Greetings Commanders.
As you may be aware, all servers are now offline as we power up our engines in preparation to launch of Elite Dangerous: Odyssey, our largest release to date.
Your feedback during the Elite Dangerous: Odyssey Alpha has been invaluable in shaping and improving what you will experience today.
To get you in the mood for this new era of exploration, combat and much more, we have collated the following patch notes detailing the changes introduced since the Alpha build, ahead of today's launch.
ADDITIONS
GALAXY
- Added 400K+ settlements to the game
- Added 8K+ new planet ports
- Updated memorials
TUTORIAL
- Added tutorial, created flows for new and existing Commanders
ENGINEERS
- 9 new Engineers added to the Bubble
- Added cost by manufacturer to weapon and suit mods
SETTLEMENTS (NEW FOR ODYSSEY)
- Increased unique Settlement count from 10 in the Alpha to 28. Themes include Agricultural, Extraction, Industrial, Military, Research and Tourism across a variety of sizes
- Added new plants at Agriculture Settlements
- Added new rotating ‘growlab’ prop at Agriculture Settlements
- Added pipes under floor grilles
- Added a dirt and scratch overlay pass to the explosive canisters
- Added two new variants of the shower and toilet in Habitat buildings
- Added new Agricultural Settlement clutter assets
- Additional detail added to interior hanging lights
WEAPONS
- Added Manticore plasma weapons to game: Tormentor, Intimidator, Oppressor, Executioner
SOCIAL SPACES
- Added Detention Centre
- Added some distortion to the glassware seen in bars to improve and help visibility
- Added pipes under floor grilles
MENUS
- Added suit and weapon customisation
- Added log notifications when other players board or disembark the vessel you are in
- Added better tracking of the cause of death and hostility reasons across the whole game, but specifically for on-foot deaths, in order to display better info on the death report screen
- Added a fines panel to Interstellar factors
- Added title to low oxygen warning notification. Also fixed the missing icon for out of oxygen alert
- Added new icons for pilot's handbook sections
- Add clear stolen authority option in item wheel
- Added new icons for vessel and humanoid store on the main menu
- Added a new icon for generic news
- Added the new controls icons to the separate controls menu
- Added a walk toggle button binding
A.I
- Added criminality chances to some dead NPCs - this allows certain corpses to be flagged as criminals, displaying the criminal symbol on their nameplate
- Added addition personal space warning lines for physical contact
- Added additional blocked warning line for a final warning
- Added special personal space warnings for interrupting conversations
MISSIONS
- Added the ‘requirements’ panel to mission details screen
- Added reward digest to mission listings for depot and completion
- Added calls to action for completed missions and progress to the depot
- Added a partial complete button to partially completed missions
- Added a new 'Professional' assassination mission which tasks the player with taking down harder-than-normal targets
- Added a new 'Clean' assassination mission which tasks the player with taking down targets without causing any collateral damage
CHARACTERS
- Added in a new walking animation for NPCs in social spaces
- Added sway to weapons hip fire, ADS, and in/outs of transitions
- Added in more variety to NPC faces/heads
- Added rank progression decals and skins
CONFLICT ZONES
- Added victory animations for the winning team
- Added ‘cheer bark’ to conflict zone celebration behaviour
- Added alternative greetings and global cool-down for conflict zones
COSMETICS
- Added livery module slots to every suit item
- Added the new shoulder decal model items to the relevant models
INTERACTIONS
- Added the ability for players to free-look whilst using the terminal. Players can also look away from the terminal to break interaction
CODEX
- Organics added with details and reporting structure
FIXES / CHANGES / IMPROVEMENTS
ARX
- Converted the Shop Hangar materials to be PBR compliant
- Re-enabled ARX purchasing
AUDIO
- Fixed the mix (particularly weapons) sometimes going muffled unexpectedly, particularly in conflict zones
- Fixed a low drone in the galaxy map and other mix improvements
- Fixed the excessive landing pad touchdown ‘clunk’ in social spaces
- Fix for reverb being too audible during vessel transitions
