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The Elite: Dangerous update, beta 2.3 “Commanders” is now available for you to test, if you have a beta access!
Let’s check what this update is made of. Don’t forget to send your feedback on the beta 2.3 forums.
- General Enhancements
- Missions
- Weapons
- Engineers
- Powerplay
- Passengers
- NPC
- POI/USS
- Ships
- Factions
- Systems
General Enhancements
- New mysterious things added
- New organics added to surfaces
- Dolphin playable ship added
- Dolphin NPC ships added
- Added ship name plates to ships
- Added ID plates to ships
- Ships can be named from within station services
- Added ship names to various cockpit UI
- Added hangar cameras for ship name slots
- Request ship name when in the start new commander flow
- Name and ID plates can be added via Outfitting
- Ship names are server moderated if deemed inappropriate then will be masked off to other players
- If you report a player in-game, Frontier will now fill in their ship name and ship ID for us
- Added vanity cameras to the ships
- Added free camera to ships
- Added Zoom and rotations controls for internal vanity cameras
- Added f-stop and focus Distance to vanity and free camera
- Enabled vanity and free camera to work in vr
- Updated ship cockpit interiors to account for new viewing angles
- Added asteroid base type station (including air traffic controllers)
- Added 32 asteroid bases in various deep space locations
- Added some new challenge scenarios
- 4 new Incursion scenarios
- Speed docking
- Driver challenge
- Ship launched fighter challenge
- Added custom engine trails support
- Added Megaships
- Tanker
- Cargo
- Asteroid Miner
- Flight Operations
- Prison Ship
- Science Vessel
- Passenger
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- Added 100 new tourist beacons
- Added Bucky Ball Beer Mats rare good
- When a bounty voucher or combat bond is awarded, all players in a wing who would previously have gotten a share will now get a copy of the full value
- When targeting a station’s location (usually but not limited to when in supercruise heading towards it) show the schematic in the correct orientation. Note that this does not take into account the stations gentle axis-rotation, but will at the very least tell you where the entrance of an orbis/coriolis/etc will be when you drop out
- Stations can now be disabled, which will turn off their response to crimes and will disable AI spawning
- Stations can now be placed within rings
- Stations can now be placed within asteroid clusters
- Increase maximum stored ship limit to 35 to accommodate that we now have more than 30 kinds of ship
- Refuel and repair SRVs and Fighters when restocking
- Adjust the sorting of signals being sent to the wave scanner GUI/audio rather than tracking a fairly unreliable subset of available signals, they should both now deal with as many as they can manage (8 and 32) ranked in order of signal strength. Fixes known cases where nearby objects can be omitted from the scanner (some entirely, some would be audio-only). Also includes some minor optimisation to the system as a whole
- Rebalance the amount of exploration career rank awarded when completing Passenger missions
- New “Vessel-Voice” system, to replace our beloved old “Ship-Voice” system. Now much more robust and maintainable. This drives the computer voice lines.
- Added audio for the FSD supercharge including voice alerts
- Added ambient audio details to the starport inner-dock variants
- 3 New flight controllers – Empire, Anarchy, Independent
- Many audio optimisations and mix improvements
- Additional Wavescanner sounds
- Secret audio stuff. Shhh.
- A LOT of renders, animations, and effects improved
- Experimental IPV6 support added
- Increased the credit values of exploration data for scans after this release. Unsold data from previous scans is unaffected by this change.
