Issues with Unknown Signals, wasting my time.

Some of these Unknown Signals have a thruster or a gyroscope combination on them with a detector inside of them that activates it when the player gets to a certain proximity of this particular type of Unknown Signal. There are several variants but they all suffer from the same problem: They have no real way of controlling where they go, they can only activate their thruster or gyrate around wildly as if driven by an unknown force that is outside of physics Space Engineers know of.

These Unknown Signals occur in space and on planets or near them in orbit, and the result is inevitably the same: If my Space Engineer gets too close and bumps the silly thing I may as well give up and go home. These Unknown Signals are a total waste of time if they're just going to get subjected to random physics imparted by the player trying to maneuver to their button panel or whatever cargo they contain on them.

I would like for Keen to improve these Unknown Signals or at least turn off the time-wasting variety, as there appears to be no really realistic means of catching onto them and trying for a bonus prize, which I thought was the original design goal. I did not think Keen intended them to become space pinball debris!

These Unknown Signals waste a lot of my time, please improve them so that they actually can maneuver somewhat better and actually have a program that tries to evade the Space Engineer in a meaningful and challenging way. These space pinballs just clutter my view up every time I discover an Unknown Signal turns out to be the joke variety. Seems like a rather bad joke I would prefer to turn the joke ones off entirely.

Cheers ...

BrickVoid

 

use tractor beam mod lol

 

There are several ways to catch them:

• The detector detects the proximity of an astronaut only. Use a ship or a drone with a landing gear set to autolock, and it won't trigger.
  
• Shoot the thruster before approaching.
• Just chase it and keep trying to hit the switch. It will stop once you've hit the switch. It's a minor challenge, but definitely not impossible, since astronauts accelerate faster, have higher maximum velocity, and turn faster than anything else.

 

There are cases where it doesn't stop after hitting the switch. Also some Unknown Signals have what appear to be multiple switches. Hitting one is hard enough, hitting multiple is definitely damned near impossible. It's not as easy as downloading a mod or building a drone, I am talking about early game, before having had a chance to gather some proper resources.

The Landing gear approach seems feasible, but it's logical to theorize that Keen would eventually nerf this tactic as well. As for shooting them, I tried, the bullets go all over the place and hit anywhere but the thruster because the Unknown Signal wobbles all over the place like the space debris it should be. Shooting them isn't possible anyway if I have weapons disabled.

Cheers ...

BrickVoid

 

You only have to hit the switch that's marked in the GPS.

I'm wondering why you think Keen would "nerf" anything here, and why "as well". As far as I know, the only changes they've made to the pods since they were introduced were: to reduce their spawn frequency, mostly because of widespread complaints they were spawning so frequently that they were actually irritating; and to give a config option to disable them entirely, since some hardcore survival players felt the injection of resources made things too easy. The "joker" pods with gyroscopes and engines are a minority. Most pods just stay put when they spawn in space, and quickly come to rest when they spawn over a planet. They're mostly very easy to capture, if you just bother to try, with the occasional "joker" that you can capture if you really want to put the effort into it. They're like chests in a roguelike dungeon crawler: four out of five have some minor treasure; and one out of five turns out to be a mimic of a chest that you can defeat for some minor treasure. This is a minor gamble, where the odds strongly favor the gambler.

I'm wondering if you're laboring under a misconception:

The rewards for catching a pod are the contents of the small container (just common components and occasionally a second-tier hand tool), a bit of uranium, and the components the pod itself is made from, plus you get a chance at a random, cosmetic skin component. The "joker" pods are slightly more valuable, but only in that they've got the components for gyros and thrusters. There's no "bonus prize" beyond any of that. In survival terms, it's a gamble of resources consumed to reach a pod versus resources claimed from the pod. It's a gamble where you'll usually win, and if it's too much trouble to go chasing the "joker" pods, you're just out whatever hydrogen, oxygen, and uranium you expended in the few seconds it takes to travel two kilometers. If you're so early in a survival game that you're worried about that level of resource consumption, you could just ignore the pods. There is no "bonus prize" you'll miss.

This doesn't sound like a bug, just a complaint about a minigame you're not good at and don't like.

If you really, really don't like the "joker" pods, you could work out which of the prefab blueprints produce those, and delete them, and copy and rename one of the other pods to replace them. Meanwhile, one of the most common complaints about SE is the lack of gameplay, and I don't think many people want them to eliminate a mildly entertaining mini-game.

 

The problem remains that the gyroscope-based pods spin, spin is not something that was ever originally intended to be in grinding something down. No matter how hard I tried I never could reliably hit the thruster for long enough to grind it away to nothing. As these joke pods are beyond a joke for me, I have started to ignore all such pods for the time being. A lot of them just descend to go rot on the nearby planet and if I'm in space, I certainly don't care about them. The rest are just not worth it to go after. I do thank you for your insights, however, I might possibly make use of them at a later date.

I still take the position that it IS a bug if it takes too much of my time to go after one type of these pods. Whether Keen decides to fix them so that there's a limitation on how much evasion they will attempt is up to Keen, not you nor I. I'm just stating my dissatisfaction with the "joke" pods, and my belief that it's a bug that wasn't intended. The "fix" could be as simple as tweaking the gyroscope's settings so that the twisting isn't quite so wild. And it probably wouldn't be that great of a tweak, either.

Edit to add: it also certainly isn't easy if you misjudge the distance between yourself and the object and fire your suit thrusters a microsecond too late to avoid colliding with it, because you're too busy trying to match it's spin, which is also never possible in this game. Colliding with it imparts your speed and velocity - partially at least - onto the pod's own. Not a good time after that happens.

Cheers ...

BrickVoid