- Fixed some engineer and bar area ambience issues (too many high frequencies)
- Improvements to planetary and settlement ambiences
- Improvements to the mix when engaged in a conversation with a vendor or NPC
- Mix improvements on lockers
- Various mix improvements on ambiences
- Improvements to landing area announcers
- Improvements to landing area reverbs
- Improvements to turrets
- Improvements to skimmers – should be less static and persistent and should be softer when stationery
- Helmet deploy and stow sounds and mix changes (mix goes muffled for a moment on deploy and goes bright for a moment on stow)
- Improvements to the mix inside your helmet
- Mix improvements on jump assist
- Various mix improvements on NPC speech and conversations
- Mix improvements when interacting with a console at social spaces
- Improved the ship rumble when inside a building, as it could be overpowering sometimes
- Tweaks to panels and glass rattles when ships fly over buildings/social spaces
- Improvements to settlement mining drills
- Improvements to reverbs generally
- Improvements to vessel transitions
- Improved interplay between planet, settlement, and external building ambiences
- Improvements to suit ventilator audio behaviour
- Boosted volume of many Odyssey sounds to be more in-line with the existing ED mix
- Numerous social space mix tweaks
- Mix improvements to organics
- Fixed overpowering LFE on supressed weapons at distance
- Fixed various issues with broken audibility on rocket explosions
- Numerous weapon, explosion and ‘whizz-by’ mix improvements
- Plasma crackle ‘sweetener’ added to plasma weapons
- Improved audibility of long range weapons at distance
- Made weapon reloads less ‘thumpy’ to other players and NPCs
- Fix for social space consoles triggering a persistent ‘hum’ in the cockpit panel
- Fixed various issues where some weapon sounds would retrigger on entering vanity cam
- Fixed numerous issues with the audio options, volume sliders and mute buttons
- Fixed various issues with reverbs not working correctly in surround sound speaker configurations
- Fixed the mix often being broken in smaller ships, caused by the changes made to the cargo bay for the conflict zone deploy sequence
- Fixed various mix and audio on the various types of player death and asphyxiation that can occur
- Fixes for various issues with external building spot sounds
- Various audio fixes and improvements on the vendor interactions and dialogue flow
- Reverbs should remain audible for the sounds you can hear, rather than being faded out with sound effects slider
- Turrets have movement audio
- Improvements to social space announcer implementation
- Improvements to pipe ambient sounds
- Improvements to capture point audio
- Fixed broken audio on agricultural grow wheel in settlements
- Improvements to oxygen replenishment gasps
- Improvements to reactor sequence
- Some fixes to adverts to ensure that they sync properly, rather than playing different ads at once
- Laser weapons now produce ‘whizz-bys’
- Added continuous Apex and Frontline ads at their booths/banners
- Settlement terminals now have unique ident audio per faction
- Audio added for big broken fan
- Audio added for cargo canister rack interactions
- DTS headphoneX feature (in audio options) should now work with some on-foot sounds
- Improvements to internal and external building alarms sounds & behaviours
- NPCs ‘call for backup’ voice lines now audible at distance over radio comms
- Improvements to radio comms voice treatment to be more effected and feel less dry
- Improvements to settlement voice
- Removed some repetitive social space crowd sounds
- Improvements to combat crowd, when small numbers of combatants present
- Replaced various lines on the Horizons 3.x COVAS Russian and Spanish localised voices, as flagged by the community
- Fixed some stealth music with incorrect intensity
- Fixed the conflict zone victory music sting always playing twice in succession
- Fix for the social space music sometimes wobbling in rotating starports
- Music score audio replaced with ‘final mix’ for on-foot music suite
- Improved various music transitions in the on-foot music suite
- Set up in-world music at settlements (bars at tourist settlements, and the music tablets at various settlements)
- Set up music interaction and mix behaviours so the non-diegetic music score does not clash with in-world music emitters in settlements
