Guide to Xenoarchaeology

Getting Your Feet Wet

Xenoarchaeology

So you’re headed to the asteroid! Or you should be. Typically if you’re a xenoarchaeologist, you’ll start at random location as any normal scientist in the station and your first job is to get off it. You’ll find the shuttle in a small passage just under the R&D lab, heading to the left. There you’ll find a small bay with some O2 supplies and of course the shuttle.

Now that you’re on the asteroid, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with it. There are a few key areas on the station that are important to note. Take some time to look at the titles on the doors to identify which areas are which.

You start off in the departure zone. Connected to that is a small medical bay complete with all four health kit types and a sleeper. This can be important as it’s dangerous out there, and medical help will be quite a ways away. Next there’s the equipment room where the dig gear found south of the medical room. It contains environment suits, emergency lights, and the field generator for your digs. We’ll touch on the contents of this room shortly. Attached to the main hall in the northern section of the post lies the four lab sections:

The Anomaly Lab, where anomalies can be examined using the equipment in this room. The Spectroscopy machine is also located in this room, but its use will be covered later.

The Chemistry Lab, where all chemicals can be produced. This room has both a chemistry dispenser and a Chemmaster for the intricate work of preparing samples and mixing things, for SCIENCE! Typically will be raided for that precious sulphuric acid.

The Hydroponics Lab, located behind the chemistry lab, has everything one would need to grow a little food, or whatever alien spores you happen to find. This lab has a supply closet with a hydroponics chest and plant analyzer, so no need to steal anything from the main station.

The Spectrometry Lab, where detailed materials testing is done on samples brought in from the field.

The observation bays are located in the southern part of the post. Each of these bays contains two rooms. The first room is easy to access and can be used to store things. The second room is where the actual sample or subject would be kept. Each room has a lock down button to control the door locks, an air inlet and outlet which are controlled elsewhere. The third room on the right has a bet for live subjects. There is also a camera system for seeing each subject without glass for safety. On the far left side there is a maintenance access way that has a heater, freezer and gas inlet for experimentation of subject termination. The exotic particle collection station and long term storage rooms are located left of the observation bays. These rooms are used for storage of materials and anomalies for further study as well as extracting high energy particles from these for scientific purposes.

The power and atmospherics stations are located left of the anomaly lab. The power room contains two SMES units and generators, various stored gasses, and some emergency scrubbers. The atmospherics room contains a heater and cooler connected to the entire air system. The filtration system consists of an N2 filter followed by an O2 filter that puts these two gasses back into the air supply. All other gasses are stored in a waste canister.

The living quarters is located above and next to the power and atmospherics stations. There is a simple bathroom and two locking bedrooms. Very simple.

Other important locations include the library, locker room, maintenance rooms, as well as storage and loading rooms. Not vital, these locations should be remembered regardless as well as their contents.

Setting Up The Lab

Now that you’ve gotten your feet wet with the lay of the land, it’s time to get the labs set up. There are a few things you’ll need to put together in order to get your day started and I’ll go over each of them in their respective lab.

The Chemistry lab has the most complicated but important set up. In the chemistry lab you’ll need to make Lithium Sodium Tungstate. This is made with the following in the large beaker: 10 Lithium, 20 Sodium, 10 Tungsten, 40 Oxygen. This will make a silvery compound that you will use for your sample testing. This step, however, is more of a scientific formality as sample analysis has largely been made moot, still, certain tests can still be useful.

The Spectrometry and Spectroscopy labs need to have their freezers turned on. The machines in these labs die at about 400K and will generate a huge amount of heat. As a rule of thumb, one person working alone can get by setting the freezer to 220K, but depending on your work load you may need to lower it. CAUTION: While you CAN set the freezers to as low as they go, you actually have to WORK in these rooms. There is some heat gear provided but it will still be very cold. ALWAYS WEAR A GAS MASK AND AIR when going in, so you don’t freeze your lungs.

Lastly, in the atmospherics room the waste gas canister will need to be connected, and just outside the external airlock there’s an air canister that needs to be wrenched into place. Now you’re ready to get on with your first dig!

Your First Dig

Now that the lab is ready, you’ll need to head out on your first dig. Head to the equipment storage room and get suited up. There are three lockers, two suits, two emergency lights, and one field generator located in this room. Suit yourself up, sticking an air tank into your suit storage and get ready to make war with the asteroid!

Measuring Tape: Important, but can be eschewed if you have a good memory. Still, the last thing you want to do is forget how far you've dug and mess something up, so take one with just in case.