Missions
- Updated the gating on missions. Now you should no longer see the planetary sign on the mission board for missions that don’t take you to a planetary station as the main destination. If you don’t have horizons, you should be getting gated at the new destination wrinkle if it is to a planetary station preventing you from accepting the new destination
- Multi-stage mission support added (different to wrinkles)
- Highlight a mission that is a direct consequence of completing a previous mission
- Fixed mission messages being duplicated during transitions
- Make supply to demand overrides take max distance into account (Stops Colonia making missions which intend to only go 500ly into missions to pop back to the bubble with a ~24 time limit)
- Add support for equipment requirements for missions
- Delivery, Collect, Passenger Bulk, Piracy, Rescue, Salvage and Smuggle mission change destination wrinkles are now optional
- Smuggle missions maximum range has been reduced to 100ly away
- Smuggle long minimum range has been increased to 100 ly away
- Fixed issue with showing credit rewards when there are no other rewards
- Updated the influence/reputation shown on the mission board for missions so that it matches the amount it actually changes on completion
- Mission specific cargo can no longer be sold on the commodity market, although can still be sold as stolen items through the black market
- When missions which require you to pick up cargo exist, they should be able to say Collect Cargo instead of Claim Reward
- Massacre conflict and massacre skimmer missions limited to 3 per player at a time. Rewards increased slightly to compensate
- Improve the chance of rank up and engineer missions being available
- Planetary scan missions now limited to 3 per player at a time. Rewards increased slightly to compensate
- The ancient codex now resets approximately 30 seconds after being scanned
- Decouple normal missions and passenger missions selection, so a full allocation is available to each type
- Added a check for illegal goods to system search to stop returning a system that doesn’t contain the markets needed
- Prevent delivery scoop missions from appearing in systems without a landable planet
- Stop player getting spammed with an inbox message from in space planetary hitmen missions
- Added a variable generator to find a faction and station in the same system as a given station
- Fixed superpower filtering in faction station generators
Weapons
- Strengthening drone vfx as they were very difficult to see at long range
- Updated laser impact effects so that they are compatible with weapon colouring
- Limpets will show up in the restock menu while the players has them in the ships cargo allowing them to be sold even when the player has no limpet controller installed
- Seeker Missile target hologram fixed
- Added two turreted mining lasers
- Regeneration sequence healing will now be affected by the targets thermal resist resistance will block healing as well (note that negative resistances will not increase healing)
Engineers
- New blueprints added
- Manifest/Killwarrant/Wake scanner:
- Long Range
- Wide Angle
- Fast Scan
- Ship primary sensor:
- Light weight
- Long Range
- Wide angle
- Detailed Surface scanner (affects how fast you can basic/detailed scan planets):
- Long Range
- Wide Angle
- Fast Scan
- Manifest/Killwarrant/Wake scanner:
- New blueprints added to:
- Bill Turner:
- DSS to grade 1, and sensor/scanner to grade 5
- Juri Ishmaak:
- Sensor/scanner to grade 4, and DSS to grade 2
- Lei Chung:
- Sensor/scanner to grade 2, and DSS to grade 2
- Lori Jameson:
- Sensor/scanner to grade 5, and DSS to grade 5
- Tiana Fortune:
- DSS to grade 5, and sensor/scanner – 5
- Bill Turner:
- Added extra gun turrets to various engineer bases
- Fixed floating rock at Elvira Martuuk’s base
- Added new longer range missile defences to various engineer bases
- Mic Turner Base had a population of 0, so added bakeout data for system “California Sector BA-A E6” so that it will pick up the correct details from server
- Add Engineer & Outfitting module groups for Life Support and Sensors so they don’t all appear in the ‘Other’ category in the Engineer Workshop
Powerplay
- Change powerplay pirates and security ships to only interdict if they will then go on to attack after scanning. This means PowersPirates check the player is pledged to the controlling power and either carrying any powerplay cargo or holding any powerplay vouchers. For PowersSecurity they check the player is pledged to an opposing (different superpower) power, and either carrying powerplay cargo of the controlling power or holding powerplay vouchers of the controlling power
- Previously ships could legally attack each other if the attacker shared the same superpower as the power of the current system, and the target was pledged to a power of a different superpower. First, we restrict this so that the attacker has to be the same power as the system. Second, we add an alternative to being different superpowersif the attacker is the same power as the system, and the target is of a different power from the attacker (but potentially now of the same superpower), is carrying powerplay cargo for the system’s power, and the attacker has cargo scanned the target and knows this, then the attack is legal
Passengers
- Passenger’s demanded cargo has been updated in passenger mission wrinkles it is now related to the passenger type
- Added prisoner cells as alternatives to passenger cabins
- Custom passenger text on cargo display does not match Passenger Type in Customise Passengers
- Ensure that NPC cruise ships have passengers when scanned
- Updated passenger bulk, VIP and VIPConflict, as well as delivery and variant mission templates. The New Destination is now a choice on these mission templates
