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Elite: Dangerous


radiofloyd
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Way back in January 2013 this game raised £1.5 million on kickstarter, was released in 2015, followed by a Horizons "season pass" which looks like it is receiving its final major update this year. I bought the base game at some stage during the last two years and have finally gotten around to playing it.

 

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I've played it for over four hours so far. The game has a number of tutorial missions (and videos) which explain some of the fundamentals of the game, piloting and landing your ship, combat, travelling between planets. There's certainly a learning curve but I think I have the basic piloting, landing and navigation parts down now. I can't really speak for combat, I completed the basic combat tutorial but I haven't yet encountered any combat in the main "open" game, which I've played around 90 minutes of.

 

You start off with a ship, 1000 credits and a mission to deliver data to another port. I completed that mission and you are then told which places to visit if you wish to learn about various aspects of the game. Each port has a mission board where you can take on a variety of missions, but you can't take on missions of a higher rank than your current rank. I'm still at the starting rank "Penniless". So far I've completed one extra mission, to supply copper.

 

I haven't even scratched the surface of the surface of the game but just playing this most basic part of the game has been fun so far. I've been playing on PC, with a controller. Aesthetically, the game looks and sounds beautiful. The hyper space jumps or whatever they are called are amazingly eerie.

 

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Played it for seven hours. This game needs way better IN-GAME tutorials. Yes the game does tell you where to go to learn the basics of trading, exploration etc, but then when you get those missions. the instructions are ridiculously minimal. I tried an exploration mission to a scan a navigation beacon, once I finally scanned the beacon (easier said than done), the game gave me the vaguest of instructions of where to go/what to do next.

 

Anyway, after seven hours I've had enough of Elite: Dangerous for now. I may came back to it but there's a limit into how much effort I'm willing to put in to learn how to play this game, when there are hundreds of other very accessible games sitting in my library.

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I got a code for this on PS4 (friends in high places) so worked my way through most of the tutorials last night (the advanced combat one kicks my arse every time multiple targets appear). I agree - the tutorials aren't up to much, spent ages trying to find a waypoint the voiceover woman said she'd marked in one of the lander tutorials, only to find out there isn't one. It's a game that definitely requires commitment from the player, but I quite like the fact that it doesn't hold your hand. At all. 

 

 

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I managed to upgrade my starting ship to an Eagle last night, and fit it out with a better FTL drive, shields and power supply. Also managed to run a few missions and accidentally poisoned a space station. Really loving this so far - it's a game that's stuck in my head, i'm reading up about it in my spare time - working out what to do next.

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Arghhh - this game. It's difficulty curve (well, I say curve - it's a vertical precipice) is really unforgiving, but i'm having such a good time getting stuck into the nuts and bolts of it. I've now purchased my third ship after ditching the Eagle for a Cobra MKIII that i've stripped bare and kitted out with a decent jump drive and sensor arrays so I can make a living as a space taxi/explorer. Currently taking a passenger on a sightseeing tour that so far has taken me 36 jumps at 20 light years a pop - and i've got another 38 jumps to the next destination, and then I have to head back! Should net me a cool 1.6 million credits though.

 

 

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Finished the passenger mission last night - 102 jumps in total. Not sure i'll be in a hurry to take on one of those jumps again anytime soon!

Managed to fit advanced scanners and some decent weaponry to my ship with the earnings though, and i splashed out on a fancy paint job...

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  • 5 months later...
  • 1 month later...

It's wont be to many peoples interest, but the tactics used but the FLC, the FRC and the FUC to get the upper hand on the much stronger Imperiel factions in the powerplay side of Elite Dangerous is fascinating.

 

 

 

I'm part of the FLC so I got to see how they arrange and orchestrate stuff like this as well as take part in the general tussling over systems. Watching week by week how things are planned out and how much stuff goes on and how quick the people in control react to it and deploy actions to take care of any spills. It's all so regimented that it has to be seen to be believed.

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  • 2 months later...

A friend I played with quite a bit in Elite Dangerous was talking about his progression up into the biggest ships in the game and it made me install the game again and have a quick look at it.

