Elite Dangerous - Never Not Scanning

Some months ago I wrote a blog post summarising the appeal Elite: Dangerous held for me, and relating my early experiences in the game. After roughly 30 hours, I had a Cobra Mark III, and an excited feeling that 'the real Elite: Dangerous begins here'. I was about to dive into the explorer class headfirst.

Approximately 150 hours later, I haven't come up for air yet.

Sticking to a class in ED isn't really the same as other games. By heading down one path you are by no means locked out of another or encouraged to 'min-max' your build towards a goal of becoming a masterful trader/bounty hunter/etc. You accrue money by doing activities pertaining to a role, and there's nothing to stop you using your space dollar to switch playstyles dramatically - case in point, me trading until I could afford the Cobra I wanted so I could go exploring. Considering how open-ended the game currently is in terms of structure, this freedom of player choice is no doubt a good thing.

So there are no artificial barriers to performing one role or another, but you still have to learn your class, and gathering that knowledge takes time. Understanding what is a useful action to do as an explorer defined my initial venture down this rabbit-hole, and it's never really stopped; as in real life, you're always learning. This is partly about getting to grips with some of the inner workings and incentives built into the game - in particular, what types of stars/planets are worth the most money - because money is required to get better equipment and thereby engage even more with exploration. It's not all about maximising profit though. I'm also learning what is it about exploration that I find the most exhilarating, what do I want to spend this time doing, because if I ignore that, I'll probably get bored and give up playing altogether. Hopefully by the end of this rambling spewing of internet words I will have gotten across the aspects of exploration that spur me on.

First though, I'll try to explain the basics of exploring in ED for those unfamiliar. To be a super cool space pioneer, you need the following:

• A ship with a decent jump range.
• A fuel scoop - no gas stations out in deep space, so we guzzle fuel from the stars themselves.
• A Discovery Scanner.
• A Detailed Surface Scanner

Never been scanned, huh? C'mere, gas giant, don't be shy...

Two scanners, you'll note - trust me, they differ in more than just spelling. When you jump into a system, the first item on the agenda is activating the discovery scanner, which makes your ship blare out a neat foghorn-like sound effect and, more usefully, adds to your HUD any objects within the scanner's range - for example, planets and other stars. Without the discovery scanner, you could be close enough to lick a planet yet have no record of ever being there - and no money either. A discovery scan nets you a base amount of cash, depending on the object, when you return home and sell the data. For most explorers though, that's just not enough. Just using the discovery scanner gives you next to no information on the sweet hunk o' rock you just found - the System Map (pictured above), which functions as your guidebook for the remote neighbourhood you just rudely barged into, will at this point boil down every astronomical feature to a sad, homogeneous 'Unexplored'.

Note the "Scanning..." message in the bottom left.

This is where the surface scanner comes in. Fly to a close enough distance (larger objects can be scanned from farther away), target-lock the star/planet, and a spinning animation will kick in automatically. After a few seconds, 'Unexplored' will gain a name, a description, a host of baffling statistics, and much more monetary value (in my experience, 50-100% more cash for doing this). Pointing my ship at something and waiting for the scan to finish has probably accounted for the majority of the time I have sunk into exploring. For many people I am sure this would be extremely dull - but there's another carrot on the stick here. As mentioned in my previous post, players can earn a "Discovered by..." tag on the System Map, permanently memorialising the first person to boldly go there. To earn this accolade, the object has to be unclaimed on the System Map, and crucially, you have to do a detailed scan - if it's Unexplored, you didn't explore it, dummy!

NOW YOU BELONG TO ME.
Or you will, once I sell your intimate details to some dude.

I had only the vaguest grasp of all this when I started exploring in my Cobra. I was also constricted by the commercial realities of my situation. Ship parts can cost a lot of money, and I had spent nearly all of mine on the ship itself. I could only afford the Basic version of the Discovery Scanner, which comes in two other flavours: Intermediate and Advanced. An advanced scanner will find any object in a system, no matter the distance. Intermediate can see anything in a 1000 light second (or 'ls') radius. Basic is limited to 500ls - in short, with my budget scanner, I could only pick up planets that were very close-by; 500ls is not a large distance in ED, and I was potentially skipping tons of space rocks. Worse, the System Map won't display a star/planet until it has been discovery-scanned, so I might be ignoring planets I had no idea even existed. Going from system to system with the nagging feeling that I was flying straight past something valuable or cool-looking was frustrating. My instinct was of course to save up for an Advanced scanner, but the hefty pricetag made scanning feel even more like a grind. Fortunately, the internet provided me with a solution that, while not guaranteeing that I would catalogue every single item in a system, would allow me to find some of them, even with my basic scanner, in a way that felt rewarding and kept me engaged.

Large, gassy planets are especially unlikely to be within
500ls of a star. I must know their gassy secrets.

