Research Sample

Research Samples are small research entities found across every planet in Astroneer and are one of the earliest ways to gain bytes. They can be collected from plants and rock formations throughout the terrain, including the surface and cave layers, and they provide a quick source of research progress before larger research items become available.

At the start of the game, the Research Chamber is already unlocked, allowing players to set up a basic research operation immediately. Research Samples can be consumed directly for a small amount of bytes, but they are usually more efficient when processed in a Research Chamber, where they yield significantly more bytes than simple scanning. This makes them especially useful early on, when every bit of research progress matters, and later as a supplemental source alongside automated research setups.

Research Samples appear in several forms:

• Organic samples are found on plants scattered across planets.
• Mineral samples are found on rock formations on the surface and in caves.
• Technology samples are rare and are found around wrecks or in EXO Dynamics Research Aids; they grant much more bytes than organic or mineral samples.
• Unknown samples are dropped by hostile flora when uprooted.

Because samples are lightweight and easy to gather, they are useful for building an early byte supply while exploring. Once a player has a steady stream of bytes from larger Research Items, samples become a convenient way to save time and inventory space, especially on harder planets where the environment tends to provide better research yields overall.

In practice, Research Items should usually be prioritized in Research Chambers first, since they tend to produce more bytes than samples. Research Samples still have a place in a research workflow, however, because they can be harvested quickly and processed in bulk, making them a reliable fallback when larger research sources are not available.

Research in Astroneer has changed several times over the game’s development. In the earliest pre-alpha release, research objects were pods that opened in a chamber and unlocked a schematic automatically. The system was revised several times after that, with update 0.5.0 introducing Bytes and the Research Catalog, and Research Samples being added in update 0.9.0, when they were originally called harvestables.