 

Took me a bit of time to find my space legs after 6 or so months away but I managed to get back into the gist of things after 10 minutes, which surprised me as I remember getting into the game was impossibly frustrating. I did it though, so that's a hurdle less that I'll have to cope with when I log in next time.

 

There's been a lot of updates and changes since I last logged in, and there's been a hardware change since I upgraded to the Pro. I don't know what the hell they did but this game looks so much better than it did before. It was kind of barren when out in the black anyway, but the sky boxes of the far away starts and nebula's were always pretty to look at. Now though, they are stunning. Maybe the update did that? Or it might possibly be the Pro's extra grunt. Looks fantastic whatever the reason is.

 

I forgot how zen like playing this game could be as well. If you're avoiding the combat it's such a nice laid back game to play. I know it's not everyone's cup of tea and the initial difficulty of learning to pilot your ship is a nightmare for nearly every single player that tries it, but it's just one of those games it's easy to lose hours and hours of time at a time. It's one of those games where you can plan what you're going to do for the night, bang a podcast or a spotify playlist on and just sink away into a world of trading, exploring, dogfighting and warring politics between rival factions all whilst pimping up your fleet of ships to become better at your chosen profession.

 

 

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Did the Hutton Orbital run tonight. Seen as a rite of passage for a lot of ED players. Got to get those Hutton Orbital mugs. Fuck doing that ever again.

 

Hilariously there's a conflict point near the station. Because after a 0.22ly flight in super cruise in a fighter craft you'd look for a ruck. ?

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On 4/25/2018 at 3:34 AM, Sly Reflex said:

A friend I played with quite a bit in Elite Dangerous was talking about his progression up into the biggest ships in the game and it made me install the game again and have a quick look at it.

 

Took me a bit of time to find my space legs after 6 or so months away but I managed to get back into the gist of things after 10 minutes, which surprised me as I remember getting into the game was impossibly frustrating. I did it though, so that's a hurdle less that I'll have to cope with when I log in next time.

 

There's been a lot of updates and changes since I last logged in, and there's been a hardware change since I upgraded to the Pro. I don't know what the hell they did but this game looks so much better than it did before. It was kind of barren when out in the black anyway, but the sky boxes of the far away starts and nebula's were always pretty to look at. Now though, they are stunning. Maybe the update did that? Or it might possibly be the Pro's extra grunt. Looks fantastic whatever the reason is.

 

I forgot how zen like playing this game could be as well. If you're avoiding the combat it's such a nice laid back game to play. I know it's not everyone's cup of tea and the initial difficulty of learning to pilot your ship is a nightmare for nearly every single player that tries it, but it's just one of those games it's easy to lose hours and hours of time at a time. It's one of those games where you can plan what you're going to do for the night, bang a podcast or a spotify playlist on and just sink away into a world of trading, exploring, dogfighting and warring politics between rival factions all whilst pimping up your fleet of ships to become better at your chosen profession.

 

 

 

Exactly this. I also jumped on this again last night with Sly and our friend, Jaydredd, and it's surprising what you remember after not playing a committed game for months. After a few pointers from both, I was hyper-spacing like Chewie around systems and landing my ship perfectly, 3 times in a row 1st time, a particular highlight. We were saying how much it's like driving after a long stint away from it. As soon as your behind the wheel, it all comes back.

Will enjoy this more this time around me thinks.

  

 

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I'm really surprised given Elites legacy that there's not more people that have got into this. It's the ideal longterm game to play between playing other games. Its good to catch up with friends (either in a wing or not) or for listening to podcasts or albums.

 

I just think that there's something here for everyone as well, everything is covered from the most casual to the most hardcore of playing styles. You can just dick about, do a bit of trading, maybe go on long haul flights with passengers. Learn smuggling routes where you're likely to get less chance of being caught. Do a bit of dogfighting. Chip in with community goals, or even sabotage them if you want. Mix all of that in and do a bit of power play for your chosen super power. Or you could go hardcore and push all your chips into engineering your ship, go fighting Thargoids or just fuck off into the black and see if you can discover some cool stuff nobody has every even seen before.

