Breaking Ground: Bring a Mun Stone on the Mun back to Kerbin

[bewing]

25 minutes ago, Odyssey said:

How do you know there's no Sandstone?  I believe you cause I just spent a while looking for it, but how do you know?

Actually, there should be sandstone. To know for sure which ROCs are on which CBs, look in your rocsdef.cfg file. Some ROCs are hard to see as you drive around. Some are a bit more rare than others. Finding them is supposed to be a bit of a challenge, requiring you to do a lot of roving. As I said above, the first time you go looking for them, you may want to turn on the indicators in your Cheat Menu. Then you can come to know exactly what you are looking for with the indicators turned off.

 

[Guest]

I found it not to work if you're game was used before Breaking Ground.

I had to restart mine for it to work

[Serenity]

2 hours ago, The Doodling Astronaut said:

I found it not to work if you're game was used before Breaking Ground.

I had to restart mine for it to work

Read my post in first page.There is a fix and it t should work for old saves.At least it works for Kerbin, i am sure it works in other planets too since i dont see many posting this problem.

Edited June 3, 2019 by Boyster

[KerikBalm]

I had to turn off ground scatters to find a mun stone. I didn't have a rover (got it during the first mun landing on a career save, had no fairings, limited parts). I panned the camera around and around ,and couldn't find anything. Due to terrain, there was a low area where I couldn't get the camera panned over. I sent a kerbal there with RCS, and found 1 mun stone, and 2 of the crater features(I think 1 large, 1 small, but without a rover arm, there was nothing I could do with those) in a relatively small area. Then it took a while to figure out how to pick up the mun stone (stood right on top of it, then right clicked the kerbal to pick it up).

2.6km away from the landing site...yeesh... but I got what I needed for the contract (and some science). The .cfg files show they have a frequency of 5, and I find geysers and other features with a frequency of 0.1... so they should be 50x as abundant... but they are so small... much harder to spot than an erupting geyser:

The mun stone for comparison would be about the size of the windows on the plane...

On 6/1/2019 at 7:26 PM, capran said:

The ground station experiments still have not completed. One of them is now over 5000%. LOL!

I also had a contract to get 50% science from a Goob experiment. While I was doing old standard science, I had to time warp a bit for the energy to transmit (forgot to take a battery). When I checked the experiment, it showed 298%... and I had only been there a short while (even with the time warping for transmission power)... it seems something's bugged in the display. I'd expect it to be at most 0.298%

[nestor]

On 6/2/2019 at 1:39 PM, jarmonik said:

There is no Green Sandstone on Minmus. I found Olivine Formation but no sandstone. It's pretty fustrating to try to find something that isn't there. Altough, I had luck with Mun Stone.

We are looking at these reports about players having a hard time finding the Green Sandstone. Could you tell me in which biomes you looked? And what's your terrain detail settings set to?

Thanks

[Superfluous J]

17 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

I had to turn off ground scatters

It could be worse. I had to read this to remember you could turn then off...

[mystifeid]

On 6/3/2019 at 10:03 AM, bewing said:

Actually, there should be sandstone. To know for sure which ROCs are on which CBs, look in your rocsdef.cfg file. Some ROCs are hard to see as you drive around. Some are a bit more rare than others. Finding them is supposed to be a bit of a challenge, requiring you to do a lot of roving. As I said above, the first time you go looking for them, you may want to turn on the indicators in your Cheat Menu. Then you can come to know exactly what you are looking for with the indicators turned off.

 

Hard to see?? I drove completely around the Greater Flats and found two Olivine formations which were pretty hard to spot.

Mercifully your tip about turning the ROC finder on instantly paid off and I finally found a green sandstone not far from where the rover had originally landed.

This is the green sandstone from about fifty metres away. It's quite invisible.

Scanning the little sucker. Remind me never to take contracts to find these again.

[Geschosskopf]

On 6/2/2019 at 8:43 AM, VBlackshadow said:

I have been driving a rover around the mun for several hours at this point, on a new save, and haven't seen a single one of these things, not even in the distance somewhere. Nothing scannable. Just the same endless featureless repetitive gray. Nothing on minmus either. This has got to be the most tedious and infuriating waste of time I've ever experienced in this game.

Are you in the right biome?

When I got this same "return Mun Stone" contract, it said such rocks were abundant in the Lowlands, Midland Craters, and Canyon biomes.  From this I infer that the the distribution of these features is not uniform across a planet but is tied to specific biomes.

I don't know, however, as I haven't yet gone to look.  But I do intend to start looking in the recommended biomes.

[jarmonik]

21 hours ago, nestor said:

We are looking at these reports about players having a hard time finding the Green Sandstone. Could you tell me in which biomes you looked? And what's your terrain detail settings set to?

