You had to see this coming, right? Swapping out an incessant drum beat for one space-game with another?

Back when Elite Dangerous launched, I had the same issue I had back when EVE Online launched, which was a sense of complete disarray that prevented me from figuring out how to actually move the ball down the field. In both games, I knew enough to perform the most minor actions — fly from place to place, shoot objects, use the markets — but none of it was enough for me to really gain momentum.

Now, though, I’m learning how to move through the additional systems that FDev has layered on top of the original game, which seems a bit counter intuitive to me as I’d think that starting from my shaky base of understanding would just compound my confusion. This time, I’ve gotten more used to looking up information and watching videos, but I also think that there’s just more info out there for me to refer to than there was at any time in the past.

With that being the case, here’s what I’ve been up to since returning to Elite Dangerous.

Greasing Palms

I will admit up front that part of my enjoyment and sudden success has been in part because I spent $25 and bought some ARX, the in-game premium currency, to purchase the Mandalay, which was the banner ship that was being offered when I re-upped.

The benefit of this was that the ship came with a whole host of amenities which, at the time, I did not have or could not equip in my starter Sidewinder. This decision has cost me orders of magnitude less than what I have spent in That Other Game, so I didn’t feel bad about it especially considering I’ve only ever purchased the base game and the two expansions across the years.

I didn’t actually start to use the Mandalay until I moved my base of operations a few weeks into playing.

Workin’ for The Man

My first order of business was to take whatever missions I could, where I could. In the base Sidewinder, I could only move small cargo, and not very far. These missions were paying out maybe 25k – 50k, with options to take less money but more influence, or less money but more reputation with the mission faction. I didn’t plan to move on to another star system so I had been working through a single faction as well as I could until I could afford an upgrade to an Adder. This provided me with more cargo space and a larger reach, which proved to be a problem.

I Can’t Read a Map

ED’s universe is frighteningly large, which tells me that I should pick a star system and stay around there for as long as possible, which I call my “Ultima Online Strategy” for reasons I won’t explain here. While taking cargo missions in the Adder, I accidentally took one which looked OK on the map, but I didn’t review the requirements before I left the station. This sent me on a 40-jump tour through the Inner Orion Spur in a ship that barely had jump ability and a teacup-sized fuel tank. Thankfully I had hours in which to complete the delivery, so I’d make 10 jumps, go eat lunch, make 10 more jumps, watch a movie, make 10 more jumps, take a nap, and then return once more to complete the trip. This kind of thing was, as I have stated, part of what drove me away from ED originally, as jumping, fuel-scooping or finding a place to dock (which layers on additional time to the process) is painfully boring.

I consider this to be lesson learned, and it has since paid off. I now know how to apply scoopable stars to the route (which almost always lengthens the time, but it’s better than getting stranded). I’ve also started fiddling with my ship configurations, looking into increasing their jump distances while trying to avoid sacrificing other factors (the Adder as no weapons, and I might pull the shields as well, but we’ll see). Moving around is still tedious, but I’m choosing my battles more carefully now.

Jumping into the Fray

When I ended up at the end of that 40-jump debacle, I decided that maybe I should take a break from delivering things and look into Powerplay. I had seen a video which espoused the advantages of Powerplay 2.0, so I figured it might be something that offers a different experience. I had tried Powerplay 1.0, but I never fully grasped the purpose of participating; I was playing so infrequently (re: annoyed by travel) and wasn’t contributing in a meaningful way that I barely bothered. PP 2.0 seems to have streamlined the system (which I can say for a lot of things FDev has done to the game over the years), making it easier to either stick a toe in or jump in with gusto.

In Powerplay, pilots pledge themselves to one of a dozen houses/factions/gangs. Each of these controls a certain portion of “the Bubble”, which is comprised of the initial set of inhabited star systems a new player can experience. When pledging to a Power, pilots are asked to perform assignments in order to gain merits and increase their rank. As rank increases pilots get perks. However, the real meat of the system is that players, working together, can move entire star systems to or from power control, carrying with them the benefits that take place in systems controlled by that Power. There are several phases a system goes through, such as uncontrolled, exploited, fortified, or stronghold.

The best part about this system is that it’s not all about PvP. When I finished my long haul, I found that the closest Power to where I had ended up was Aisling Duval. Her tactics can best be described as “Influencer”, which results in a lot of delivering pamphlets or hacking advertisement holograms. This past week, I’ve been trying to reach rank 1, which required me to complete five assignments.

I tackled the easiest ones first, which were the “scan ships” and “transport documents”. These were two tasks I had always been doing, so it was just a matter of checking the requirements to make sure I was doing them in the correct type of system.

Then I moved into the one task which always gave me the sweats in ED: combat. I had to earn at least 150,000k in bounty vouchers by taking out wanted criminals. While this could include players (I am a member of the Mobius PvE private group so there’s not a lot of PvP going on), I went to a resource extraction site and took on the low-level NPC pirates that spawned there. This turned out to be relatively simple, but I wasn’t eager to overstay my welcome.

Next, I had to source, buy, and deliver rare commodities. For this I had to use a third-party tool that’s well known in the ED community, INARA, to find the closest rare commodity sale I could find. In the Adder, this was a good 14 jumps, although later I realized that the Mandalay could have carried the goods and would have made short work of the trip, but it is what it is.

My final task was the most complex for me but also provided the best learning opportunity, and that was to retrieve 9 escape pods, damaged or operational. I’m not going to “prose” this one out, but here’s a list of what I had to figure out to best get this done:

1. Find the appropriate Powerplay system type and go there.
2. Scan the system (“Honking”) to figure out what the system “looks like”.
3. Use the Full Spectrum System Scanner to locate signals where pods might be found.
4. Fly to a selected signal and hope I didn’t pick one where a full-on battle was going on (which happened exactly once before I got wise).
5. Use collector limpets to tag and collect any pods I could find, sometimes before friendly NPCs came in an jumped my claim.
6. Turn them in and repeat until the assignment is complete.

Now What?

That’s always the question, isn’t it? I completed my Powerplay ranking assignments with 2 days to spare, so I’m waiting for the next set of assignments to see what guided activities I might be able to do. I’m looking forward to it, and I am not usually the kind of person who looks forward to doing “dallies” in MMOs. Of course, I don’t need to sit around and wait; I can find other Aisling systems where I can help out by doing tasks (I have come across a subreddit where players are coordinating, so I might look into that). I might not be able to single-handedly convert a system, but it would be a goal that I could set for myself to work towards and while I’m not a big RPer, it would feel like it’s RP-adjacent enough for me to consider it.

There’s always influence and rep missions, of course. I’ve been upgrading my ships as I have been able so I’m in constant need of more cash. Now that I understand travel better, I can take jobs that send me out further because I know how to minimize the travel time at least a little.

And then there’s Everything Else and when I say that I say it with capitalization because we’ve got ground missions, different flavors of mining, xenobiological scanning, cartography, hacking, Engineers, exploration and collection, and probably more stuff that I don’t even know about. The more I read or watch, and the more time I spend in the game, the more I discover, and the more I discover, the more I want to learn about, and that way lies a much better time in Elite Dangerous for me. I’m kind of sad I didn’t explore this game further in the past.