Another sneak peak from David Braben, this time our first look at a planetary base amid some SRV action.
Looks really good, actually. Much bigger than I expected.
Kelan
5142
I took a vacation today to catch up on some things, but did manage to collect my 8 mil payday in Tabaldak and went down to Orcus to start to work on my Veloxi faction!
I may go out for a bit with some friends, but should be on later in the Veloxi group if anyone is about.
Are you all grouping or what?
Don’t need to be in a specific group to help the Veloxi faction, just fly to Tombaugh station and do missions, turn in bounties, trade, etc etc.
Kelan
5146
I plan to hang around there at Orcus/Tombaugh for the next few weeks at least and am almost always up for forming a wing for some combat. Just give me a shout if you see me on.
Sweet, there’s a HazRES in there, and last I looked a civil war too, so wheeee!
I nearly bought a paintjob today as I preordered Horizons. WTF is wrong with me? :)
Kelan
5149
I ended up going to bed early last night, but have been doing some missions today on my normal day off for Veloxi faction.
It appears that there are still some missions that I do not understand, however. I got one mission to eliminate a target, but I can only see them in supercruise mode. I thought I just used to go into USS over and over until the target appeared, but I have a feeling that will not work in this case.
Do I need an Interdictor or a Wake scanner or something? I have never used either before. What do the different sizes and grades of each do?
conVurt
5150
Yes, you want a frameshift interdictor. (You may be able to still drop into USS’s, but that will take much, much longer than spotting your target in supercruise.)
The different size and grades affect range and how difficult it is for the target to evade, I think, but I haven’t done any actual testing in that regard. Generally I just equip the biggest one I can slot and the best one I can afford, and sell it off when I’m done with it.
The wake scanner will let you follow your target if they flee from you, but I have never bothered with it to be honest. It’s probably more suitable for PvP, since mission targets will respawn eventually if you give them enough time.
New Horizons stuff. Looks like the ground game will have “points of interest” to explore. Crashed ships & bases but far more interesting to me is natural things like mineral resources. Potentially this is looking more and more like explorers will have a massive multiplier in things to explore now on surface!
In this week’s Dev Update, Executive Producer Michael Brookes talked about some of the fascinating things you will discover and interact with on the planet surfaces.
On the surface there are many different things to see. Different military bases, research establishments, hideouts, starports, mining complexes, crashed ships and debris to investigate, and perhaps a few other things too. We are collectively calling these things ‘points of interest’. There is essentially a scale of items on the surface from starports and settlements, down to interesting mineral finds. Points of interest cover the encounters at the lower end of that scale, so as you travel across the surface you have a chance of encountering one of these points. The nature of the encounter will vary depending on where you are, the type of planet and the local topography and geology.
So for example you could be exploring an old mining world within the human bubble and find old mine workings, or machines. You might find a crashed ship way out beyond the frontier and who knows beyond that?
These points of interest come in a variety of flavours broadly split into two categories: natural and constructed. Natural points of interest are things that occur naturally on the planet such as mineral deposits. These themselves come in a range of elements and compounds and these feed into the new type of resource collection that we are adding as part of the loot system. Some elements of this will be part of the planetary landing release and will allow some specific modifications to your ship and SRV – we’ll have more on this coming in the next few weeks.
As well as naturally occurring formations we also have resources that can be found that have arrived from beyond the planet, but still of natural origin. These include items like meteorites that again feed into the new resource system. These will include resources that can only be found on the ground.
Manmade constructs can also be discovered on the planet’s surface and again these come in a variety of guises ranging from crashed ships to small encampments and other devices. More familiar cargo containers or other scoopable objects can be found at these encounters, so a crashed trading vessel may well have spewed the contents of its cargo hold. Or they might have something that needs scanning or data extracting from. These will tend to be found in the human habited region, but also beyond as tales of The Missing can attest to.
It’s often wise to approach these sites with caution as they can be protected by automated systems!