 

It's such a big game that there's only 0.003% of the galaxy being explored, and while there's probably fuck all out there it doesn't hurt to go and look, you . The Pleiades was just a normal nebula until the Thargoid discoveries were made and since there's plenty of permit locked systems miles away from anything it looks like there's extra stuff to come further down the line . I get that some people might feel daunted because the game doesn't really tell you what to do and the direction you go needs to be on your own drive. If you don't have that drive then it's not for you. Everyone else should have a ball, given the little bit of guidance every bugger needs to get on with it.

 

I think as well it has the ability to deliver stories that are unique tot he player in the way @Blakey talked about when fawning over Sea of Thieves.

 

Me and the aforementioned Jaydredd were both in our attack ships contributing to a community goal where we had to kill off any saboteurs that were wanted within the system. So we're sat in our wing near the systems star waiting for ships to jump in and get a leg up on them to kill them before they knew what was going on. It was a fruitful endeavour, we're both sitting on about 500k in bounty bonds to be cashed in when we realise we're starting to run a bit low on supplies so we decide to make the next hit our last one before cashing in. The next ship that came in didn't look like much of a threat, so we engaged and started to put through the moves that had worked for hours before. It didn't go well, the ship that were were fighting although it was a minnow in the terms of ship sizes was armed to the teeth and dangerous as fuck. We became more and more damaged as the fight tumbled through the depths of space, mine and his systems getting knocked offline and damaged beyond being useful. Fists the shields went completely offline, then the power coupling. The hardpoints array started glitching out, power delivery causing sparks and smoke to come from our dashboards. In a final sweep, we both line up in a game of chicken towards the pirate and let loose a final salvo, lock on warnings blaring through both our warning systems. The game worked out, our lasers and kinetic weapons finally tearing through the last part of the enemy's hull. Bounty claimed! Although the part missile the enemy fired off hit us both just as the fight ended and sent us both into complete shutdown. Thrusters were down, we spiralled helplessly as the fractured cockpit glass flashed with numerous warnings, flickering on and off as it struggled to display. The parting gift the last fight ended up had knocked us both out in exactly the same way. and as our ships counted down what air supply we had as we toppled helplessly into the grasps of the sun we had to scramble frantically to get the ships in working order or risk facing a rebuy and losing our bounty tickets. A complete system shutdown and reboot was in order, all the lights went out and we held on as the sun dragged us in bit by bit. As the systems reset they'd report back. Shields - nominal. Hardpoints - nominal. Thrusters - nominal. FSD- nominal. Life support - nominal. Hull at 8%. Temperature rising. The heads up display projected on the ruptured glass looked like the end was inevitable. Me and Jay are getting really flustered at this point, shouting at our ships to get them to work just a little bit faster before it was too late. Controls reengaged and I set the thrusters away from the blazing sun which had since pulled me into it's grasp, my thrusters even at full just slowing me down from entering the big hot shiny bastard. I pointed to the exit trajectory and hit the FSD and watched it limp up as my ship started to take heat damage, the hull slowly ticking down point by point as I cooked. I see Jay high wake just as my counter hit and I wake out too. We sit in supercruise for a bit and let our shields recharge before slowly making it back to the Coriolis for repairs.

 

Shit was tight. Scary as fuck, but tight. There's no written scripted game that's going to write stories like that. Bespoke adventures can only be done in free world games. It's what you make it.

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Been prepping quite hard to get some FSD engineering on. I'm prepping my Asp Explorer to go to Colonia and then on to Sagittarius A* and back, then maybe go out into the black exploring and doing plenty of scanning to get some cartography stuff done and hopefully get my explorers rank to Elite.

 

This means I'm currently Felicity Farseer's bitch. I've a hell of a lot of materials to farm and find before I can top out the upgrades and really get the best jump range from the best FSD I can squeeze into my ship. I think maybe there might be a little more to it than that, maybe shedding as much weight as possible while still having all the stuff I'm going to need out means the expedition might take a bit longer to get going, but it's probably better to lay down the foundations now instead of trying to trying to attempt a 52 thousand plus light years trip only to find I made it way harder for myself by being an idiot and trying to run before I can walk.

