Mr. Abner wrote:Source of the post I would imagine the search always starts in the outer layers, otherwise if you've reached the 10K limit, it won't matter whether you select a radius of 20ly or 2000ly it would always find the same results closest to the viewer.
No, searching order is "fractal", according on architecture of the star engine. Search starts from the top
octree node, then traverses down and scans all children nodes (8 pieces) which intersects with the sphere. Then each 8 children nodes of that nodes etc. If 10,000 limit reached, search stops. It's hard to say what part of space has been scanned in this case. But typically you will have not fully scanned dwarf stars, because star octree have bright (giant) stars in the top levels (probably 100% scanned), medium-luminosity stars in the intermediate levels, and dim (dwarf) stars in the lower levels (only partially scanned, if 10,000 limit were reached).
20-25 ly bias is perfectly explained by
FastFourierTransform, and yes, there are some bugs in search function in 0.980, which had been fixed.