Do you hate being out in bumblef* nowhere? Do you wish you could just know where the hell you are? Well i've got just the thing for you! It's illustrated too!
Intro
You just got a rover, drove it around, and now you're wondering where you came from. You have a general idea, but are you sure you're right? You've been driving for some time, you could be anywhere. What do you do about this?
The Easy Way Out
You can always get out of your rover, acquire some distance between you and it, and just suffocate to death. You'll respawn back to your base, as if nothing happened.
The Smart Way Out
You Might Need A Pen And Paper For This...
You don't wanna die! You have a rover full of resources and/or research stuff! You're not a coward, and you're going to get back to base in one piece.
You're about chest deep in luck, since your "astroneer" buddy is equipped with a functioning compass.
To use your compass, simply hover your mouse over your character. Unfortunately, it won't show you any markers or leads to your base, just 4 cardinal directions. They're pretty great, trust me.
Now, What The Hell Do I Do With It?
Try to remember your base, and your departure from it. This is the worst case scenario, so you didn't check your bearing before leaving. You take the following confusing path, along the dotted cyan line, which you can not remember.
In this scenario, try imagining a circular area (in red) which represents the surface area where you could be. The circle gets bigger the more you move around and the more you've been out there, and there really isn't a good way to calculate it's size (that doesn't really matter) the point is: Keep the circle as small as possible. Don't take unnecessary treks.
Evidently, the way back home is the yellow current thing i drew, and if you know what direction you went to from the start, your best chance is to go back to that opposite direction (if you went eastward, go west, northward, go south, westward, go east, southward, go north, or just use a compass image on your phone or something)
But I Don't Know My Initial Bearing!
In this case, you're gonna need a beacon. To get one, you gotta find some quartz (pink crystal ball thing) either by mining for it (fat chance) or scavenging ruins. Eventually, you'll find some, even if you have to move around and increase the size of the hypothetical red circle. As soon as you do, craft the beacon and place it down. This is vital if you do not want to worsen your situation.
The beacon (green) will act as your fallback point. From now on, you just have to pick a direction and just drive to it, falling back to your beacon if you are sure it's the wrong one.. There will be obstacles in your way, and those will force you to deviate from the exact direction you want to go towards. Try to get out of your rover and check if you're still on track. If you forget to do this, when you come back there is a chance you will not find your beacon, and oh boy that's bad.
Eventually, you'll pick the right direction, and you'll see the home marker out of the corner of your eye. Hurray!
This method is most likely eons faster than just travelling around the circumference of the globe hoping that you'll find home by luck, and works even in the scenario where the big red circle engulfs your base.
The Smart Way Out
For Smart People Who Do Not Want To Read A Novel And A Half...Base you. Blue dot line your path. You not know path. You sad.
Big red circle is where you could be. Big red circle must stay small circle, or you in trouble. Yellow arrow good path home. You not know good path home (which has the best odds of being the opposite of the direction you departed to) you not know to use compass before leave.
Put down beacon (made from quartz), go in random cardinal direction, if you think it's the wrong path, come back to the beacon.. Repeat till you find home.
I Hate When This Happens To Me, How Do I Make It Stop?- Place a bunch of beacons near your base, preferably in a circle around it. Quartz is pretty abundant.
- Note the direction of your departure next time.
- Operate close to your base, you probably don't need to travel to the other part of the globe for resources.
- You wont get lost more than like 2 times since you'll probably expand upwards into the solar system.
Source: https://gameplay.tips/guides/6110-astroneer.html
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