What does the future hold for being able to search for and find caves themselves?
TL;DRThe plan is to make caves easier to find mainly by greatly increasing their number if server-side OCS goes well, keeping some radar signature, with specialized underground scanning coming further in the future.
Right now, when we got the final numbers of how many caves we can put in the game while keeping the same performance, we kind of figured out that they're going to be a pain to find. A planet that is so big, and five caves: the chances of finding them are very small. So what we did initially, we had a solution of putting a signature on the cave so the radars will pick it up. We started with a signature of 5,000 meters. Before we even went live with that, we made it 10,000 meters, and I think now we've made it even longer. There's a tiny triangle that appears as soon as you go close enough to a cave. The problem is even that is not enough. What we don't really want to do is just give a mega signature that everyone sees, just because they're there, and they just win a cave. That is not what we do. We would like to get to the point where a planet has a realistic number of caves. So if everything goes well with server-side OCS, that should allow us to put way more caves in than we have. I'm talking orders of magnitude more. If you look at Earth right now, there's thousands and thousands of caves. We want to do something like that for our planets. We'll see what the number actually is and what performance allows us to do. But the idea is to increase the density. That will automatically make them easier to find. We would still like to keep a bit of a signature on the cave, so if someone comes close enough to a cave, they'll detect it. But again, this will be dependent on what radar you have. Do you have a radar that is specialized in finding caves? We can put a specialized signature type, not necessarily on the cave, but for underground deposits, because we will have this in the future. We already talked about this, where we can own a piece of land and prospect it and go, oh, this piece of land has this amount of stuff underground. Ideally, with the same device, you'd be able to say, wait, there's a cavity here under the crust. But that is coming a bit further into the future.