Lots of stuff probably? Did you accept the 'Atlas' quest right at the start, when you first played the game and you had your ship to fix up?

On my first test game (while i was building up a working modlist) i decided to not follow it and did not get a 'path' to follow outside of my starting system.

Also i think in general the game works best when not playing it as a 'best way to rush to the centre' game, and just slowly working stuff out yourself. I've put 80 hours in (give or take) and still have that starting multi-tool not having found any others to upgrade too.

I like getting 100% for the exploration data on planets, i like trying to learn as many words as possible and uncover the history of the games aliens. There are quite a few things to do in truth if you are happy to not rush to the centre.

Thanks for your suggestions---I'm in no hurry, but looking for something other than random systems.
I don't remember if I joined Atlas, but I get frequent encouraaging messages from Atlas at their towers.
Someone wrote that you see floating labs with Atlas passes?
Exploring 100% of a planet--it's repetitious? Are these generated landscapes stored on my computer, or just erased when I leave?

No, not stored on your computer. The criteria for generating the planet and the systems are stored locally. And the product of the algorithm will be similar enough that if two people drop down on the same planet, the rock and formations should typically be so similar you can't tell them apart. It's sort of an interesting question if some static "tweaking" that replaced certain solution-based functions with actual random values could create planets for players that are very different (so one player could have a huge mountain where another has a lake, etc). But we don't know, and certainly won't know until Sony's "support agreement" with HG expires (around January next year).

..You're supposed to get the v1 Atlas pass (to have an easier time getting at suspension fluid, warp engine fuel, and so on) on either the first Atlas station, or at the first "Space Anomaly" system. Outside of that, you will get some of the critical blueprints from scanning in space (for the warp-cores and antimatter, for example), that then finds you a manufacturing plant. Or from exploring on planets with hazards - the first "random" blueprint on an extreme hazard planet is going to be a shield for the planet hazard if you don't have one already, for example.

And the only way to avoid either the space-anomaly or the atlas station happening after the first warp now is to essentially fly down to one planet immediately, leave the ship, and never go into space again. If you, on the other hand, go into the cockpit at some point, the anomaly icon or the atlas station icon will pop up. You can't hide from the "anomalous object" popup in the hud.

Before the patch, there was one way to break these "first blueprint quests", which was to escape the system with the anomaly, monolith or factory, etc. And then ignore the new waypoint that would point to a new station (which the game would home in on during the instant you would select the starmap - whether you had fuel in the warp-drive or not, this would be your first location on the starmap). Or basically never trigger a system-scan in the ship again, in spite of the game prompting you to do so every five seconds, while you can trigger these "random first blueprint quest" missions.

So basically the only way you would have these kinds of problems is if you are as retarded as Sony's tester groups. And I mean no disrespect to people who actually have braindamage or a clinical condition they cannot be blamed for themselves, that genuinely impairs their brain. Rather than what happens with Sony's testers, who are retarded in spite of not actually having a valid excuse. Since even a severely reduced person still would not have had any problems with finding the first blueprint in this game. It is technically impossible to miss if you don't land on a planet and walk around in circles while shooting your laser in the air or something.

*sigh* Sorry about that... Anyway. Other than for the 100% fauna achievement, which is necessary to get past level... 4? to get the last milestone rank - there's no real reason to keep scanning everything. Plants and so on can be scanned if you want to name them. Finding all buildings on a planet is completely pointless, and can't really be done anyway - there's no meter in the game, no way to actually rank it or find out when it's a 100%. There's no reward for that, etc.

But I've ended up on some planets that I've spent enough time on walking around that by the end of an hour or so, I'd be missing a critter in a cave, or something like that. And then went hunting that last creature to get the credits for a full fauna upload to the Atlas database.

And to do that, you could probably imagine that you need to explore about a 1 degree slice of the planet in a 5 minute radius. There are exceptions to that if the terrain is more complicated, and so on, but usually it's mechanically very easy to complete these goals.

Interesting. ...I have lots of blueprints, I think I saw an anomaly system once but lost it while clicking around; I don't remember ever seeing an atlas station.
Problem: Opening doors which say steel sealed. I opened one once with the multitool laser, forgot what it took and can't open now. One of the tool blueprints?

Either the grenades or the mass driver :)

Anyway. Sorry about the rant, and so on. Because I think you're right that it's sort of possible to need many jumps before you get these anomaly systems turning up.

So if you don't have the blueprints for suspension fluid and electron vapor before that, you could probably be running into a pretty big stretch before anything happens. And would need to randomly buy suspension fluid, the at that point very expensive antimatter, etc.

If you don't know that you will get the blueprint on the first try in the next system, you could of course get stuck on one of the first planets for potentially... 350x40 raids on manufacturing plants as well :)

But if you jump in any direction on the galaxy map, you should get these triggers again, even without the atlas or nada&polo quests active.

In the same way, on the galaxy map, the first waypoint is always towards the core. The second tab/back key is free exploration. And then the third is the atlas quest if available. Then custom waypoints.

So yeah.. sort of see why people get stuck, and only on the red planets.. What I do usually is pick a star, waypoint it, and then start working my way towards it. Then at the edge of the warp-limit, go into free explore and pick one of the red, green, blue or white stars.

But.... if you follow the waypoints, or not very intuitively, don't hit the right tutorials while exploring on your own - you're sort of stuck in a pretty boring part of space, and in front of a ridiculous grinding hurdle, aren't you..? Hm. Maybe some of the complaints make sense after all.

I have the grenades--now I can blow up whole outposts!
I noticed on the galaxy map, core path slider, you can wiggle a little pixel bar around the home system to open up flight paths to other systems, and follow those lanes to other places, as in turn based space games. But they all required tau level jumps which I do not have. So back to exploration.
Also noticed Atlas pass on sale for 2.7 M units which also do not have.

:) yeah, really got to wonder what genius came up with that: "hey, early explorer - want to buy something for an amount of credits you will never earn in your lifetime by selling resources? What about buying a ship that costs a sum with four more digits than the sum you currently have, and where the value of your current ship is disregarded as a trade-in? Also - on the starmap there are millions of stars you can't get to, but we're not going to tell you what you need to do to get there. Because mystery!".

But yeah, you can sort of skip to the red, green or blue/white systems by pilfering a downed ship with one of the warp-cores. This is usually very fun, because you don't have fifty layers of protection gear at this time. Or warping until you get the blueprint from nada&polo, and so on. Or super-grind the manufacturing plants. But if you sort of ignore these artificial goals the game seems to want to highlight for you, that's sort of where the game opens up.

I don't know. It's like the game initially never had any of these barriers in it. That you were essentially hunting for the specific type of element you needed. And then needed 1 piece of the crystal to put in the warp-core, and off you'd go, etc.

And then someone gradually added layers and layers of things on top of that - until the game genuinely looks like it's some sort of dystopian parable about the last human in the universe, fleeing desperately from planet to planet to drill the natural resources out, leaving a trail of dead husks of swiss cheeze in their wake, to support their pointless self-gratifying lifestyle and quest for ever more galactic units.

But you can still fart around the galaxy and have fun, like we're meant to, if you avoid those grinding goals, was my point. After all, they're not actually something you need to do. It's literally a sideshow to the exploration, and a very bad one at that.

I finally hit the right number on the transmitting outlet, it gave me a Space Anomaly where they welcomed me, spoke my language and gave me the Atlas 1 blueprint. So there is some progress.
I am still puzzled by how to handle the galaxy map.