Are You Playing Elite Dangerous Yet?

Yesterday, my friend, Tomas (who I call Terri or Terrifiedmist), invited me to check out his Twitch channel. Terrifiedmist has been playing Elite Dangerous and on Mondays he streams the game. I’ve known Terri for 5 or 6 years now. We first became friends playing Allods together. Terri was the type of guy that would spend an hour helping out someone in the guild with their quest (sometimes 4 or 5 people in a row) and never complained.

So basically, he’s the opposite of me because I tend to be very… I don’t want to say I am selfish, but I usually have some goals in mind when I log into a game and if your needs correspond to my own then I’m happy to team up.

Terri was also the “go to guy” if you had questions in Allods. He knew the lore, solutions to tricky quests and all that good stuff. We used to affectionately call him Terripedia. I mention all of this because if you are new to Elite Dangerous, you can go into his channel and ask a question or two and you might find some helpful answers. Just don’t be the guy that asks 10,000 questions.

You may notice Terri wearing a bad ass tie with rubber ducks on it. He wears that on special occasions. If you want one yourself, you can find some here.

So what is Elite: Dangerous?  A pretty cool space game.  The game is set in the Milky Way galaxy and is 1:1 scale with 400 billion star systems to explore.  That’s right, if you and ten of your friends started exploring right now, in 50 years you’d still be playing the game.  Now since we have not yet discovered all 400 billion stars in our galaxy, that’s mainly an estimation scientists have made.  All 150,000 that we have discovered so far are indeed in game.

So yeah, I’m a dork and I like to ask the hard hitting questions.  So I asked Terri, “what is Pluto’s status in this game?”  Well Terri showed me our solar system and when he located Pluto it was classified as “icy planet.”  So take that IAU and NASA and whoever else has a grudge against our ninth planet.  Just when you thought it was safe to lose a few pounds, My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas all over again!

So when you’re not exploring, you can mine asteroids, complete missions and build reputation with one of three factions: the Empire, the Federation, and the Alliance.  Then there is also my favorite: bounty hunting!  There’s both NPC bounties and player bounties.  Apparently if you break laws (unpaid parking tickets) and such, you can end up with a bounty on your head if you don’t pay your fines in a timely manner.

The games expansion comes out late fall/early winter of 2015 called Horizons: