The last two weeks have been a whirlwind of discovery for the Elite Dangerous community. We don’t know when humanity’s arms race with the Thargoids will begin. But players have compiled a list of 200-plus planets with one of the Thargoid facilities that have been taken the community by storm. But many of Elite Dangerous’ most dedicated explorers believe there are dozens more to find before the next expansion, The Return, hits PC and consoles later this year.
Elite Dangerous players have been running into the Thargoids for several months now. It began with random interdictions -- when a ship is pulled from “witchspace” (ED lingo for hyperspace) before reaching its intended destination -- and eventually progressed to sporadic encounters on barnacle-bearing planets. But it took Elite developer Frontier Developments more than a month to confirm the ships encountered by the community were Thargoid vessels. And we still don’t know why their recent interactions brushes with the ED community have been non-violent, given how easily they’ve been able to neutralize human ships in recent months.
Those lingering questions aren’t for a lack of trying though. Members of the Elite Dangerous subreddit have rallied together in recent weeks to explore the Thargoid facilities discovered on hundreds of planets near the Merope system. It’s been a long and arduous process, one that couldn’t even begin until after the community completed a series of puzzles in the first Thargoid facility to be discovered. ED players uncovered a map by running audio logs from the site through a spectrogram, pointing them in the direction of three new sites. Audio logs at each of those facilities pointed to three more. 210 Thargoid sites have been identified this way. But the confirmation process is time-consuming and 30+ sites still need to be validated.
The good news is many of Elite’s most dedicated explorers and puzzle solvers believe they’re close to finishing the list, at which point we’ll have a pretty good idea of how heavy a presence the Thargoids have already established. The bad news is that there’s no guarantee that information will do anyone any good. It’s unlikely we’ll see a significant shift of the status quo before the next Elite Dangerous expansion debuts. And it could be more than a month before The Return, which is still slated for a Q3 release, brings the Thargoids back en masse. That said, as someone who occasionally likes to dabble in deep space exploration, it’s been nice seeing explorers have such a measurable impact on the narrative this summer.
Elite Dangerous is currently available for PS4, Xbox One and PC. The game’s next expansion, The Return, is scheduled to debut this fall.
Be sure to check back with Player.One and follow Scott on Twitter for more Elite Dangerous news in 2017 and however long Frontier supports Elite Dangerous in the years ahead.
