I recently got the combat visor upgrade to help me aim at a distance like I'm used to, and the range of the multitool does allow for ranged stuff - good for when there's sentinels around and stuff as they don't seem to see a connection between the exploding minerals and the energy beam that's hitting them. As such, they're just confused, and don't trace back the beam or check the direction from where it came.

Uhm, anyways... precision. If I try to aim precisely, I notice a very rough, like, grid, the cursor snaps to always. It's as if they divided the space around you in 360 degrees, and allow you to look / aim at 2 degrees, and at 3, and 4... but not in between. As such, there's no fluid aiming when you're aiming slow enough to notice, and you can't aim properly at smaller (example: distant) stuff.

Very annoying, and I'd guess it's because of the controls being coded for controllers, and only ported to / for KB & mouse. But, in case it's just my mouse or something weird on my side, could someone else confirm, please...?

My experience is, that while in first person mode the aim is right on spot when using any way (RMB or aim for scanning) to aim in, being in third person mode hoses aiming, being off up to the point of rendering any effort to target specific objects completely useless.

It is these kinds of blatantly obvious 'mishaps', which make me feel, that this release was rushed out of the door (as in 'it compiles, ship it, ship it !'). Which is one of the reasons, why the game I so very much like to play gets so much heat.

That's exactly what you can't do. Well, it is accurate to hitting what you do aim at, but it prevents you from aiming at stuff you want to aim at precisely. It snaps around, most of the time.

If you're aiming with mouse, and want to aim precisely before you start shooting / mining, I find it very hard to do.

Example: I move the mouse, fluidly, in a smooth curve, with very low DPI to be precise.
In other games, the same movement happens ingame.
In NMS, the crosshair goes like, 1 field left, 2 up, 2 left, 1 up. A digital grid, as opposed to analog, fluid movements.

I'm unable to see if the controller behaves the same way, as I can't aim that precisely / slow with it.
So IDK if that happens with controllers, too. I only use those to fly the ships, as that's much easier than mouse.

*Addendum:
Here's two examples.
https://imgur.com/a/eROifEu

I'm still on 1.57 but I can say this is not the case for me at all. I play exclusively 3rd person except for flying and haven't noticed an issue with aiming. As noted, I'm still on 1.57 but after noticing your thread I fired the game up and played for a couple hours. I'm not experiencing this at all.

Thanks for the clarification -- I actually did noticed this kind of 'grid-snap', but since the scanner seems to have a mind of its own, when it comes to deciding what exactly to scan, I stopped trying to aim the way you referred to a long time ago -- and promptly forgot about it.

So: Yes, I am also experiencing what you noticed. I don't have the Blaze Javelin installed currently, but seem to remember, that that was one of the reasons I never bothered to move my aim when zoomed in on a distant target, but instead 're-aim', when in 1st person.

What I originally referred to was, what I attached as a set of pictures, each containing three screenshots.

The first screenshot in each picture shows me aiming at one of the cannons of my Explorer, the 2nd one when using the scanner on it, and the 3rd one after releasing the scanner key.

While in Scan_1st_person.jpg I'm back in the exact same spot (minus involuntary movement of the in-game character) with my aim after releasing the scan key, Scan_3rd_person.jpg shows, that I'm already off while holding the scan key, and I'm even more off after releasing it.

This might seem to be a minor interference (just as the 'snap-to-grid'), but repeated often enough it turns into quite a pain in the back. Especially, since naturally the effect gets worse the farther away the aimed targets are located.

I'm on 1.57, btw. And I doubt, that 1.58 changed any of that behaviour. But then, I kind of can't know, what version I really have installed, since I can't check in-game, can't I ? :D

Edit: Corrected a 1st / 3rd person mixup

I lose my beed, when a little hungry pooper, nudges me.

Seriously tho, are you holding both mice buttons in that imgur example?

My dam. Numbers go down the further away I mine. That does not stop me from mining from space port seating areas, however, on hazard, and aggressive planets. Mostly I use shield in mouse button 2, because I cannot seem to get scope visor off neg one in 1.59 patch. In older patch. It went up to neg fifty, and I crit often. Prolly has something to do with my prepatch multitool. Dunno.

Zero difference between zoomed-in movement and not-zoomed movement. Both equally jumpy.

And, the -1 actually does mean something? Because, I've seen the -1 the first time I used the scope, but thought it to be a bug, a meaningless number. Later, I noticed the number changed to like, a 50 or something like that, for no reason or consequences.

Further away, less damage with the mining laser makes sense, and I've seen it, too. Less efficient mining, which I sometimes still prefer to spending additional minutes to walk all over the place all the time, because that adds up quick.

I'm pretty sure everything you're describing since your original post was present in Atlas Rises. With a Boltcaster with Omega damage, Tau and Sigma Rapidfire and Tau Coolant, if I moved the cursor off the target by a hair, the stream of fire would snap to the target, but if I went a hair further, normal physics took over and I missed wildly. It was annoying and didn't make much sense. If I'm missing the target, let me miss. That encourages me as a player to learn to aim better. But when the fire stream torques off at an obvious angle to hit the target, the whole thing seems artificial like my skill has nothing to do with playing. It is, as you say, very much like a digital grid placement of shots.

And yes, there is damage dropoff over distance, and this was present in Atlas too. It was most noticeable with the shotgun-like weapons, but it existed in all. At max range, a cyclotron ballista would annoy a pirate, but at close range the same number of shots would reduce its shield well below half. At max range a photon cannon could hit a crystalline asteroid with 12 shots and not destroy it, but at medium range it took only 5 to 6 to obliterate it. The same was true with the MT. Within arm's reach, the mining beam would vaporize a medium size crystal node in a second, but at max range it would take 2 or 3. If you fired a boltcaster at a sentinel biped the moment you saw it, you'd have to reload to destroy it even if every shot hit, but at close range 3 seconds of rapid fire was enough to drop it (with the setup I described above, anyway).

I get the damage dropoff, it's a bid to realism, I guess, although there is so much about this game that is abstract I don't think they should have bothered. But there is obviously an auto-aim that is not well hidden and not well implemented, and I think most of us would rather it not be there if it can't be replaced with something less obviously grid-based.

Take a look at your mouse smoothing and sensitivity settings. A long time ago (probably not long after the initial release) I found that the default mouse smoothing was actually causing very jerky behavior when looking around. Probably a combination of my particular hardware setup and the game's early engine. I found that I got the best play by setting the mouse smoothing to "0" and the afoot sensitify to "25." YMMV, of course, but might be worth experimenting with those.

Mouse smoothing needs to be declared illegal, if you ask me. =D
As such, I always check and disable anything related to that out of the box before doing anything else.
So, it's already off.