Pickaxe: There are a few of these around. You’ll want one. That dig site isn't gonna dig itself out, and though you may not want to use this to get artifacts, you're going to need it to get to the actual artifact bearing tiles. Alternatively, you can always print up a mining drill from R&D to flaunt off to the shaft miners you may run into.

Optical Meson Scanner: Unless you want to play Xenoarcheology on hard mode, this is a vital piece of equipment, but while it will highlight terrain and floor, it will not show people or things you can move or pick up outside your light range.

Tracking Beacon: Sends its location to locator device, allowing you to quickly find the right spot. You can adjust frequency to use multiple beacons with one locator device. You can always use this to make sure you don't lose the field generator.

Locator Device: Adjust frequency to the frequency of tracking beacon that you want to find and reset the device. After some time it will show an arrow pointing in general direction of the beacon. Unfortunately, it won't reset it by itself, always pointing in the same direction, so you have to do it manually.

Relay Positioning Device: Only slightly important. You can use this to help you find dig sites if you write down your location as the device lists it. Mostly useful if you have more than one Xenoarcheologist, or you can give one to a shaft miner and employ some cross-department teamwork!

Core Sampler: This is used to take rock samples which will be covered later. To extract your samples, just use the device in your hand, also you can stuff empty baggies back into the device.

Depth Analysis Scanner: This device detects ANYTHING within a wall for unusual formations and will be one of your most used objects. If used on a blank wall it will tell you of anomalies in the stone as well as the field needed to safely extract the artifacts. Its use will be covered in more detail later.

Lantern: For light, optional if you don't mind losing track of items, otherwise stick one in your pocket.

Excavation pick set: These contains a set of picks that you will need to carefully carve down walls to get to unusual rocks. Without this set you are just a shaft miner than can't smelt ore.

Wrench: Essential, as you'll need it to secure and un-secure the field generator. Keep it handy and close, like in your pocket.

EVA suit and oxygen tank: This should be a no brainer, but it can be easy to traipse outside only to realize you forgot to grab some oxygen.

Take what you want, but the minimum you should have are: Pickaxe/Mining drill (Put it on your belt), excavation pick set, depth analysis scanner, a wrench, optical mesons, EVA suit, oxygen tank and your hand pickaxe. The rest are optional, but things like the measuring tape and core sampler are recommended.

Now that you’re outside, you want to begin looking for useful rock formations. The tell tale sign is the whiteish striped rocks. There’s no real way to know if a close dig site or a far dig site will have good finds, so it’s best to start close and work your way out. For your first dig, I suggest finding a formation that isn’t currently inside another material, such as iron or plasma. This can throw off your readings and it takes experience to separate the junk iron from the sample.

Getting outside
You can most certainly use the airlock to get out, but you have a couple options, and ones you might consider if the current build has some serious airlock leaking issues.

The fastest way to get outside safely is to use the conveyor belts east of the EVA locks, both of the belts can be toggled to go either direction, so you can use it to get both you and your stuff outside without having to bother with slow and potentially broken airlocks, this may not make a lot of sense in-character unless your character is a bit childish, but it's by far the best method for getting in and out, plus the right most disposals goes directly to the Anomaly lab, the other disposals chute leads to long-term storage.

The next way is using that large and intrusive tram system, it does require a bit (a lot) of waiting for the tram to arrive, but once inside, you can use your arrow keys to go through stations willy-nilly to get where you need to go. The biggest problem is that it can only hold once person, so if you have a partner you're S.O.L.

Finally, if you have the time, resources and in-game character skills (Or out of character philanthropy.), you can keep an airlock from leaking by placing a windoor on the outside of the outer airlock, and another windoor on the inside (BEFORE the actual airlocking chamber) of the inner airlock. Share this with your mining buddies, since they only have one option to get outside.

Some notes on digging: When you hit a wall that has (or had) an unusual rock in it, you will hear something. A crunch, breaking... Something like that. This often times means you’ve destroyed something valuable, but not 100% of the time. To solve this, when you get close to potential dig site take a look at how big it is with just the parts of rock you can see with the mesons. If it’s rather large, it stands to reason there are lots of hidden rocks. Use your depth analysis scanner before digging into a wall, to see if there’s anything there. If it pings, there’s something in the rock. BE WARNED the analysis scanner DOES pick up plasma, gold, iron, et cetera, so take a look at the analyser. If the analyser shows an anomaly depth of zero and the field it suggests matches the ore you're scanning, feel free to bust through it, if, however, it does not, you have an artifact in there.

Make sure you give yourself enough space, but don’t waste hours digging out everything. Naturally, you’ll want to remove as much red wall rock as you can if there’s nothing in it to give yourself some room to work but don’t waste too much time if you aren’t even sure your dig site is worth exploring yet!