- Turbo lift music is less full range and should not hard-pan as much on headphones
- Turbo lift music should random seek, so we no longer always hear the start of the music tracks
- Improved the way the music fades during important dialogue
- Should now get tension music if observing (but not participating in) a combat scene
CHARACTER
- Fixed issues with jump animations
- Fixed issue in third person where players would pop between crouching and standing
- Fixed issues with all weapon animations
- Fixed issues with all tool animations
- Improved stair climbing animation
- Improved conserving momentum when airborne, so that releasing the sprint input or relaxing the directional inputs does not slow the player mid-air
- Updated head look on NPCs
- Updated eye look on NPCs
- Shortened shield break animations
- Updated certain facial expressions
- Shortened NPC dodge times
- Balanced eye textures
- Updated all engineer clothing
- Codex Discoveries
- New Organic life has been added to worlds with tenuous atmospheres
- Players can report and confirm new organic lifeforms using the Composition Scanner just as they could in Horizons
- Improved Organic Placement for v3 planets
- Organic Colour Variants introduced and will be driven by the environment they are found in
CONFLICT ZONES
- Fixed issue where AI would remain aggressive at the end of a Conflict Zone
- Improved AI control point awareness
- Improved AI prioritisation of targets in capture zones
- Disabled watch behaviour for AI, post conflict zone
- AI will no longer leave their team at the end of a Conflict Zone
- Increased control point capture credit reward bonus to 3,000cr
- Reduced kill and control point capture reinforcement damage to 5 and 50 points, respectively
- Idle vessels no longer count to the team count in on-foot conflict zones, and only humanoids count during the final phase of the conflict
- When in the shuttle booking planetary map, selecting conflict zones should now give a more descriptive reason for why the ‘book’ button is greyed out
- Prevented melee attacks from dealing any damage against Ships, SRVs, and anything that is not a humanoid
- Restricted personal space warning to physical contact, post conflict zone
COSMETICS
- Fixed issues with items remaining previewed in store/livery
- Fixed an issue with the flight suit for its default black look
- Fixed vendor suit images
- Fixed incorrect avatar settings on the flight suits
- Fixed incorrect materials that were in engineer avatar settings
- Rebalanced emissive values on cosmetics to fit with new shaders and lighting
- Bobbleheads adjusted so they are brighter
- Cosmetics are now available for suits and weapons
- Suit livery changed to go through the object refresh rather than the cosmetic
- Previewed items are now added and removed as expected in the suit livery/store
- Updated the customisation visualisation system to be able to deal with being used in both the livery and loadout browser
- Removed the lighting rig from being attached to the camera in the vessel store
- Store packs are now initially sorted alphabetically
- Removed shoulder pads from the base exploration suit
- Removed resetting the camera when in main menu and exiting the store
- SRVs can now spawn and be viewed in the game store
COMBAT
- Fixed an issue where, while reloading a weapon, the AI would get stuck
- Fixed an issue where collisions would reapply their damage for every frame they were colliding (resulting in instant death if two ships rammed each other)
- Fixed an issue where dying humanoids would be treated as environment objects and deal huge amounts of damage to colliding SRVs
- Fixed an issue where certain NPCs detectable by humanoid sensors did not show their nameplates
- Fixed an issue where AI would not perform their ‘death bark’ when being tazed
- Fix for a rare Kinematic crash
- Fixed some situations where AI would incorrectly think they had weapon line of sight when close to nearby obstacles
- Fixed an issue where Humanoid corpses and certain NPCs did not have their nameplate attached to their head
- Fixed erratic weapon aiming when AI were very close to their target
- AI will now engage vehicles at a longer range
- Improved AI behaviour when their combat target is a long distance from a settlement
- Improved AI behaviour when their combat target is in an unreachable location
- Various improvements to ship AI
- Various further improvements to combat AI
- When seeking cover, AI will no longer hide behind their ‘friends’
