The scanning room is excellent, the mineral detector has the range of an overpriced gardening hose. If you move to the rigth & the target moves to the left that means it's close, if it doesn't then it's far away. You can easily tell get a good estimate of the distance to a scanner target based on it's proportional movement in response to your own movement. Just report with the in-game tool (F8) when you find them. The solution is what I said right after the part you quoted. I'm certain you know this already, just including for completeness. You need the mineral detector to get an approximation of distance with it's hot/cold interface. You can legitimately be staring at a wall right into the scanner HUD circle and that resource is 100m away in another cave. It doesn't tell you the distance to target. Originally posted by Warc1:You'll find that around 25% of the coral identified in that biome cannot be harvested because they are partially or wholly buried in the terrain. It's just that this is an issue for BZ beta players, which for now, is every BZ player. SN1 suffered the same issue, and by the time it was released, the number of raw materials that was inaccessible was reduced to a fraction of 1 percent.
I've reported this numerous times and my guess is that is being worked on prior to release. And it's definitely not just limited to the lilypad biome as I've encountered this issue to some degree in every biome. I've found widespread examples of virtually every raw material that could not be harvested because of its placement in the terrain. To be clear, this is not an issue solely related to table coral, though this is the worst case. Small relative movements means a middle distance. If the target position appears to move in absolute position, but holds constant relative to nearby terrain, it's in close proximity. If you briefly swim laterally from a raw material target, and the target appears to stay in the same absolute position, but moves relative to nearby terrain, it is a long distance away. While the lack of a distance readout on scanner hits is a pain, you can easily tell if a resource is 3m, 30m or 300m away. Just don't save your game after using the commands as this will stop further achievements from being recognized. This can easily be confirmed by using console commands to clip through the terrain and find the raw material buried just below the surface. The rest is invisible because they are fully embedded. It's just partially buried in the terrain and the game mechanics will not allow it to be collected. It's not an issue with the scanner, Most of the unharvestable coral in the lilypad biome is visible. However, once you branch out into the more remote biomes, this becomes a bigger and bigger issue. They've done a good job of rectifying this in the Twisty Bridges biome, so anyone starting a new game is unlikely to encounter this issue. This harvesting effort has revealed that there is a non trivial percentage of raw materials that cannot be collected throughout the game world because the game designers have inadvertently buried them in the terrain. I then draw from the stockpiles to build whatever I want whenever I want.
My gameplay style is to grind through the harvesting of raw materials (3,000 pieces and counting) and stockpiling them in four bases strategically located around the game world. You'll find that around 25% of the coral identified in that biome cannot be harvested because they are partially or wholly buried in the terrain. Go to the lilypads biome and set up a scanner. Originally posted by Catalytic:As for finding table corals that you can't cut, I have never run into that in any of the EAs I have played.