There are points of interest that don’t neatly fit into those two groupings, but we can leave them for you to discover for yourselves :-)
How you find these depends on your current transport. While on ships you only get a vague knowledge of whether there are points of interest nearby – this is shown as an area on your scanner. You will need to deploy your SRV and with its more specialised equipment locate whatever is there. This new equipment will form the focus for a new stream and update in the next few weeks.
As well as continued development with Horizons we’re supporting the released game and this week we deployed a server update to tackle the issue we encountered with the servers last Sunday. We are still looking into changes to address issues with the background simulation and player backed factions.
Kelan
5152
Good stuff, Rod. Just holler if you need a wing mate to keep the enemies off ya! :)
Thanks, conVurt! I fitted a B2 as that was all they had in Tombaugh and went back to Mbere and got her first try! It was an Orca with some sidewinder wing mates. I went ahead and just killed them all, but now I have a local bounty of 16,500 on me, heh.
I did manage to get me a Vulture and used about 11mil to fit it out. It works pretty well, but I am taking a bit to get used to having a fixed beam on a wing and those cannons, even though gimballed, really take some skill to make hit. I think I like it, though. The different ships really do make the combat experience, I believe, and even more so with different weapons to try.
Another thing about Mbere that I like (right next door to Orcus) is there is a Compromised Navigation Beacon there which is just a gold mine of wanted targets to kill. It is even better when they send me there to kill pirates as a mission. I do notice that there are a lot of missions that they will not offer me due to various ranks and still being Neutral to Veloxi’s Vixens. I can’t really get any trade missions as my rank is 0% Penniless, haha.
Overall, though, having a blast and should be around later today and most of the day Saturday off and on.
pyrhic
5153
Cannons on a vulture?
On other things, I’m starting to believe they should have some sort of profile/character logging option. I’m wandering in…the galaxy…and quite far from home now. I’m kinda happy with that, mostly because it took me a damn long time to get out here and now I’m here…but, sometimes I’d like to just run a few missions or, i dunno, land, or something, and I find myself wishing i had an alt I could log into.
conVurt
5154
What about doing some CQC? Not quite an alt, but at least it’s separate from the main game, as far as I know.
Kelan
5155
Yeah. Probably a little rare, but I read about a few people using them. I have one size 3 fixed beam laser and one size 3 gimballed cannon. I realized I don’t even need the cannon to tear through the hulls of smaller ships, but trying to get behind a viper or eagle to hit with a cannon can be a bit of fun :).
I do miss the multi-cannon, but seems they don’t come in size 3.
pyrhic
5156
iirc, i just have pulse lasers on mine as a secondary. You might want to give that a go…
I just pre-ordered Horizons. Tip for anyone that does and uses Gmail–the confirmation email goes to the Spam folder for some reason.
Kelan
5158
I have been doing missions for Veloxi’s Vixens the last couple days and things have been going pretty well so far. I can’t seem to pay off my fine/bounty in the Mbere system, though. I went to both outposts there, but they won’t let me pay them off in the security office. It makes it a bit of a pain fighting there for the good combat missions as once in a while I get scanned and shot at by enforcers, but it is manageable. If anyone has a tip on how to pay that off, I would really appreciate it.
Here is one of the first missions that Veloxi’s Vixens offered me. What kind of scam are you running there, Brian? :) I hope this is all legit and all!
And another!
Here is my target for my assassination mission.
Yay! Green color! I am now friendly with Veloxi’s Vixens!
First mission I get offered once I hit Master combat rank. Nice!
Thanks for helping the faction! Didn’t they change the system so now you can’t pay off fines/bounties for a week or something now?
conVurt
5160
Kelan, I think you have to wait a week from the time you incurred the bounty before you can pay it off. As you’ve probably noticed, not all the targets of assassination missions are wanted themselves, only escaped prisoners and notable pirates are, and the rest tend to be folks who are simply unliked enough by someone to make them a target. If you absolutely can’t wait the week, I think that a suicidewinder may still work (and may be cheaper than paying off the bounty in any case)…