 

I did break out of The Bubble to go and have a look around the Pleiades and I want to go down that way again at some point to look at the Witch head nebula

 

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I should have done this ages ago, but I didn't and now going out that way from The Bubble runs the risk of getting gang fucked by aliens. I'd be fine with this if it was the sexy type of aliens William Shatner dicked, but the only thing taking a dicking by getting caught by those aliens is my bank account, I'm not entirely fond of that idea. There's other nebulas and cool stuff down that way and it's pretty close. It's just there's Thargoids there and they ain't nothin' to fuck wit. Maybe I should just the bullet and just go for it.

 

I'd have to look at the star map and see if there's any other nebulas or systems that look like they might be interesting to go have a poke around. Just keep a wide berth away from the Pleiades so I don't end up a statistic of the war.

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Very nearly had enough to max out engineering the Frame Shift Drive but ended up missing out because I didn't have enough arsenic collected.

 

As a result I ended up down on a planet searching for nodes to collect materials. Got 20 or so arsenic so I should be able to max out the FSD on the Asp Explorer and maybe even my Python will be able to be taken to max jump range.

 

For reference I've gone from about 34Ly jumps on the Asp to about 47Ly. I don't know what maxing out the FSD engineering will do but I'm hoping I can hit 50Ly per jump. I'm going to outfit for exploring so I can probably shed a load of weight by stripping weapons and putting more lightweight components in where I can get away with them. It might be worth me visiting other engineers to try and bring my hulls mass down to push that jump as far as I can, although that will require a bit of adventuring and work to do since. I'm not even sure what could be engineered to shed extra mass. Being as light as possible is going to be the highest priority. When I'm out in the black I'm not always going to be near a scoopable star so running out of fuel is always a worry, so being able to do huge jumps to potential fuel sources is going to help, especially when I'm mapping those systems that have pulsars or dying stars.

 

 

 

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I forgot to mention in the last post how much improve the SRV driving is. Since I last played they made it so that tiny pebbles don't cause such collisions fucking up your space wheels and making travelling more than 2mph a danger. I think they took out the collision models of all the small rocks because now it's great to go and have a burn out around the planets surfaces. The bigger stuff and other planetary furniture can still snag you up but it's nowhere near as infuriating as it was when I originally played it.

 

Anyway I managed to top out my FSD to level 5 and strip it down as far as I could to get the most out of it. Ended up at something like 48Ly after tinkering with other bits of the ship that added weight back on. I'm guessing when I remove the hardpoints and some of the other stuff that I'm not going to need when I leave The Bubble I might see the 50Ly jumps I wanted, but it's not too bad if I don't. The jump range I have now is pretty good for what I need.

 

Also bought another ship for fighting. A Vulture. It's the nastiest little fucker on the block that will see off much bigger prey than itself. It's no Fer-De-Lance, but I should be able to outfit it and have a capable fighter for a fifth of what one of those ships that happen to be built around a gun costs. Shit's expensive when you go further up the tree, especially when it comes to outfitting your ships. I mean everything is expensive really,  but when you buy a ship that's worth millions and start stripping the stock parts out for a better custom build, some parts cost more than the base vessel itself. That's before you start engineering as well, although it's not really monetary cost for engineers apart from a few exceptions of unlocking the person that does the work. It becomes space Gran Turismo, except instead of making a 1000hp Skyline you're making a ship can fuck up any job you put in front of it.

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At this point I'm basically talking to myself, but this is more or less a journal of thoughts and progression as I continue through this bout of Elite Dangerous play.

 

So the old weekly community goals have swapped over and they're a bit more lenient this week. For the uninitiated a community goal is two weekly activities that story of tie into the story of Elite Dangerous, a plot line that takes a step forwards each week and events unfold. Sometimes the CG are just fluff, maybe focusing on a factions national holidays while other times they're more humanity based. A lot of the recent ones have been supplying building materials and evacuating space ports because they've been attacked by aliens.

