Experimenting with the Signal Booster

NMS Worlds
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I’m reposting this here from a Reddit post I made the other day. Some of you might find this interesting!

I kinda love the signal booster and will occasionally go on random exocraft treks on planets to see what’s nearby.

signal booster output
signal booster output630×929 67.6 KB

Unlike charts and exocraft radars, the signal booster will usually give you a location within 1500 units of distance (based on rough estimates and personal experience). So it’s ideal for randomly exploring planets without being sent to the other side of the system or the opposite pole.

What I did here was land at a trade outpost (bottom of the image), drop a signal bosster, go to the destination and jot down the coordinates. Rince and repeat.

A few quirks I noticed:

  1. Some points of interest require you to “clear” them before the signal booster will give you a new destination. Resource depots wouldn’t clear unless I had killed at least one sentinal and blown up one resource. The beacon had to be activated, and I had to interact with the terminal at the manufacturing facility.
  2. It will occasionally send you back to a previous point. Placing the signal booster at the beacon sent me back to the previous observatory. I went back until it said "destination reached, and fired it again.
  3. Interestingly, the x coordinates for the signal booster increased with each successive use. Even after it made me backtrack, it sent me back in the same direction.
  4. When I arrived at the final destination (the Manufactury Facility), it sent me back to the original Trading Post. The trading post then sent me to another trading post 48 minutes away.
  5. All of these destinations were less than 1100 units away from the previous point of interest. The distance between the start point (trading post) and end point (manufacturing facility) was 16:30 minutes. Unfortunately it is not possible to get units of distance past a certain distance.

I’m not sure if any of these things are just a coincidence or random, but I’d like to experiment more and figure out how this thing works! Plus I like making maps. I wish there was a way to do this in game!

Video here for more information: https://youtu.be/CtCi8njjZUM

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Nice. The random large antennas found on planets seem to always send you to the other side of the planet and can only be used once. With the huge planets we now have, it’s too far away. I prefer the short distance of the signal booster.

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Now that is what we call, Citizen Science. Thanks for sharing your findings with us Rob, nice to see an old traveller traipsing through <3

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Very interesting. I am sure you’ll find there is nothing random happening here. Figuring out how things actually work can be great fun indeed. Looking forward to any further testing and data you may be willing to do.

This can be estimated, at least for the actual conversion from time to units, when on foot. With your starship or base computer near, while on foot, you will see a distance in units when aiming at the marker, until you reach a certain distance away from it, where it changes to a time measurement. This appears to be around 1245u ≈ 4m56s ≈ 296s. This means 1s ≈ 1245 / 296 ≈ 4.2u/s. In your case, the 16m30s would result in about 990s * 4.2 ≈ 4158u. Of course distance is measured differently when in your ship, or inside a vehicle, as it takes speed into account. For example, when 10m away, it would be about 600s * 4.2u ≈ 2520u. If I place my ship at that spot, get inside while fully on the brakes, it shows 2m20s with 18u/s on the display, this estimates to 140s * 18u ≈ 2520u as well.

There are other ways to possibly measure with access to the save data. Could take the coordinates and use those to approximate between them.

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