- Also updated Bulk to show the correct rewards on the inbox message when you get the wrinkle, and transaction panels during wrinklesNew destination and dont die
- Balanced numbers for explorers disgruntledness in the LDE template to be the same as on other templates
- Updated the demanded cargo reward amounts on the passenger missions to make them more worth wile
- Reduced exploration rank boost from passengers as it was way too high
- Occupied passenger cabin modules can no longer be stored using the store multiple menu
- Fixed NPC passengers not showing up properly after a manifest scan
- Fixed UI inconsistency, where the ‘Pick Cabin’ button was located differently to ‘Accept Mission’ even though both these UI essentially share the exact same user flow
NPC
- Fix NPCs not having the long FSD cooldown after interdictions
- Added the Independent Fighter to alliance and independent faction navies
- Improve piracy behaviour and associated chatter to indicate the threat and a time limit for compliance
- NPC docking improvements
- Added in the Vulture & Python to the police archetype, these ships should now respond to crime and have the correct skins
- Make sure that we have the correct faction before using the automatic loadout for NPC archetypes
- Don’t report that the player is clean when being scanned when they are not
- Balance pass for AI interdiction ability, to make it slightly easier
- Auto-loadout system will now automatically add required passenger cabins based on the custom passenger type
- Allowed auto-adding of cargo racks to consider slots which don’t accept shield modules but do accept cargo racks
- Fixed a bug in adding passengers to cabins where Passenger Entries were being added to cabins with the number of passengers set to 0
- Removed VIP flag from Customise Passengers. Custom Passengers being added to Imperial cabins will automatically be made VIP
- Changes to extend AI terrain avoidance on higher gravity worlds
- Authority ships now prioritise the closest ship to them when determining what to scan, ie either the Mothership or Fighters
- Fix Pirate Hunter Hostile behaviour so that they attack after interdicting
- In auto-loadout system, tweak chances of high-end weapons to make them slightly more unlikely for both military and all other archetypes
- For AI ships using the auto-loadout system, vary the amount of ammo that utility modules have based on rank. For police/military, override and have 100% ammo, unless in a conflict zone when the standard rules apply
- Get AI pirates to start attacking if the target moves more than 1km or starts charging FSD while the threatening process is ongoing
- Change pirates that interdict the player to always scan (rather than sometimes attacking without scanning), and to dismiss the player and fly off if the player doesn’t have any/enough cargo
- Threaten time changed to 15s (from 18s) now that it’s displayed in chatter
- Added jump after all ships scanned, which we didn’t used to need for these pirates as they always attacked
- Ignore drones and powerplay cargo when deciding whether to send a generic cargo chaser after the player
- Pirates should now make it clear what cargo can be dropped to apease them
- Stop NPCs in ships that can’t jump (like fighters) from trying to do so
- When a pirate has threatened you and started to attack, reiterate the conditions for the attack to stop occasionally, updated based on the amount of cargo already dropped
- Fix for pirate hunter hostiles not always being wanted
- Increased the combat bonds and bounty multiplier for the “big 3” (Anaconda, Corvette & Cutter), upping their values by ~10%
- Make sure that NPCs properly evaluate cargo worth to prevent some odd cases
- Fixed an issue in the AI defence code which stopped heat-sinks/Chaff/ECM from working
POI/USSs
- Lava Spouts now have proximity effects around them. Depending on the ferocity of their eurption, they deal heat and damage to the player. The more ferocious the eruption, the hotter and more damaging they become
- Added additional installation scenarios
- Medical installation added
- Added Space Bar installation
- Added Space Farm installation
- Added Government installation
- Added new Security Station installation
- Colour variations for installations added
- Enable replication of scannable space wreckage so that they are visible to all players
- Changes to stop Unknown Probes jumping about and rolling up hill on planets:
- The slow spinning animation did not work at all with things on the floor, it’s been removed
- Align to planet and align to system no longer apply when the object they’re aligning is near a planet
- Skimmers currently don’t report hostiles to their owning settlement fixed
- Allow planet surface landed ships to take-off and attack if there’s a near-by faction hostile
- Fumarole disappears in multiplayer situation when a collectable is collected while another client is logged out fixed
- Added new Passenger USS scenarios
- Fixed a bug with setting the health prop of a Destructible Mining Component to 1 causing it to have 0 health
- Fixed hitcheck on fumarole collectibles
- Proximity effects support added
- Added more wreckage types
- Space scenarios can now have localised fog
- Fixed objects in a settlement drifting from their correct position if the player is far enough from the planets surface
Ships
- Fix collision warnings on ship authority dummy objects hitting terrain wen landed
- Prevent repeated malfunctions when they shouldn’t occur
- Added a new Data Link scanner for ships
- Changed Vulture’s planetary approach suite size to 1 as intended
- Some optimisations for large multi-ship scenes
- Prevent Eagle utility modules being swappable, because there is only one utility module slot and they’re already in it.
