Naturalist Update Changes
On July 28th 2020, Rockstar released a new update that made some changes to the Collector role as a whole that may change the effectiveness of using our map, or any map, going forward. This quick document will take you through the changes made to the map and what this means for you in your future Collector career.
In the update, Rockstar added a new collectibles set; the Fossils. Currently, these collectibles are PlayStation 4 exclusive content and will be coming to other platforms at some point. All these collectibles will be added to the map soon, though they are randomized (see below for what this means).
In the update, Rockstar made changes to the collectible spots to make them less predictable. Unlike a cycle change which we can update easily daily, this is a more complicated change that prevents anyone from using a map to rush to a specific spot and gather a specific collectible they need. In other words, what item you get from a spot will be completely random with no way to tell which item you're going to get, other than the loot tables.
This change has been made for Arrowheads, Coins, most Jewelry, some Heirlooms and the new Fossil sets. These being the best sets in terms of rewards is annoying, but also probably the reason why the changed the Collector role to now be this way.
This all means that you will not be able to easily complete the above sets every day anymore. Instead, what collectible you get will be luck-based. However, if you go to a spot where a coin was in the past, you will still get a coin, just not the specific coin you're looking for.
While you may not be able to get a full set each day, you should be able to get all collectibles over time. However, if you have 9 items of a particular set, it may not automatically mean that you are guaranteed to get the 10th item if that's the one you're missing. Before the update, random digging spots were not guaranteed to give you an item if you already had 10 of the item it tried to give you, ending up with a dig spot that gave you nothing.
Note: This, however, may have been fixed in the update, this is not yet known for certain.
No. The map still will display all possible spawns for Collectibles, though it won't be able to provide you with the item you're obtaining from that spot anymore for items that had this randomization change.
No. Since the items have only been randomized but not moved, the in-game purchasable maps will still only get you to the locations of the dig site, they won't guarantee you an item, nor do they advertise this fact in the game either. In short, the usefulness of the in-game maps is still questionable.
Random dig spots were always random, unlike this change where they made previously set locations for set collectibles random. You will still be able to retrieve the same collectibles you were able to retrieve from random dig spots. This hasn't changed in this update.
All other sets, Cards, Bottles, and Flowers haven't changed in the update. This means the map will still be able to provide you with locations for those items.
As is to be expected, Rockstar changed the way cycles work again, and does not overlap with our previous method of determining the daily cycles for items. However, this in itself isn't a big deal as we have ways to quickly check which cycles are active today manually, so other than a little bit of added waiting, nothing has changed in this regard. Again, it just takes a little more time to figure out the cycles, that's all.