 

Mostly each week you end up with a trading based goal and a combat based goal. It's specifically last weeks trading CG that has me most vexed with how they've handled it. It's not often this happens, but occasionally the goods a station calls for are unique goods. So among all the alcohols you'll have stuff like Bast Snake Gin, which is a product of the Bast system and cannot be gotten anywhere else. Which is where the issues arise. Because these items need to be hauled quite far people tend to go for the one that's going to make them the most tonnage. The more tons you deliver the better the end of goal reward you will get dependant on which bracket you fall under. Each bracket you climb increases the final payout you will receive on top of any profits you make from hauling goods. Overall tonnage also increases the money everyone gets as tiers are broken through. This is the problem with these bespoke system goods, people deplete them quicker than they can restock and you end up getting stuck on the overall delivery as a group, but it also fucks with your placing within the top 100%/75%/50%/25% and 10%, so if you want to deliver you have to first go to the system, find that they're only selling 2 ton and then move on and try to check out one of the other systems selling another viable bespoke product to try and push you up the leaderboards. It's kind of fucked because if you don't get lucky with how the game supplies back into those product pools then you've basically no chance of climbing the ranks, nor has the overall community got a chance of finishing the goal at tier 8 which will reward everyone with the biggest payouts when the CG flips over.

 

This doesn't affect the other vanilla style trade CG's since if they want something like Tea, Aluminium or Landmines you can always go searching around the systems that are closest and start hitting their reserves up, this has a snowball effect since people will look at the progress of the goal, see it's going to get them a few million payout for dropping the bare minimum of work and chip in, maybe even hedging the bets of the people between top 100% and 75% to push more products into the CG in the aim of tripling or quadrupling their final payout. People start going frenzied at the final payout and want to make the cut or even cushion themselves from falling down a pay grade. You just don't get that with the bespoke products because it's such a fucking ballache to deliver any serious tonnage since the game is throttling how much product can be delivered.

 

It results in people not giving a shit about those particular events. There's better ways of earning cash in the game that people will drop a load and then leave it at that.

 

For instance the goal I'm moaning about a round trip would net me maybe half a million, which for the amount I'm hauling is incredible. It's still a shit payday when you considered everything I hauled tonight net me 1.2m for less jumps and less distance travelled in supercruise. This is before we tally on the amount I'll get before the CG finishes or completes. For a small hauler starting out it's an amazing payout, but we're at a place where small haulers aren't a thing. It's dead easy to come into the game now and be flying an Asp Explorer with a decent cargo capacity. I'm not entirely sure what the fuck Frontier are aiming for for these types of CG's since it's barely worth anybodies time.

 

I love this game to bits, but at times I've got to wonder what the fuck they were thinking making such shitty design decisions. It's not just that, Elite Dangerous is such a big game that's got so many complex parts moving that there's bound to be some flecks of shit in there somewhere, but it doesn't stop me getting irate when I get one of those flakes stuck between my teeth.

 

I'll probably talk about another aspect I love/hate when I can be bothered to type up another wall of text.

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Had a bit of a day on this. Nearly lost a ship due to my own stubbornness and stupidity but managed to wake out of danger after being caught in an interdiction. Lessons were learned, no cutting corners when it comes to interdiction in the future.

 

Here's me and JayDredd sat in the Bobko dock waiting for @Bigkopman.  Both sat in our Pythons, Mines to the right while Jay's is the bottom left ship.

 

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I lost a Vulture and got hit with a rebuy for 500k-ish credits. I lost a load of bounty vouchers as well, I must have lost 3 or 4 million because I've not had a chance to cash them in since they all belonged to various different systems and claiming them can be a bit of a chore. It's a painful loss that has a bit more story behind it, but I'm going to sit on it because of how it occurred.

 

Bounty hunting took a bit of a knock because @Bigkopman managed to write himself off into a rebuy and then fire on an innocent miner causing us to leave the area we were cleaning up. Accidents happen, and in Elite Dangerous having an accident will fuck you up. Friendly fire and attacking innocents is not tolerated in 3304. Becoming a fugitive is almost as easy as kissing the void through screwing up a dogfight with pirates.