Thanks

 

I have tried terrain details of "Default" and "High". Other graphics settings are set to "high" too. Terrain scatters at 50%.  I found the green sandstone using the cheat mode. Like the screen shots form above shows, it's close to invisible. If you are hovering over the stone at 100 meters it may go easily unnoticed unless ground shadows give it a way. Also I didn't spend that much of time to search the "empty" space of the flats, I looked into the areas where the terrain scatters were. (i.e. the edge area of the flats, not the center of it). I never really looked anything that small. Also, the density of the stone is way too small to be found by accident. I found 5-6 blueberries from Duna, even if it's small, it's not too difficult to find, density appears to be pretty high.

Biomes used for searching sands stone: Flats, Great Flats, Greater Flats, Lesser Flats.  Time spend searching the sandstone about 5h.

Edited June 4, 2019 by jarmonik

[capran]

21 hours ago, nestor said:

We are looking at these reports about players having a hard time finding the Green Sandstone. Could you tell me in which biomes you looked? And what's your terrain detail settings set to?

Thanks

I did end up finding the Green Sandstone in the Lesser Minmus Flats. I had to use the cheat menu ROC finder option. 

[mindstalker]

On 6/4/2019 at 7:13 PM, capran said:

I did end up finding the Green Sandstone in the Lesser Minmus Flats. I had to use the cheat menu ROC finder option. 

Yes, at this point I'd almost consider this a bug. The green sandstone exist, but there seems to be just 1 or 2 on the entire planet and next to impossible to find without using cheats. As its the first or one of the first contracts of this type offered its difficulty level far outweights its payout and its timing in the game. Increase the frequency of green sandstones by 10X at least.

Edited June 8, 2019 by mindstalker

[OrbitsR4Sissies]

It took me a little bit of fiddling with camera, but I've had two contracts to find and retrieve Green Sandstone and a Mun Stone with no issues in completion. This was a new game save for 1.7.1. The Mun Stone was found by one of my rovers, who sat by it to mark it out for my crewed lander to find it.

To pick one up with a Kerbal, you have to basically make contact with it--as in stand atop it.

My Mun Stone was located in a biome outside of the contract's recommendation, which still satisfied things.

My terrain scatter is set to very low, to the point where hardly any appear. Helps a great deal. Half-res on graphics settings and also bumped up ambient light. No use of the Cheats. Just my Mark One Eyeball.

On Mimmus I found lots of the larger rock piles (guessing those are the Olivine). And even climbed one.

It would be nice that, if you have a Kerbal atop a surface feature it cannot pick up, that there is some informational message that suggests that more specific tools may be needed to get more data. Or, at least, the Kerbal is told what the feature is, although that yields no science but gives you an option to mark it on the Map for later study.

Edited June 8, 2019 by OrbitsR4Sissies
Clarifying

[lordqarlyn]

Here's something I noticed when I was doing my first Mun landing with the Breaking Ground pack, terrain scatter features don't cast shadows, however, Mun stone features did. That caught my eye right away, that is, seeing what I thought from above were merely terrain scatter features but some of them were casting shadows. I was landing while the sun was nearly at horizon so things were casting long shadows. I attempted to guide my lander to one of them, but being still early tech and a while since I played and just newly experienced kerbalnauts it was a little tricky for me. For now I've turned off scatter until I get used to what Mun Stone features look like. Then I will turn back on terrain scatter. I'm one of those weirdos who like terrain scatter, it does add a tiny amount of surface features to otherwise nearly featureless surfaces.

Anyway, if you happen to have terrain scatter on, look for terrain features that are casting shadows.

[Superfluous J]

On 6/8/2019 at 2:24 PM, OrbitsR4Sissies said:

Or, at least, the Kerbal is told what the feature is, although that yields no science but gives you an option to mark it on the Map for later study.

I kind of like the idea that, once a feature is within say 100 meters of you, it gets put on a list of things that a contract can be created for "We were analyzing old footage and found something interesting. It was near sector 2Y-GGA. Go out there and bring it home." with a waypoint. The waypoint will be not exactly at the rock, maybe within 2000 meters so it's in physics range.

[mindstalker]

3 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

I kind of like the idea that, once a feature is within say 100 meters of you, it gets put on a list of things that a contract can be created for "We were analyzing old footage and found something interesting. It was near sector 2Y-GGA. Go out there and bring it home." with a waypoint. The waypoint will be not exactly at the rock, maybe within 2000 meters so it's in physics range.

Yes. I spent most of yesterday trying to find a sandstone on Minmus with no luck.  Eventually I found a few using the RocFinder, but was just using it to guage how difficult. I can't find a setting that allows me to see the sandstone farther than 200m .  After a few passes of trying to find the sandstone that I knew where it was pretending I didn't, I gave up. My plan was to get an idea of how to find them and go back and do it for real. Canceled the contract, as its simply not worth it, at least for my crappy monitor. Not sure.