This Has Potential

Alright, so you’ve dug your way, carefully, to the first wall formation with something in it. Now comes the real work. You need to see just what it is you’re working with. Put that big pick away and take out your depth analyzer. Use it on the rock wall, then take a look at it. (The bottom entry is always the newest one) You’ll want to pull up your newest entry and give it a good looking over. You’ll see several bits of useful information:

Anomaly Depth: This is where the center of the anomaly is based on the scan.

Clearance above anomaly depth: This is a useful tool for telling you how far to dig.

Dissonance Spread: This is still pretty esoteric, it might be the size of the object, or it could just be some random number that's usually 1.

A good formula for digging is as follows. If your anomaly measures a depth of 30, and a clearance of 10, you should start to see it at about 20 cm into the rock. You’ll need your fine picks for digging at this point. Your aim should be to dig close to, but not into the anomaly in order to get a core sample. A good rule of thumb is to stop close to two meters out from the further possible point. For the example above, you would want to dig to 18 cm before taking a core sample. Edit: Because whoever wrote this to begin with is a horrible person and can't just come out to say it, for the math inclined but those who suck at word problems, here is the formula: depth - clearance - 2.

The excavation pick set is a very important toolbox. It has a series of picks in it, which I will explain the purpose of each below:

Hand Pickaxe: Digs out 30 cm.
1/1 Pick: Digs out 12 cm. (Purple)
5/6 Pick: Digs out 10 cm. (Blue)
2/3 Pick: Digs out 8 cm. (Green)
1/2 Pick: Digs out 6 cm. (Yellow)
1/3 Pick: Digs out 4 cm. (Orange)
1/6 Pick: Digs out 2 cm. (Red)
Brush: Digs out 1 cm.

Yes, this IS a lot of picks. No you don’t need all these picks, in fact, you can get by with only three picks not including your big smashy pick, be it a drill or a pickaxe. These picks are: the hand pickaxe, the 5/6 (10cm), and the 1/6 (2cm), the rest are optional and might save you some time if you can memorize all of them, but if you want to save space or eschew maths, just take those ones. So you’ve now found a dig site, and you’ve dug your way to “close” to your target! Now what? SAMPLE TESTING!

To start your sample testing, you’ll need to start with a core sample. Just press the core sampler up against the wall and you’ve got a core sample, ready for testing.

Preparing The Sample

So you’ve got a core sample! Now you have to do something with it. Take it back with you to the chem lab. You’re going to be in the lab for a while, so go ahead and take off that heavy suit. If you happened to find anything useful while you were out there, feel free to drop it in the anomaly lab on your way to the chem lab.

Now, simply click the core sampler to get a baggy with your core in it, and then the bag again to get your sliver of rock out. Rock in hand, pop that baby in the grinder and grind it into a thin pink paste. The next steps are what’s called the DST, but we’ll just call it prepping your sample. THIS IS IMPORTANT. DO NOT FORGET A STEP.

Take 5 units of rock sample with the dropper, put it in an empty beaker.

Take 10 units of the Lithium Sodium Tungstate we made earlier, put it in the 5 unit rock beaker. It should bubble. You will now see two new fluids in the beaker.

Put the beaker in the ChemMaster. EXTRACT THE WASTE and disposal it. Eject beaker.

Put the beaker on the bunsen burner. NOT on the table. Make sure you get the popup message informing you it’s on the burner.

Toggle the burner, it should show lil’ flames. When the beaker bubbles, you’re done. Toggle the burner off, get your beaker.

Return the beaker to the ChemMaster. Extract the new waste material. Eject beaker or turn your useable fluid into a bottle.

You should now have 8 units of useable analyzing fluid in your beaker!

If you’ve followed the steps correctly, you should now have some usable fluid, all primed, pink, and pretty. Now you’re ready to start a test battery. You’ll want to find one of the boxes of solution trays. We’ll need to add sample fluid and carrier fluid to the tray. Carrier fluid is explained like this in the IC book.

Below is a list of the most commonly used scan carrier reagents, and the particular molecules they resonate most strongly with:

Carbon - Trace organic cells, typically used for carbon dating of organic remains.
Potassium - Long exposure particles floating in the depths of space, such as meteorites.
Hydrogen - Trace water particles.
Nitrogen - Crystalline structures.
Mercury - Metallic derivatives such as ferritic elements and pure metallic substances.
Iron - Metallic composites such as alloys and atomic structures that are metallic in nature.
Chlorine - Metamorphic/igneous rock composite.
Phosphorus - Metamorphic/sedimentary rock composite.
Plasma - Anomalous materials such as bluespace phased composites that are not fully understood by modern science.