My task was to identify what looked like a planet, fly towards it until I was in range, and ping it with the discovery scanner. But the difficulty in finding planets this way is that they can look a lot like other stars. A thousand or more light seconds is sufficient distance to make any planet no more than a dot reflecting its own star's light. Anyone who has seen the stars on a clear night - or has played Elite - knows there are a lot of them. In the game, the vast swathe of distant stars in other systems is essentially a detailed, very beautiful texture painted on the invisible boundary of the game environment - and no matter where you go in supercruise around that system, their position relative to you will not change. But the planets will. If you find a particularly bright "star" that seems suspicious, you can fly towards it and carefully observe as the planet appears to drift across other, distant lights in the galactic backdrop. This game within the game of sussing out nearby sites of interest sustained me during a period of play that might otherwise have discouraged me from pressing forward. Incidentally, what I have just described was essentially the method by which the ancient Greeks picked planets out of the night-sky - planet means "wanderer", because they strayed from the path of other stars and constellations. I find it pretty cool that I was unknowingly using an ancient Greek method of astronomy. 

This method is impossible to convey in a still image,
so enjoy this sweet planet instead.

So I learned how to track down some sneaky planets. Scanning their surface is the next step, but which should I scan? Shooting for every body in every system would take a long time. I'm never going to see all 400 billion systems in the game, so I need to somehow prioritise certain planets or stars over others. The tricky part is that whereas stars can be identified on the System Map while still unexplored, planet types are unrevealed at that point. Assuming money is a high priority - and at this point in the game for me, with my shitty short-range scanner, it was - you want to assess the probable value of your target based on its image in the System Map. Some are easy to discard: icy planets are easy to identify, for example. But some of the best finds were the also the most elusive. Water worlds could just as easily be a dark rocky grey or arid-looking beige as they might be a deep ocean blue. Ultimately the obtuseness I was struggling against with this led to me taking a break from the game midway through an excursion not far outside civilised space. I'd been playing Elite: Dangerous pretty obsessively and was growing bored.

Fast forward a few months and I had a reason to jump back in - Gurdeep 'kingofallcosmos' and James 'theris108' had taken the plunge and purchased Elite: Dangerous. After eagerly rushing home to meet up, I finally reaped the fruits of the exploring foray prior to my break. It turns out that, despite not really knowing what I was doing, my efforts were handsomely rewarded with nearly 2 million credits - not a massive windfall by the standards of more expert players, but in my case this more than doubled my total earnings. I could now afford the advanced scanner, which would find everything in a system instantly. No more searching for "wandering" planets - I could just scan and judge from the System Map what planets were worth investigating. Grinding for cash wasn't over though; I could now start working towards my dream ship, with a much higher potential jump range: an Asp.

Spoilers: I bought an Asp.

'Grind' might be an accurate term, but it belies the fact that I am rarely bored when exploring. One of the things that keeps me coming back to this game is how often, amidst all the repetition that would otherwise be so tedious, I experience something new, something I haven't seen before; a series of 'firsts'. The first black hole I found, the first neutron star, finding a rare type of planet I hadn't seen, the list goes on. Around this time I realised that some of the "high metal content" planets I had been dismissing as low value were in fact terraforming candidates. After performing a detailed scan on a world, the System Map would include in its description whether it could be terraformed. Not only were these planets much more valuable, they lend immersion to the act of exploring, allowing me to feel like a true pioneer. Many hours later, discovering terraforming candidates continues to be a rewarding moment every time one comes along. Even better is the elusive Earthlike World. These are an explorer's holy grail - they're worth a ton of cash and amongst the ED community they are nearly always a topic of conversation. In all the time I have spent in this game, the thousands of planets scanned, I have found just five - all previously discovered (unfortunately).

"Fuck, yes!" - me, on five occasions.

It wasn't too long before I had my Asp. With a really capable exploration ship in my possession, my ambitions became somewhat higher. So far I had been venturing just a little bit beyond the occupied sector of space, far enough not to have to deal with NPC pirates ruining my day, close enough to return to port in a timely manner. Other players on the forums boasted of venturing much further afield, and one destination in particular enticed me. A supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, named Sagittarius A*. Previously I had travelled as far as 1,000 light years from Earth. My new target was over 26,000 light years off, making for a round trip of at least 52,000LY, probably more. One day I stopped merely thinking about setting off. I kitted out my ship, waved farewell to my friends, and began a long, lonely voyage.

My white whale. Although I don't harbour much hope of slaughtering him.

I'm currently en route to "Sag A", as it's affectionately called. 16,000LY from Earth but still 10,000LY from my destination; I won't be back any time soon. Along the way I'm keeping myself engaged by sifting through planets in search of terraforming candidates and earthlike worlds, checking out neutron stars, and listening to a great deal of music. On my previous treks closer to home, most systems had been claimed by other players; this far out, it is quite the opposite. The allure of having my name affixed to a distant world on the System Map is still strong; but every time I scan a colourful gas giant or cool-looking planet, I'm know that I'm delaying my arrival in the galactic core. It doesn't matter though; I'm thoroughly hooked, and I've promised myself to see this immense journey to the end.

Now, how about giving Hold your Fire by Rush a listen? I need something to amuse myself as I scan yet another Class III Gas Giant.