Final communications between Asterope tower and the salvage craft Ibex
CMDR Froggy: Tower, I have spotted significant starship wreckage and I have stopped to investigate.
(FSD spooldown blackout)
CMDR Froggy: Tower, do you copy? Well, there sure is a lot of wreckage here, a couple of cutters from the look of it. I am just going to poke around and see if I can identify a cause and any survivors before I start salvage operations.
Tower: Be advised commander, there has been a great deal of signal anomalies and communication gear blackouts. Proceed with caution.
CMDR Froggy: Copy Tower.
(COMs Static)
CMDR Froggy: TOWER, THER Her….DRONES R…
Tower: Say again commander.
(COMs Static)
Tower: Say again CMDR Froggy, squawk ident if you can hear me.
‘The Return’ — Patch 2.4
Elite Dangerous’ 2.4 release has rolled out today after a lot of anticipation. Major items in the patch include a significant change to the way missions are conducted, to prevent stacking many missions for easy payouts, a tax on PvP combat levied on the ship rebuy screen for non-PowerPlay-sanctioned murder, a slew of quality of life fixes, and…Dramatic pause…The much-awaited introduction of interactive Thargoids.
You read that right, folks! the Thargoid encounters are no longer on rails. Players can interact with them, and more to the point, the bugs can reach out and touch you.
Spoiler alerts ahead. The players are dealing with a vastly technologically superior culture which has been playing hide-and-seek for several hundred years. Confronting them went about as well as you would expect.
Events and Encounters (SPOILERS)
There have been reports from a couple of locations now as to where to find them Thargoids. It appears that the wreck sites are becoming popular spots, as one can imagine. Specifically, when you set out to find one, you need to search for “Non-Human Signal Source, Threat Level 5”. These will drop you into a wreckage field (Both Imperial wrecks and the Feds are represented) with a Thargoid Interceptor.
The Interceptor will scan you with high-energy equipment, and your UI will send you a bunch of data in octal. As of this moment there are several streams of octal being analyzed, but no meaning has been teased out of it yet. After scanning you, the interceptor charges into combat.
When this happens, MOVE! Pilots, such as CMDR Owl, who don’t move out of the way are quickly destroyed. The interceptor is swimming in a cloud of drones which dive-bomb your ship and may pulverize it nearly instantly. This is actually really cool, and a throwback to the original Elite where the bugs had swarms of mini ships that you could harvest if you were VERY GOOD. I never could pull it off, for the record.
Once you have gotten out of the way, and if you keep your distance, the interceptor loses interest and goes back to scanning around the debris field. One brave commander grass_type, from the Reddit Thread, after being able to dodge the interceptors charge, jettisoned a meta-alloy and found that the ships will come “eat” it.
Once the interceptor has eaten the meta alloy, it will recall its drones and then Unknown Wake away from the field in similar fashion to the previous cutscene style of event.
Conclusions
There aren’t any yet really. The Thargoid stuff is interesting, but initial reports make it sound overwhelming. The interceptor is SO fast, and its ability to maneuver defies physics. As of now, there are no reports of successful engagements of any kind. Just wreckage across space.
New reports are coming in from CMDR Malfeasance that the interceptor and drones both can be kited in high-end combat craft, but as of the time of writing, they do not appear to take any damage.
One can only hope that there will be some progress, otherwise we should make our new bug overlords welcome. In the meantime, interested Commanders can check out the Frontier forums, or the 2.4 Mega Thread, Decoding Efforts, and Killed In Action threads on Reddit to keep up to date with the community.