[capran]

@SQUAD

At this point, it seems to me this Breaking Ground DLC, while having some good stuff (robotics are good, scanning arm is good, finally inventory), feels like a beta. OK, so they gave us more stuff to do on planets and moons! YAY! AWESOME! But the rocks/formations/etc. are too hard to find, and even when you do find them, you can't just pick them up and put them in your inventory the same way you do with ground stations? Seriously? You guys created the inventory system (FINALLY) and stuff to drop and pick up, but the rocks can't be put in your inventory? WTH?

[Geschosskopf]

1 hour ago, capran said:

@SQUAD

At this point, it seems to me this Breaking Ground DLC, while having some good stuff (robotics are good, scanning arm is good, finally inventory), feels like a beta. OK, so they gave us more stuff to do on planets and moons! YAY! AWESOME! But the rocks/formations/etc. are too hard to find, and even when you do find them, you can't just pick them up and put them in your inventory the same way you do with ground stations? Seriously? You guys created the inventory system (FINALLY) and stuff to drop and pick up, but the rocks can't be put in your inventory? WTH?

The reason for this is pretty simple.  The surface features use the same mechanic as all the ship-mounted science instruments and crew/EVA reports.  That is 1) run the experiment, 2) get the report pop-up, 3) decide to keep or transmit.  And if you keep it, you can store it in and move it between pods and containers.  The scanning arms are no different at all from a Science Jr. in this way.  And picking up a rock differs only in that the rock vanishes from the map.  The rock in your pocket simply becomes just another science report, same a from a thermometer.  This is why, if you try to board a ship with a rock in your pocket when the ship already has a rock aboard, so you "dump the experiment and board anyway", the rock does not disappear.

I can live with all this.  What really bugs me is that you can only get science for a specific type of surface feature exactly ONCE, and there's no difference between taking a Mun Stone back to Kerbin and scanning it with a rover arm.  So, for example, suppose you go to Mun as soon as possible, in a minimal ship without a rover.  While there, you bring home a Mun Stone.  That gives you ALL the science for ALL Mun Stones on ALL of Mun.  If you go back later with a rover equipped with a scanning arm and scan another Mun Stone, you get ZERO science because you already got everything from the one you took home.  Same goes for other features.  If you use the arm on a single "Large Mun Crater", you're done with them.  No point in stopping at any others.  The ROCs are not per-biome, but per-planet.

So on Mun, there's no point in sending more than 1 rover.  And it really doesn't matter where you land it.  You almost certainly find all 3 known types of ROCs within a 10km radius of your ship.  And once you've found a single example of one type, there's absolutely no point in every touching another example of that type again.

[bigcalm]

Yeah I found this a bit confusing, but the KSPedia sorted me out.

Essentially there's two types of surface features - big ones and small ones.  Small ones, like a Mun Stone, can be picked up.  I must have spent 20 minutes trying to pick up a big one!  Turning off terrain scatter is highly recommended as well, as the Mun Stone (and the big one too) looks really similar to terrain scatters, and neither are particularly abundant.

[capran]

1 hour ago, bigcalm said:

Yeah I found this a bit confusing, but the KSPedia sorted me out.

Essentially there's two types of surface features - big ones and small ones.  Small ones, like a Mun Stone, can be picked up.  I must have spent 20 minutes trying to pick up a big one!  Turning off terrain scatter is highly recommended as well, as the Mun Stone (and the big one too) looks really similar to terrain scatters, and neither are particularly abundant.

They really need to fix this. Either remove terrain scatters, or merge them with the new rocks and such. Maybe some of the current "terrain scatter" items are just not interesting when scanned and will result in no or very little science compared to a Mun Stone or something.

[lordqarlyn]

Quote

I can live with all this.  What really bugs me is that you can only get science for a specific type of surface feature exactly ONCE, and there's no difference between taking a Mun Stone back to Kerbin and scanning it with a rover arm.  So, for example, suppose you go to Mun as soon as possible, in a minimal ship without a rover.  While there, you bring home a Mun Stone.  That gives you ALL the science for ALL Mun Stones on ALL of Mun.  If you go back later with a rover equipped with a scanning arm and scan another Mun Stone, you get ZERO science because you already got everything from the one you took home.  Same goes for other features.  If you use the arm on a single "Large Mun Crater", you're done with them.  No point in stopping at any others.  The ROCs are not per-biome, but per-planet.

Dude I'm with you. It would be nice if there was a biome-specific "stone" for each biome. Or, to get the full science value, you would have to make multiple visits and collect multiple stones. 