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I've put all I can into the Community Goals this week, if I slip out of the rankings that I've earned then so be it, I can always get the money elsewhere. Plus I've incurred a lot of damages and rebuys while in this particular combat goal, so I'll be glad to see the back of it. So while there's a little window of opportunity to do so, I've decided to pull my 2 main ships away from the action and into the workshop to see some serious overhauls. This is a doing over in outfitting and engineering.

 

So the people that have played this will know what both of those are, but I'll just go over it in case anyone who is interested will know what the deal is.

 

Outfitting is where you build your ship with the various modules the game has to offer. Each ship in the game has core slots and optional slots, each slot has a number denoting the biggest size of module it can take. On top of this, each size of module has a rating of itself, going through from E to A, each letter having an attribute. Just because it's a low rating doesn't mean the module in itself is bad, for instance D rated gear is the lightest of all the mods which is extremely valuable in certain builds. A rated stuff is generally the best, but it's also heavy and it costs more than Brendan Fraser's alimony payments. It's also worth noting that each bit of kit you upgrade alters the insurance for your ship, so decisions have to be made not only in outfitting, but also out in the world where things look like they could possibly go to shit. It's not fun having your cock twisted clean off with repair bills or at worse a complete rebuy if your ship gets written off.

 

Engineering is going several steps further and tuning those modules to give and overall better performance. I mentioned earlier in the thread I engineered my Asp Explorer to maximise the FSD so that my jump range is much larger than I could get it just by tinkering with module configurations. Now's the time for my Vulture (a fighter) and my Python (my workhorse) to go through what scrappy work I can fit them with before the next round of Community Goals come again and the feeding frenzy starts once again.

 

Engineers are not like Outfitters. Outfitters can be found almost in every populated system, the modules they stock varying in price and quality. Whenever you dock at a ship it's worth seeing if they have anything you might want to think about picking up to make your life threading through the stars a bit easier or more lucrative. No. Engineers are rare cunts.

 

Currently there's 20 Engineers in the game and they all have their own specialisation. However, you can't just go to them and ask them to sort you out, you have to hear about the initial 5 through rumours and get invited to work with them through your escapades. Each Engineer will have a speciality and the way to unlock them will reflect that. For instance Felicity Farseer is a renowned explorer known for being interested in aliens. You have to hit a certain rank by exploring and then befriend her by giving her a specimen of aliens alloy. The "Dweller" for instance calls you in when he finds out if you've been smuggling goods, while Tod "The Blaster" Quinn hears about you bounty hunting and offers to help you with kinetic weaponry.

 

Getting upgrades from Engineers increases your relationship with them and in turn they introduce you to the next in line. You always have to do something to win them over though, for instance "The Dweller" puts you onto someone who wants payment in gold bullion. This opens a couple of options for how I go about acquiring this gold. I can just go looking for the cheapest price and eat the cost. I can refit a ship and go mining for it. I can turn pirate and hit the miners up that are prospecting for it, or I can take missions that might reward me with some tonnage that will go towards paying my way into that particular club.

 

So far since I left the Community Goal I've managed to outfit my under performing Vulture with bigger teeth, a better defence and a limpet control room so that after a dogfight has happened I can pick up all the materiel from the resulting wreckage. Materials and data are important to the Engineers because that's how they upgrade your modules. It's not just the bits of wreckage you need to get, there's bit like scanning ships and wakes, as well as visiting planet surfaces with mineral and metal contents that you might need for specific upgrades. It's very much a case of collect everything if you're in doubt as long as it isn't illegal (unless you don't mind the risk) because you can always take it to a station and trade it for something you are lacking.

 

So I visited "The Dweller" for his beam laser expertise for my Vulture and now Felicity Farseer is hopefully going to increase both my Vulture and Pythons capabilities before I head off to Tod so that my Vulture's multi-cannon can be made more viscous for the next possible Community Goal which will start on Thursday.

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