- Lowered Orca weight to increase jump range and effectiveness
- All ship explosive effects improved
- Attached decals to heat vents and moved the geometry up a bit to mitigate z fighting on the Imperial Cutter
- Beluga Liner now has similar strength headlights to the Anaconda
- Orca tactical paintjobs fixed
- Left Decals on the F63 Condor fixed
- Fixed Bobblehead cams and orientations on the Fer-de-Lance
- Fixed smoothing groups and some decal positions on the Imperial Cutter
- Updated Asp cockpit geometry to allow for the new camera views
- Anaconda death explosion sorting fixed. Timings are nicer too
- Disable GUI lights if the player is dying
- Tweaks to the Sidewinder’s exterior hull
- Art fixes/improvements for the Cobra cockpits
- Fix misaligned lights on the Diamondback
- Fixed ship kit tail cameras for the Eagle and Fer-de-Lance
- Imperial Cutter hologram clipping when launching from docked is now
- Fix wear and tear on Python ship kit
- Added spotlights to the Beluga’s tiny hardpoints to highlight them more in outfitting
- Added missing spoiler camera to the Viper
- Removed blinking light from Cutter cockpit
- Fixed bobblehead positioning in the Vulture
- Fixed Anaconda bobblehead camera 10
- Adjusted decal front outfitting camera for the Imperial Eagle
- Re-aligned the the F63 cockpit so thrusters align correctly
- Added tail kit hanger camera to the Asp
- Fixed blue emissive ‘Lakon Systems’ panel in T6 cockpit
- Fixed missing textures on Type 7 utility slots
- Fixed LOD popping with lime green gradient predator paintjob on cobra mk4
- Fixed fighter bay hitcheck on Federation_Dropship
- Fixed Z fighting issue on Federation_Corvette hardpoints
- Smoothed LOD transitions on Eagle
- Fixed clipping issues when deploying SRV from Viper
- Fix for Federal Dropship paintjobs covering the vehicle bay
- Fix for stretched textures on Viper MkIII ship kit
- UV fixes for Federal Fighter’s drive
- Fixed wonky utility mounts on the Imperial Cutter
- Patched a small hole in the Corvette
- Fix a decal camera on the Vulture
- Fix a missing texture on the Corvette’s nose
- Fixed bobblehead cameras in the Diamondback XL
- Fixed landing gear volumes and hitcheck on the Sidewinder
- Moved the Asp’s front decal so as not to interfere with the ship kit
- Imperial Clipper now has an icon on the livery page of outfitting
Factions
- Fix a rare opportunity for a conflict to start immediately after ending early
- Fixed faction influence change from smuggling weapons
- Faction influence change reduced from murder, interdiction and assault crimes
- Faction influence change increased from redeeming bounty vouchers
- Balanced faction effects from selling commodities with a zero purchase price
- Removed faction reputation gains from smuggling cargo at a black market
- Improved local news articles when faction conflicts end
Systems
- Renamed a duplicate BD+56 521 system to ‘Between’
- Renamed duplicate Kamba system to Mbooni
- Iorant JN-S c17-0 renamed to VonRictofen’s Rescue
- Iorant PD-K d8-4 renamed to Macedonica’s Leap
- Cuffey Plant in Acihaut renamed to Habermann Sanctuary
- System COL 359 SECTOR NN-S D4-16 renamed to Joseph’s Lighthouse
- Exoplanet in 61 Virginis renamed to ‘Rubin’s Discovery’
- Added a dockable megaship called ‘Fisher’s Rest’ to the Aldebaran system
- Col 285 Sector Ke-V B17-1 renamed to Oliver and Ben’s Beacon
- Col 285 Sector MZ-U b17-6 renamed to Sulis
- Fix orbit and type of Scheau Phoea WL-D d12-1 A 1
- Renamed a planet in 74 Aquarii to Ethan Raza Khan
- Hyades Sector Zu-Y D117 renamed to Fullerene C60
- Added starport “Rebuy Prospect” to Fullerene C60
- Added starport ‘McArthur’s Reach’ to LHS 5287
- Added starport ‘Bob Paffett’ to Runo
- Added starport ‘Jaitinder Singh’ to Namba
- Added starport ‘Mike Tapa Astronautics Ltd’ to Sigma Hydri
- Added starport ‘Contestabile’ to Baltah’Sine
- Eol Prou IW-W e1-2400 renamed to Meretrida
- Eol Prou YI-W b17-19 renamed to Kopernik
- Eol Prou PX-T d3-347 renamed to Pergamon
- Eol Prou IW-W e1-3246 renamed to Magellan
- Eol Prou NH-K c9-40 renamed to Pyrrha
- Eol Prou LW-L c8-227 renamed to Signalis
- Eol Prou KW-L c8-164 renamed to Garuda
- Eol Prou IW-W e1-3167 renamed to Canonnia
- Eol Prou PX-T d3-336 renamed to Union
- Eol Prou IW-W e1-1601 renamed to Phoenix
- Eol Prou LW-L C8-10 renamed to Dubbuennel
- Eol Prou LW-L C8-6 renamed to Kioti 368
- Eol Prou LW-L C8-54 renamed to Mobia
- Eol Prou IW-W E1-3231 renamed to Edge Fraternity Landing
- Eol Prou SS-T D3-241 renamed to Tas
- Added a dockable megaship called ‘The Harmony’ to Yum Kamcabi system