Since the last time I wrote about this, I’ve bought the Horizons DLC and put in many more hours into this game. I have to say that the learning curve just to get back in is pretty brutal. Not only did I have to refamiliarize myself with my custom control setup, the addition of Horizons and patch changes since I last played meant that there are now many more controls, all of which are not automatically bound. It’s pretty hard to set up these keybinds when you don’t even know how all these new systems work.

The in-game tutorials don’t really help but as usual there are plenty of YouTube videos to help one understand the new exploration mechanics and how the new SRV missions work. I also wasted time discovering that delivery missions now don’t automatically load and unload cargo for you (except when they are for one of the superpowers in which they do, it’s confusing). Anyway after spending an embarrassingly large amount of time getting my feet under me, I duly went to do missions that involve landing on planets only to discover that so far you can only land on airless worlds. It doesn’t look like atmospheric landing is due to be finished anytime soon either so my main reason for buying Horizons is right out.

This meant that I spent most of time doing things that were possible before the DLC anyway. Yet I still did plenty of things I didn’t do before and had a great time. I learned for example that doing the sourcing commodities missions are very lucrative and easy relying on external websites to find out where to buy the goods needed. I finally bought a Dolphin and kitted it out with luxury cabins to play at being an Uber drive in space. Not really that lucrative but fun role-playing. Annoyed at being saddled with a low combat rank, I also bought a Vulture and did more fighting. I ended up being blown up a lot trying to participate in conflict zones. I cleaned up at resource extraction sites however and grinded combat ranks by ganging up on wanted felons with the help of system security.

Another thing I did was getting started on engineering and collecting materials for it. It’s a terrible grind and chasing around signal sources and hanging around stations collecting data isn’t exactly fun. I’m not sure how far I want to pursue this but at least I understand how it works now. I haven’t done anything yet with the Technology Brokers though I really should. Having the Guardian Frame Shift Drive booster would be incredibly useful.

My main reason for all that of course is that I wanted to make the trip to Colonia over 20,000 light years away and I bought an Asp Explorer to make the trip. I’ve seen the tourist missions going there of course but even I’m not dumb enough to accept those. I wanted to do this just for the sake of doing and seeing if I can find undiscovered terraformable worlds along the way so as to get my name permanently on them. Discovering all planetary bodies in a system is now easier with the new mechanics as you don’t have to physically go close to each one but trying to do so for every system along the way is still far too daunting. I chose to dive a few hundred light years below the galactic plane before plotting a route to Colonia and really it’s easy to find completely untouched systems once you leave the bubble of inhabited space.

I only completely scanned systems that were unusual or looked interesting to me and I did find a few terraformable worlds along the way, though no Earth-likes. I set myself a target of about a 100 jumps a day but it was still pretty boring. It’s cool to see planets under white and blue-white stars and I loved how the starscape becomes increasingly dense as you approach the core of the galaxy, giving new meaning to the phrase ‘it’s full of stars’. It’s too time consuming to map many planet surfaces using the new probes but I did do it whenever I came across particularly interesting planets such as the ones bearing life. It’s impressive how the developers came up with the procedurally generated planets and some of them look quite amazing.

Then upon making the final jump and in transit to Jacques Station, I was interdicted and very quickly killed by another player. In retrospective it’s pretty obvious that Colonia would be a popular gank spot so I should have been smart enough to switch to Solo Play for the last few jumps. But I’ve never been attacked by a player before ever so it just didn’t occur to me. Luckily the game let me respawn in Colonia instead of back in the Bubble but I did of course lose all of my exploration data and those precious discoveries that were to bear my name.

As the game tells you who killed you, I looked up his name Cmdr Harry Potter and ‘lo and behold the guy is a genuine celebrity in this game having pulled off a high profile gank that was reported everywhere. I suppose I should see being killed by such a famous player as a bit of an honor and part of the Elite experience. In any case I am now slowly making my way back towards the Bubble but by way of a longer route that takes me closer to the core so it’ll probably take me months. Despite the unpleasantness of the gank, I find that I love spending time in this game. I intend to keep this game installed and do a few jumps everyday so I won’t forget the controls again and play other games in the meantime. So look out for more updates a few months down the road.