What all this junk MEANS is complicated, but I’ll try to explain it. A carrier fluid is something you put in with your test fluid. In the machine, it’s a reference point. Your machine can ONLY reference what you put in with the analysis fluid. For example, carbon. If you put carbon in with your analysis fluid, and put it in the machine, the machine will run a comparison against carbon. Depending on the machine, you will get an output, but that output will be BASED on carbon. Every fluid listed here has the potential to produce a result. I will explain in detail what the results of each machine means, in order to better examine your core sample.

Set out two solution trays.

Add one unit of sample fluid to each tray.

Add carrier fluid as YOU PREFER. The carrier fluids are listed above.

THE MACHINES! THE DREADED MACHINES!

There are a lot of machines. I mean a lot of them. And you’re suppose to know what they do in order to do your job! So, we’ll go over them as simply as I can for you. The first bank of machines you should care about are the Spectrometry Lab machines. These machines are as follows:

Gas Chromatography- This machine is used to identify what trace particles are found within the sample. It’s used to help identify what kinds of tests you should do, and is often an important first test. (Personally, I start with carbon and iron, as they are typically most common.)

Ion Mobility- This machine is used to identify what quantity of the carrier fluid is present. Basically, the higher the number, the more likely that’s the material your anomaly is made out of, but this device can only test one carrier fluid and will give no results if there is none of that reactive agent present.

Accelerator- Used to age the material, only works on the billions of years scale.

Isotope Ratio- Used to age material, only accurate up to a billion years.

The two most important ones, as you can probably tell, are the Gas and Ion machines. A good rule of thumb is to check the Gas first with a common material such as iron or carbon. This should give you a range of carriers you can now choose from to place in the Ion machine. Whichever number comes up highest on the listed print out from the Gas sheet, is most likely the composition of your dig site. For example, if you get a 94% from the Gas, and a total of 15.6 on your Ion, you most likely have some kind of carbon material at your dig site.

The age of your dig can be important as well. Often times this will tell you if what you’ve got is run of the mill, or something truly outstanding. This tool is more used by those with experience, not wanting to waste time on lesser valuable finds.

All this testing is important for a few reasons. First of all, if you want to avoid a certain kind of dig site, for example if you just want to find a given type, you can ignore some if you do diligent testing. As well, and the most important reason for testing, is that the tests tell you what kind of field generator settings you need to get back to digging!

Science schmience, I want stuff!

Did that seem like a lot of work? Yup, it was! In fact, it could take upwards of an hour of meticulous testing and re-testing to figure out what the hell field you need to use to actually safely dig out ONE anomaly from a tile that can contain up to THREE!

Thankfully, someone came to their senses and made the depth analysis scanner show you flat out what field to use. This speeds up the process considerably. So time to actually bring home the bacon!

Begin with mining out the margins: If the site is reasonably small, work your way towards the site, a pickaxe in one hand and your depth analyzer in another. Scan then pick, once your analyzer starts the pinging you know where NOT to keep digging. Keep this up until you have dug all the way around the site. If the site is very large, a good chunk will suffice, as you may not have the moxie to mine out the entire thing, especially if it's within a mineral field.

Remember that you can mine multiple tiles at once, so make your corridor wide, otherwise you'll be wresting with your field generator in a very bad way.

Place and secure the generator: All you need do is place the “business end” of the generator up against the rock you’re working on. Make sure you can actually get to the tile you want to mine, since you certainly can't mine through the generator, nor can you mine diagonally unless there's a clear space. Don't forget to swipe your ID to unlock the interface, simply clicking your ID on the generator is sufficient, no need to feed the UI your ID.

Activate the generator: Remember to select the field type that you got from the analyzer. There will be a sparkly field on the rock you’re on indicating you’re safe to pick away. Every time you produce an object from the rock wall, the field generator will catch it, making a sciencey circle to obscure your view, but you'll still get a brief glimpse of what you've grabbed. Once you see that precious white speckled rock! Turn the field off, grab the goods, and re-scan the tile if it's still there, then start mining towards the next awesome rock. Keep this up until you reach the sandy floor below.

Mining mineral artifacts: Mining artifacts in a mineral is a huge pain, one that you'll want to avoid as often as possible. Unlike a tile with just the artifact rocks in them, minerals will seriously mess with your readings. The field will be correct, but the depth will usually be wildly off. Usually, the first artifact will be at least somewhat correct, after that, however, it's a matter of leaving the generator on and carefully picking your way through until you get the object. Note that tiles can be close to 200 cm deep, so you'll be clicking quite a bit (For gods sake don't use the brush!). Not only this, but the tile won't disappear once the final artifact has been emancipated, so keep an eye on the scanner. If the depth goes to zero, drill that thing out of existence... Unless...

