Further update. It seems Polo is not interested in the droppings themselves. The coprite the animals normally produce is transformed into hexite in this quest - but Polo doesn’t collect it. The only thing he’s interested in is the number of animals you’ve fed.
A warning.
The quest allowed me to collect enough information to exchange for 4,000 quicksilver. Then it stopped.
I was told “Data Collection Limit Reached”. Once I’d handed in my research to Polo, that was it. The quest was over. 4,000 was all I could earn.
Now consider that the total cost of all the rewards connected to this quest adds up to 7,700 quicksilver. But you can only earn 4,000. You need to start thinking very carefully about what you spend it on. Or, indeed, whether you spend it at all, at the moment. There are more quests, and more rewards, to come.
It’s probably wiser to wait, and see what else becomes available in the future.
Once I got away from the starting (portal) planet, that’s exactly what I did - and how I finished so quickly.
On the starting planet, it’s harder. It’s a desert world, with heat storms, and no real herds (or, at least, none I could find). I ended up feeding extremely shy, extremely fast, spider crabs. Hell to catch.
The first requires you to go through a portal, and feed 25 animals. As you feed the animals, the quest log racks up the number you’ve fed. When you get to 25, it stops adding any more. You can feed more, but they don’t get added to your score. Only the first 25 count.
Then you go into space, and hand in your results to Polo. As I said earlier, he’s not interested in any coprite/ hexite you may have collected - he only wants the data from the 25 animals.
When you give him the data, he gives you 2,000 quicksilver. He then tells you that you can feed animals anywhere in the galaxy.
So you go back through the portal, go to another planet, and start feeding animals. The number you’ve fed gets added to your log. At some point (I think it was around 100, but I’m not sure), the quest tells you it won’t accept any more.
You go back into space, hand over your data to Polo, and he gives you another 2,000 quicksilver - so 4,000 QS in all.
So consoles are finally in the community event for week 2, woop woop.
I found a good spot to feed critters within sight of the portal though you’ll want to take a ship.
Directly ahead of the portal you’ll see a volcanic type mountain in the distance. Lots of creatures spawn here, and like lemmings they walk over the edge quite a lot, forcing new creatures to spawn instantly.
Can confirm, 100 animals fed is the cutoff point. Now the question is what to do with the nearly 1000 units of hexite that I have…sell it, hold onto it?
I went to the nearby planet of Demazuscu Gamma, claimed it and then sat and let the critters flock to me.
Glad to hear it poly. I got distracted gallivanting around some star shards with mad hatter, just tested handing in 83 to see if it reset to zero but it stayed at 83 so that doesn’t stop the cutoff at 100. Ill chat with the ro-panion (bro-bot? Still trialing names for polos pal) once I hit 100 and see if that re-jigs it.
This sounds like a significant bug if we’re supposed to be getting 35 quicksilver per feeding, plus the additional 2000 for for finishing. @toddumptious, you turned in 83 first? Can you confirm if you got additional quicksilver for that?
EDIT: I couldn’t sleep so I loaded up NMS and tested it myself. I had a backup save from right before triggering the event so I restarted from there. For stage1, all 25 feedings must be done before submitting to Polo for the first 2000 quicksilver. For stage 2, partial data does indeed give 35 quicksilver for each new feeding. Getting gypped out of 3500 when submitting all 100 has to be a bug! For now the best deal is to stop at 99, submit that to Polo for 3465, then do the final 1 for the finishing 2000.
When i handed in 83 I got something like 2,900 but was a very uneven number in or around that.
Later while traversing the stars to a planet I accidentally hailed Polo and decided to hand in the five I’d fed since, and that gave me around 150 odd. Once I handed in the last twelve I got whatever the price is for one times twelve. Definitely didn’t get the bonus 2000 for completion people are mentioning, but I had 4500 ish QS when I was done but some I’d spent on the new bronze statues already, and I also had some left over from week one.
I’m quite annoyed about that - I can’t do the quest again, and going back to my last backup save would lose me too much progress.
There’s nothing in the quest instructions to suggest that research has to be submitted in any particular order, nor is there any indication (until you hit it) that there’s a limit to how many animals you can feed.
Interesting to see how the new event planet (week 2), starts with 10/13 creatures discovered. Network discovery is working and I was able to upload a few. Then I noticed the amount of pages with creatures shown … It has a total of 9 pages, 49 creatures ???