It is not uncommon to have meteor showers (this is on the original map) where half the nodes are simply unbreakable. It doesn’t matter how many explosives you use, the meteor shell never “cracks”. Either the game is giving it some impossibly high health value, or the client thinks it’s “there” but the server thinks it’s under the mesh or some weirdness where the explosion never actually hits the object.
This has been a thing for years now, and it would be nice if it was actually addressed.
You are probably going to hate me, but on PC with mods even I have almost no issues using explosives to crack star metal nodes. I happened across one a while back and was surprised.
I then went on to harvest three other nodes.
It’s rare when I don’t encounter at least one node which can’t be broken. I play on Xbox, but I’ve seen people on other platforms talk about this as well. It’s been a long-standing problem.
Its about 25% for me that can’t be broken. I’m wondering if its some sort of server desync.
Had nodes that took almost a full stack of demon fire orbs to crack(was trying to get rid of them to switch to explosive arrows). Even then I’ve also come across nodes standing up to several explosive arrows. I’d be a lot more vexed if I wasn’t looking for an excuse to consume dragon powder to free up space.
The issue IMO appears to be a poorly defined collision boundary on the meteor. While arrows and things collide with the meteor and explode, the component of the meteor actor that detects whether or not it was hit by an explosion seems to sometimes be blocked by the meteor’s geometry. I have found that sometimes a “bugged” meteor can be cracked by hitting it in just the right ‘sweet spot’. Unfortunately, I think this sweet spot sometimes ends up embedded in the terrain making the meteor impossible to crack.
This is my experience as well, not only can some nodes take multiple shots, (I always use explosive arrows), but also require different angles. Sometimes the best angle is also straight from above, whilst standing on the node.
Another thing that has worked for me is to run out of render distance and come back at a later time, probably 1/3 of the non cracking ones then break on a single shot.
If you do fix meteors, please don’t dumb them down, one of the best facets of meteor hunting, (whether intended or not), is the varied methods you have to use to access and break them. So here are some thoughts and suggestions.
I love that they can hit the sides of concave cliffs or static non-player structures and that it requires some planned “cold” climbing or “parkour” dropping down onto the meteor itself, (after you have cracked it), standing on it to mine it.
When using explosive arrows, the fire dot should burn players 24/7 on PVE and PVE-C servers, not just during PVP times on PVE-C servers, this would add a little more urgency and strategy to mining the meteor itself, especially when faced by 3-4 Sabres wanting lunch in Frostneedle Forest.
The bug that is causing the hard or impossible to crack nodes could be added as a feature, (after the bug is fixed), maybe show these nodes with a slightly different hue or tint to signify that they contain a harder and more difficult outer shell to crack, either requiring more explosive arrows, DF Orbs etc, (cheap and easy), or an entirely different strategy altogether, (i.e. the old TAR ignite and burning method), whereby the outer shell needs to be cooked off slowly over time. Do this for say 1 in 10 meteors for the players that want that little bit of extra challenge.
Make exploding arrows, explosions, fire and smoke attract mobs within a certain distance, (sure it’s not realistic with respect to most animals, but these are apex predators in a fantasy world). Even though it can be quite dangerous farming star-metal, (especially in the forest), it’s usually fairly trivial if you proceed with caution or take a stronk thrall with you; having dangerous predators on alert due to all the noise, fire and smoke you are making would make this gathering process even more of an adventure.
They quite often are embedded partly into the ground. If this happens, you can only destroy it from below via ghost mode (single player-wise at least.)
Encountered a few of these unbreakable meteors in the Savage Wilds. I thought it was an issue with the mod though. Seems it’s far more common.
While this would be nice, it would be very difficult to implement due to the way PvP damage works in Conan. Orbs and Arrows are considered Player Induced Damage. So the fires from those are considered player damage. FC would have to do a bit of a workaround to make this work, and–while I think it would be a nice change–its not something I think would be a high priority for them.
Nope. It’s a problem with the star metal meteors in the base game. It’s been an issue since I started playing 2 years ago. I feel like it should have been an easy fix, but I think it must be hard because I would have expected it to be fixed by now otherwise.
Yup, this has been my experience on my SP games. Sometimes it takes several shots to get the right spot at the right angle (never tried standing on top and shooting straight down. I’ll have to remember that one).
It was addressed, just not fixed.
Meteors used to require multiple explosives to crack them, but since some of them were bugged, it was really hard to tell if your meteor was bugged or you just needed to use more explosives, potentially causing you to waste them on bugged meteors.
Funcom attempted to fix them, but couldn’t figure out what was causing them to be bugged, so instead, they reduced their health down to 1 point. This means that either they crack in one hit or they are bugged.
Funcom could look into the issue again, but since they already invested effort into solving the problem and were unable to find a proper solution, this has likely been reduced to a low priority issue.
On to how to deal with bugged meteors:
The bug is location-dependent on the shell, this means that if one hit does nothing, hitting it again in the exact same spot will keeping doing more nothing until your aim happens to be far enough off that you luckily fail to hit the exact same spot again.
If it is bugged, rotate around the meteor and hit it from a new angle. The bottoms of the meteors seem to be the least likely to be bugged, so try to aim as low as possible (ones stuck to the side of a cliff make this much easier).
Some people swear by greasing them first, and while I would never waste my time on that practice, I theorize that the grease may cause the explosion to be redirected to the ground, and thus hitting it from the bottom instead of the top or side.
here what you can do , is craft a sandstone foundation place it under the node and then shoot at it … that will help the explosion to go into the starnode better … its a little trick … if it doesnt then you got a rig one that failed to disappear after harvested
For me it’s far less than 1%. Once 18 months ago and it was likely me misusing explosion orbs for the 1st time. Then once about 6 months ago but I thought it was just old or something - it was by itself with no others around and not smoking.
Last time I was cracking them I thought about this issue
But all of them cracked, haven’t been playing much so I thought it was maybe fixed in the updates I missed…
Seems like I was lucky
Every meteor can be exploded from below. Of course if you are playing in SP and you can ghost under it. My experience is if a meteor can not shatter from one explosion (gaseous + demonfire orb combo), it is bugged - stuck underground partially. And ghosting and bombing it from below ALWAYS solved the issue. The star metal will remain on the ground, will not fall from the map.
Yes, I have always shot at the base of the meteor, logically, the blast wave goes up. And never failed…
If you have very few explosives, maybe go with this thinking. But there’s been many times I shot an explosive arrow at a “bugged” meteor from different angles and finally got it to break. I put bugged in quotes since I’m not sure if it’s a bug, or if they intended to make you find the sensitive spot (which I highly doubt).
My advice…Just take plenty of explosive arrows with you. You can’t get Star Metal at lower level this way, but they’re cheap to make, so you won’t feel as cheated when you have to use a few to find the right spot.
Back when I played on servers, I don’t remember having this issue as much as on my SP. But that was a few years ago, and I’m old. lol
Definitely a bug. One they’ve already spent much time on attempting to fix.
I figured it was. I just try not to make definitive statements when I don’t have the absolute facts. Not saying I’ve never done it, I’m only human, but I try not to. lol