 

I hate bringing other games, but again I love how No Man's Sky did the planets. I'd love to see that method implemented in KSP. Not only would the potential to have many good science value collectibles, the terrain features would be so cool; there would be real canyons, extensive caves, ravines, real mountains (though I suppose Kerbin has mountains lol). With much fewer bodies in game, they could do a lot of interesting things with it.

[Geschosskopf]

5 hours ago, lordqarlyn said:

Dude I'm with you. It would be nice if there was a biome-specific "stone" for each biome. Or, to get the full science value, you would have to make multiple visits and collect multiple stones. 

I think making the surface features work per-biome, like surface samples, would a good compromise between the current level of 1-and-doneness OT1H, and allowing players to milk them for too much science.  Besides, you'd think rocks from different biomes would have different chemical compositions so should provide additional science.

5 hours ago, lordqarlyn said:

I hate bringing other games, but again I love how No Man's Sky did the planets. I'd love to see that method implemented in KSP. Not only would the potential to have many good science value collectibles, the terrain features would be so cool; there would be real canyons, extensive caves, ravines, real mountains (though I suppose Kerbin has mountains lol). With much fewer bodies in game, they could do a lot of interesting things with it.

I have asked for deformable terrain many times.  I don't want anything fancy, just the ability to bulldoze the ground flat in a small area just to help with base-building.  But I've been told that even though Unity supports this, it would add too much overhead keeping track of the terrain changes.

[OrbitsR4Sissies]

On 6/11/2019 at 7:02 PM, Geschosskopf said:

The reason for this is pretty simple.  The surface features use the same mechanic as all the ship-mounted science instruments and crew/EVA reports.  That is 1) run the experiment, 2) get the report pop-up, 3) decide to keep or transmit.  And if you keep it, you can store it in and move it between pods and containers.  The scanning arms are no different at all from a Science Jr. in this way.  And picking up a rock differs only in that the rock vanishes from the map.  The rock in your pocket simply becomes just another science report, same a from a thermometer.  This is why, if you try to board a ship with a rock in your pocket when the ship already has a rock aboard, so you "dump the experiment and board anyway", the rock does not disappear.

I can live with all this.  What really bugs me is that you can only get science for a specific type of surface feature exactly ONCE, and there's no difference between taking a Mun Stone back to Kerbin and scanning it with a rover arm.  So, for example, suppose you go to Mun as soon as possible, in a minimal ship without a rover.  While there, you bring home a Mun Stone.  That gives you ALL the science for ALL Mun Stones on ALL of Mun.  If you go back later with a rover equipped with a scanning arm and scan another Mun Stone, you get ZERO science because you already got everything from the one you took home.  Same goes for other features.  If you use the arm on a single "Large Mun Crater", you're done with them.  No point in stopping at any others.  The ROCs are not per-biome, but per-planet.

So on Mun, there's no point in sending more than 1 rover.  And it really doesn't matter where you land it.  You almost certainly find all 3 known types of ROCs within a 10km radius of your ship.  And once you've found a single example of one type, there's absolutely no point in every touching another example of that type again.

I'm a little disappointed about this, too. But when playing at maximum science, one scan is a LOT of science points. I'd prefer a per-biome science yield (with lower data as more are found, one per biome) as traditional experiments have done.

Different types of collectible stones (that is, adding more to the game) would also be an alternative. I'm all for more of these things to find.

Still trying to work out the Deployed Science's result, which also appear to be one-per-planet. Getting the seismometer science (by designing my cruise stages as probes and slamming them at the Mun) has been IMMENSELY SATISFYING (Chatterer and all kinds of stuff go NUTS like a jackpot payoff with the system messages flashing and I can't stop laughing when it happens).

I'm playing at the lowest science (10%) throughout, but things are working out OK. I like traveling.

While the surface features are one-and-done, they are generally one-and-done per rover arm type. CRSY will give some science, SPRT a bit more and OP-E will give a bit more on the same object.

While sending more than one rover seems pointless, I've used several. First, I'm refining my rover tech. And they are a great help in finding collectible stones or other items far faster for Kerbals to pick up for contracts. I find one, and park the rover right next to it as a landing target. You can also use the rover this way (with an Experiments Storage Bay) to collect science along the way for a Kerbal to retrieve.

Edited June 13, 2019 by OrbitsR4Sissies

[lordqarlyn]

1 hour ago, Geschosskopf said:

I have asked for deformable terrain many times.  I don't want anything fancy, just the ability to bulldoze the ground flat in a small area just to help with base-building.  But I've been told that even though Unity supports this, it would add too much overhead keeping track of the terrain changes.

Heck, I'm not even asking for deformable terrain, just more featured and varied terrain. But deformable would be cool. While I myself am not much good at base building, I know many players are and love it.