Regolith Survey Corps: Join Today!

The idea is to crowd-source composition and location data about rocks, gems and salvage (eventually) in the verse and serve it back to the community in the form of charts and tables.

Here are some examples:

🪨 Ore Table 🪨 Rock Table 🪨 Rock Location Table 💎 ROC / hand Mining Ore Table

How does it work?

Enlisted members of the Survey Corps will have the option to add their rock/gem/cluster scans to the global survey. When this happens it generates charts that others can use to plan their mining ops and learn about places in the verse.

Scans are given a score for completeness and a bonus multiplier for being in a location that has less data. This is to encourage users to scan in places that are less well known.

Why is this necessary?

In previous versions of Star Citizen the information about where minerals could be found were baked into the game's XML files. This meant that with a little effort we could extract these values and publish the results. This was convenient and 100% accurate.

Unfortunately the data has now been moved onto the server where we do not have access to it. The only option left is to scout and survey for ourselves and share those results with each other.

Could this be fun?

Maybe? For those of us who have spent years waiting for an exploration mechanic from CIG I hope the Survey Corps creates a kind of "light exploration experience". Maybe this will help tide us over until we get a more official mechanic.

Isn't this error-prone?

Sure, but so is surveying in the real world. Prospectors looking for gold during the 1848 gold rush had to do science and make guesses about what was under the earth and where to dig. They were often wrong and had to correct the data. They couldn't crack open the game files for earth and pull out distribution information.

I really like the idea of industrial users making decisions about where to go based on data submitted by other users. Time will tell if this is a good idea or not.

What about erroneous or misleading data?

Again, that's a problem in the real world too. We'll start by detecting and excluding data that is more than a certain standard deviation from the mean. We also have the ability to permanently exclude a user's data that is determined to be false or error-prone.

I expect this algorithm will evolve and shift a lot over time. We'll never catch it all the problems but hopefully we can minimize them.

How can I help?

Sign up today and start adding your scans to the survey. The more data we have the better the charts will be. Also send us feedback about what you like and how we could do better.

This is all a big experiment so I expect there will be some missteps and we'll need to adjust. More charts, graphs and analysis to come!

https://regolith.rocks