- AI vision cones are now correctly tied to the third person model
- A rework of the AI's ability to utilise grenades and the frequency thereof
- Improved AI grenade throwing so that they will now flush targets from rooftops
- Non-physical contact personal space warnings are remembered in the area around them, preventing multiple AI talking over each other
- Personal space vocalisation cool-downs are now remembered between behaviours
- Reworked the cool-downs for personal space warnings
STABILITY
- Fixed a crash when the cargo bay is not available when attempting to enter the cargo depot
- Fixed an issue where player ships bounced when landed
- Fixed an issue where if you book a shuttle and then cancel the booking before the shuttle goes live, the pending shuttle object would remain
- Fixed a crash whenever a player died while participating in CQC
- Fixed a crash when another player in your session disembarks from their vessel
- Fixed a crash in the on-foot tutorial when opening the system map (also disabled access to the system and galaxy maps from the navigation panel)
- Fixed a crash caused by adding suit modules to the loadout
- Fixed a crash in visualising a new loadout
- Fixed failures seen in the carrier fuel contact
- Fixed a crash when the UI is not being shown
- Fixed a crash if the player gets a fleet carrier update while on the main menu
- Fixed a crash when upgrading laser ship weapons at an engineer
- Fixed a crash caused by getting shot by a Guardian sentinel
- Fixed a potential crash when trying to turn suit shields off when entering a social space
- Fixed a crash when loading in at a particular planet
- Fix for error when setting 3D mode to Anaglyph in VR
- Fix for error when changing 3D mode from "Off" to "Anaglyph", "Side-by-Side" or "HMD" in VR
- Fix for an error often seen when accessing the System Map
- Fix for an error seen when filtering by ship type in Inter Astra
- Fix for an error occasionally seen when entering supercruise
- Fix for an assert seen when fading planetary rings, based on whether they're seen through atmospheres
- Fix for a crash often seen when in a Dropship
- Fix for an error seen when exiting the livery
- Fix for crash seen when changing resolution
- Fix for crash occasionally seen on load up
- Fix for crash sometimes seen when using terminal
- Fix for a crash seen on occasion in social spaces
- Fix for a crash seen when closing the game via the "incident report screen"
- Fix for a crash occasionally seen on start-up
- Various data port fixes - now ensures the game closes without crashing
- Put a safety check around the commander data when declining applications to prevent a crash
- Improvements to how corpses handle their physics skeletons
- Avoiding crash for old or non-existent resources sent to us by server when someone's inventory is very out of date
- Stopping data transfer on death to avoid upload crash
ENGINEERS
- Fixed floating rocks outside of the Long Sight Engineer Base
- Fixes and polish to the engineers donation flow, and some adjustments to how on-foot engineers are displayed in the Known Engineers UI
- Fixed an issue where Engineers would animate in the wrong place
- Fixed an issue where Engineer progression was not being set correctly
- Improved height map for Felicity Farseer Engineer Base
- Balanced Engineer pad holograms to use the same brightness settings as the other landing pads
- New engineers focus on applying modifications to suits and handheld weapons
- Each new engineer will specialise in certain types of modifications
- A requirement must be met before commanders are invited to dock at a new Engineer’s base (just like existing Engineers)
- When invited to dock at a new Engineer’s base, commanders will be able to engineer with them right away
- Completing a certain task for a new Engineer will have them refer you to another Engineer that focuses on different types of modifications
- Existing Engineer Bases updated to allow commanders to disembark and meet them in person
- Increased Resistances Suit mod should now immediately come into effect when applied
- Applying mods now consumes credits
- Prevented players from disembarking at Engineer bases they do not have access to
- Prevented players from interacting with the Engineer if they do not have access
EXPLORATION
- Fix for organics sometimes appearing incorrectly in highlighted areas of the Heatmap overlay