Rocky debris: This is what you're REALLY after, locked within these sight blocking monoliths of brown jumbled masses lie the potential for those fancy large artifacts so much of the research station seems to be devoted to, but don't get too excited, most of what you find will simply be empty rocky husks that make you feel bad for destroying. Rocky debris may appear after excavating a tile with artifacts in it, this may only happen when the time is broken carefully (Meaning, without resorting to a pickaxe or drill.) but this is currently unknown. They can be a little easy to miss, as you'll have a large pile of useless rocks in a tile anyway, but these things usually are the size of a tile, so the telltale signs of rocks in all four corners will give it away. The debris is basically a movable mineable square, so give that sucker a scan with your analyze. If it just hums, don't have any qualms about breaking that thing into dust, no matter how much it tries to guilt you otherwise, however...

Oh god, it's pinging!: If your analyzer finds something in the debris, it will be as excited as you probably are! You've struck the mother lode my friend, don't pay any attention to the depth, it won't do you any good. Instead, break out ol' red (1/6 2m pick) and slowly crack your way to the juicy center. Yes, it will take you a long time, but it is definitely better safe than sorry in this case. While you CAN do this out on the asteroid, the safest and most sciency way to do it would be to drag the debris back to the research station, plonk it in an exam room or the anomaly lab, don yourself an anomaly suit, and get picking. It will be an excruciatingly long process usually, but the last thing you want to do is go too fact and break the artifact. These things are rare, you've already done the hard part by actually FINDING one, have patience, you're getting close.

Artifacts

You're going to be getting a lot of rocks, so you may want to have a way to transport them all. Luckily, there's a convenient crate sitting right there in the research shuttle, grab it and throw it out onto the asteroid, now you can hold a ton more rocks! As for the actual artifacts you can find on the asteroid, they vary greatly, and also not a lot, while they will all unique descriptions, they function mostly the same. While you can find many with uses, there will be a lot that are just eye-candy. Sadly, most everything you find on your digs make pretty poor research materials for R&D, so what you see is what you get... Usually. Xenoarcheology is still pretty fringe in itself, so it never hurts to give your findings to your colleagues to keep them from going SSD, or to experiment with them yourself.

In case you missed it above, a torch or a splash of acid will release the artifacts from the rock, also don't be afraid if the rock burns away to nothing, it doesn't mean you did anything wrong, it just means there was simply nothing in the rock... Maybe.

Large anomalies

Ironically, a good majority of specialists scientists that are called 'Anomalists' will likely never have even seen one. They're rare, they're unique and since Xenoarcheology has been made actually feasible, it's still mostly in the dark about anomalies... Just like REAL science! Luckily, you're actually thrown a bone in this case with there being anomaly analyzers. Two out of three exam rooms have them, and the anomaly lab not only has one, but also have a lot of the things that might be needed to activate them. (The emitter, however, does not work with the research stations meager power supply.) Time to get excited, because you're on the fringe of science, actual experiments with potentially awesome results! Revel in this my friend, cause you are truly breaking new ground.

Miscellaneous

Because there is only one field generator and only two EVA suits, having multiple Xenoarcheologists can result in a lot of stepping on others feet, if there's only two, then there are things you can do to keep both busy whilst producing results, increasing efficiency, and hopefully finding those precious rocky debris. Xenoarcheologist two can go around digging the margins of other sites, while the one with the generator digs them out. Any more than two however and things get... Well.. Complicated. Xenoarcheologist three and beyond will truly be third wheels. No suits to go out on the asteroid (Unless they get one from beyond the research station.), and they'll essentially just be digging more dig sites only to wait for the chosen one with the generator to dig it. The best thing they could do until a large anomaly is found is to do sample testing listed above. Aging rock samples may be the most useful thing to do, as you can likely find the good stuff this way, other than that, a quick trip to the HoP for a title change may be in order...

Also, an important thing to know is how to change the power cell in the field generator. Screwdriver the generator, then use a crowbar, then with an empty hand, remove the cell. Doing the previous process in reverse will return the generators functions. You can upgrade the field generators cell, but I mildly suggest against this, as it's a good way to get you can to the station and drop off your finds. Otherwise, you can put a hyper cell in there and dig all the live-long day.

So that's Xenoarcheology, like mining, only slower and with the slight possibility of finding something amazing and new. Try not to drown in too many fossils and/or beartraps!