulse jet) upgrade. I ONCE found a functional drive on a crashed ship, but that doesn’t give you the blueprint, and the game did the ()#@() “fly away for a second to get something you need to repair the ship, and the crash disappears while you’re gone” fun.
Anybody know where these upgrades come from post-patch? I’ve opened more than a hundred of those “debris” rocket parts on various planets, and I don’t even have one of the three yet. The chances that I’m just “unlucky” are getting close to zero at this point, there must be something specific I need to do.
Major update news leaked! Mechanic’s terminal coming, which will be used for constructing ATVs similar to those in Elite: Dangerous.
Path Finder has gone live! Notable changes: [ul][li]Owning Multiple Ships[/li][li]Base Sharing Online[/li][li]Steam Workshop Integration[/li][li]New Vehicles – 3x Exocraft[/li][li]Permadeath Mode[/li][li]Build and Share Vehicle Race Tracks[/li][li]Ship Specialisations and Classes[/li][li]New currency and shops with Traders for tech and constructs[/li][li]Double the the amount of variety in Base Building[/li][li]Multi-tool Specialization and Classes[/li][li]New Weapons and Weapon Modes[/li][li]Photo Mode[/li][li]Improved Discovery Menu[/li][*]Most requested Quality of Life Improvements[/ul]
I remain hugely critical of how Hello Games handled the initial release, but I must say that this and the previous update have been gigantic improvements across the board (UI improvements, substantial new features, visual and performance, etc.).
But my main comment is: their release notes page is really, really well-done. They obviously spent a lot of time on their presentation of the changes, including a well-produced video. Other developers should take note.
Steam workshop support is likely to be HUGE for this game.