Is there any chance a Dev could answer my initial question please. @james @Steggs101 @lucadeltodecso @rossstephens @vdragon @Tobelawe @olliepurkiss @luke-turbulenz @Minyi … my apologies for all the multiple @s wasn’t sure who was the best person to ask … sorry if I missed anyone too 
I realise this might seem like a small thing to some people but for me it would make a huge difference in being able to make best use of my playing time. If the only time I can rely on a reasonably up to date map is at say 1am then perhaps I could occasionally do an all-nighter once in a blue moon at the weekend to look for gems and just use the rest of my time for other stuff rather than wasting endless hour’s going from one mined out hot spot to the next as is the current situation. Any help and insight would be greatly appreciated
Hmm, not one response from any developer, somewhat disappointing but not surprising 
From my understanding the Atlas DOESNT show you where things are… its shows you where things COULD be… IE doesnt update because it doesnt need to…
It just follows the rules for spawning … and if its possible that something could spawn there it will mark it based on the chance of that thing spawning there…
To be fair, they probably dont want to make that info public knowledge for the exact reason u stated. People will camp til reset then go crazy farming mats in the “hotspots”
So why would the map need to update every 24 hours?
Because the landscape changes when people dig up or build over things…
so going back to Depths of materials?
If people change the height of the land it can affect what happens below it. Claims also stop things from respawning right ? surface materials (well even underground) will stop spawning in the actual claimed blocks.
That’s my assumption too … but if that is the case then the system is always going to favour those that always end up with a updated map for their usual log in time.
You’re probably right
For surface materials yes… but underground things. yeah i dunno… in my mining experience which i will admit is quite limited (only >T5) ive NEVER seen an underground base in locations i want to mine… and i generally dont mine right under someones city or where someone has modified the land to grab a tonn of silty soil/sand for example
but again ive never been to Serp and ive heard loads of people mine there so i could be wrong about that planet
I’ve pretty much given up using atlases apart from navigating around lava and water etc… as far as resources go I’ve generally had better luck just mining randomly and following seams.
I’ve only really been using them to find an area that could be hot. In areas I know are hot for a certain resource I don’t even use it except to maintain that I’m in that area.
The dev who created the system is currently on holiday.
I’m not fully sure but after a quick look the code I think the server updates the resource maps every 30 minutes, the planet maps every 60 minutes, but the client only requests (and then caches) them every 24 hours. So when you first open your atlas the information should be correct(ish). But it’ll then not update for 24 real world hours. So players will have different resource maps depending on when they were last requested.
We’ve discussed options for making the held resource maps update much more frequently - and we’ll hopefully be able to do something.
(But it’s worth adding them having them update more regularly will increase bandwidth and increase the client CPU cost of merging all the different resource maps together. So what? Well players are regularly complaining about networking and performance - without realising that the game is doing a huge amount of work in the background. The planet maps are ~400k, so just imaging what the game needs to do when you walk through a portal into a shop which is selling 40 atlases with multiple different resource maps on display. We’re trying to hide away all that bandwidth so the world continues to load and render smoothly.)
Smells like an opportunity for some sort of LOD type system: maybe only fetch the hourly regenerated map when you’re looking at the atlas, or while equipped
You know, on top of the oodles of other things on the backlog 
Thanks @james … so does that mean that the heat map is an actual representation of the selected resource at one point or is it as suggested a map showing where the resources could potentially be based on the spawn parameters?
The system already contains LOD. Planets in the sky and planets in the hand / HUD / inventory / world already use an LOD system based on the world block LOD 1 pixel = 2m x 2m, 4m x 4m and 8m x 8m. If you run up to an atlas on a plinth really quickly you’ll sometimes see the LOD pop. (You should see the maps at 1 pixel = 1m x 1m!! If only everyone had your Internet connection!)
The problem with fetching the maps hourly is that it’s a huge waste of bandwidth. You basically download an entire map when you only care about a tiny portion of it surrounding you. So much of it is wasted bandwidth. We’re looking at a system where the map gets adapted based on local date sent to you as you’re exploring. So the local environment would be perfectly accurate, where as the other side of the planet might be hours old.
The resource map contains the exact state of the resources now. (Which is very similar to the original state normally.) They represent live data.
Oh nice! “chunk metadata”?
Thanks @james for the explanation, especially at such a late time in the evening, I appreciate the time you’ve taken to explain things and I look forward to future updates especially with regards to this. It’s too easy for some of us to forget (namely myself) and not appreciate just what goes into what you guys are doing with this amazing game. I’ll have to keep reminding myself that this game is constantly running through the Internet and all its inherent problems and not just running locally on my computer and you always have to battle with it running smoothly on the worst case scenario as opposed to a top of the range computer with ultra fast and stable Internet connection.
make a “Resync this atlas” button.
pressing it (maybe while actively viewing the atlas) will request an update for this very specific resource map.
if this causes a minor data lag (like sometimes walking through multiple portals)
i’m sure that the clients will understand.
It’s better than relying on 22h old information
But when is it that they actually update is what I’m trying to establish.
Do you really want everyone to know? It’ll cause a stampede at that one time of day.