Hi commanders,
If you missed tonight's content reveal livestream or just wanted a recap of all the content discussed, read the notes below from Sandro Sammarco, Lead Designer, and Steve Kirby, Principal Designer:
Please note this is part three of three livestreams, for more details click here.
If you missed part one, check it out here.
If you missed part two, check it out here.
Engineering Improvements
Engineering is gaining a significant update in Beyond Chapter One, focused on a single principle: the process should always result in a sense of progressive improvement.
In this updated system, you progress a module’s capabilities through a series of modification grades, with every upgrade you craft working towards an improvement. Any penalties are static and visible upfront.
Experimental effects are no longer randomly applied but can be purchased by spending materials, putting the choice fully in your hands.
Together with remote engineering from any Starport that has outfitting, a new material trader contact, (100) per-material storage facilities and additional target information for materials, there’s never been a better time to upgrade your favourite ship!
Materials Trader
Added a new contact called a Materials Trader to give players the ability to hand in materials in exchange for others at set exchange rates based on grade and material type.
This will allow players to trade for rarer items or items obtained by gameplay they do not want to take part in (E.G. killing trade ships) as well as converting stockpiles of unwanted materials to ones that the player needs.
This is not intended to replace material gathering completely, but be a useful tool to help shorten the gameplay loops around gathering materials, making engineering and unlocking items at the tech broker more accessible.
- Allow players to trader one material of another in a single trade.
- Only one trade at a time can be completed.
- Material traders operate on a true barter system. There are no credits involved.
- Traders are split into types – Raw, Manufactured and Encoded.
- Each trader type only trades in their type of materials and can be found in different economy types. Locations material traders can be found are:
- Raw Materials Trader - Found at extraction and refinery economies, only trades in raw material found on planet surfaces and planetary rings.
- Manufactured Materials Trader - Found at industrial economies, only trades in manufactured materials.
- Encoded Materials Trader - Found at High Tech and Military economies, only trades in encoded materials.
- Systems also need to be mid to high security systems and have populations between 1,000,000 and 22,000,000.
- Materials Trades will not show up in lawless and anarchy systems.
- Materials Traders will not show up at stations that are currently controlled by a criminal faction.
- Materials Traders will be unavailable when a station is damaged, under repair or put on lockdown.
- Horizons is required to use Material traders.
- Material traders can be found using the new By Service map view configuration option. This has a 40ly range and only shows traders that you have discovered.
- Material traders will also be shown on the system map in the station services list.
- Material traders will appear in the Human Bubble, Colonia and Pleiades regions at economies types listed above.
Galnet Audio
At the simple click of a button, you’ll now be able to listen to GalNet audio whilst flying your ship.
All you have to do is select the play button at the bottom of the right-hand system panel in your cockpit to play through the headline news stories.
If you’re looking for a specific story, or you want to curate your own playlist of handpicked news, you can do so by opening up GalNet news from the same panel and select the stories individually.
GalNet news will fade in and out depending on the situation, and stop altogether in some key situations. In some cases, such as counting down to hyperspace jumps, the news will pause and then resume once the countdown is complete. The story, or playlist, will continue from where you left off.
COVAS Customisation
Changing your COVAS is a new addition to Elite Dangerous and the first of these will be Victor, ready at the launch of Chapter One of Beyond. Commanders will be able to change their COVAS at the Starport Services livery customisation section.
It'll be possible to also change the COVAS for your SRV too, you'll need to head over to the SRV customisation bay to change your preference.
And... if you miss Verity, you'll be able to change the COVAS back.
Frontier is working in partnership with HCS to bring you new COVAS packs in the future. These voices are intended to bring a new flavour to commanders out in the black, however, it's important to note at the current time we do not intend to introduce celebrity voice packs.