- The DSS Heatmap no longer displays with "hot" or "cold" areas, but with an overlay where organics/geologicals highlighted should appear
- Emissive properties of DSS Heatmap rescales based on light/dark side of the planet to retain visual fidelity in all light conditions
- The 'All Filter' for the DSS Heatmap has been removed
- Genetic Sampling will no longer require the player to complete a timing-based interaction - sampling will be an automated process
- Sampling an organism now adds a marker to the Commander's compass
- Different types of life will require the commander to sample subsequent specimens at a different distances from a previous specimen
- Commanders can view the typical range of an organic colony in the codex - this is how far Commanders may need to travel to find a specimen, genetically diverse from what they have sampled
- Rewards for logging organics with Vista Genomics greatly increased
- ‘First Logged’ bonus for being the first to log an organism with Vista Genomics greatly increased
SYSTEM AND GALAXY MAP
- Fix for System Map acquiring a grey overlay on planets
- Visual improvements and removal of visual artefacts in the System and Galaxy Map
- Changed name of Eskimo Nebula to NGC 2392 in alignment with NASA's official change
- Planet icons have been updated in the ship radar so that they are now much more visible
- Sol planets updated to more accurately reflect real-world data
ECONOMY
- Adjusted sale prices of some Goods, Data and Assets to the Bartender
- Adjusted recipes for Upgrades, Suit and Handheld Weapon Engineering
- Improved negotiation balance and feedback in the UI
FLEET CARRIERS
- Fix for the skybox becoming increasingly over-exposed with every Carrier jump
- Fleet Carrier colour schemes work with new shaders
INTERACTIONS
- Fixed an issue which sometimes resulted in AI spawning in spawn cupboards at abandoned settlements
- Fixed an issue where locked lockers would display an ‘interact’ prompt when they could not be interacted with
- Fixed a number of settlement assets that were not visually powering down at Offline and Offline Damaged Settlements
- Implemented a number of changes to ensure ‘cuttable’ panels fall outwards more consistently when cut
LIGHTING & VFX
- Fix for Shuttle Cockpits appearing overly dark
- Fix for broken suit thruster lens flare
- Fix for the player flashlight
- Fix to prevent overly orange-tinted social spaces and removal of "cone" effect seen above area
- Fix for incorrect placement of Apex projection light
- Fix to balance the organic scan VFX as well as the motherlode asteroid scan VFX
- Fixes and improvements to reflection probe placement in Settlement rooms
- Fix for the Life Support asset not turning light off when powered down
- Fixes for lighting seams observed in some rooms
- Fix and visual improvement of framing for weapons and humanoids in livery
- Fix for light leaking outside of specific room
- Fix for lighting of specific room not turning off when the Settlement if offline
- Fix for station exterior lighting changing as the player approached
- Fix for visual artefact caused by over-bright fire VFX
- Fix for an effect caused by Thargoid probes
- Fix for visual artefact caused by over-bright grenade explosion VFX
- Fix for steam VFX clipping through box in specific Settlement room
- Visual improvement to the chimney VFX
- Visual Improvements to lighting at all Station Lobby Types, including Engineers
- Visual Improvements to lighting at Horizons Engineer Bases
- Visual Improvements to lighting at Odyssey Engineer Bases
- Visual improvement to lens flare that can be seen when navigating down to a Settlement
- Visual improvements to the appearance of other ships whilst in supercruise
- Visual improvements to lighting in Engineer Bases
- Visual improvements to lighting in all turbolifts
- Visual Improvements to lighting for all "Under Repair" hangars
- Visual improvements to lighting for Damaged Stations
- Visual Improvements to lighting for all inner docks and hangars
- Visual improvements to Ship Exterior lighting
- Visual improvements to lighting of full body commander portraits
- Visual improvements to lighting in selected buildings and Settlements
- Visual improvements to livery lighting
- Visual improvements to exterior lighting of all Megaships
- Visual improvements to all ship lens flares and emissives (VFX)
- Visual Improvement to the VFX of hyperspace sequence
- Visual improvements and further balancing of all human weapon bullet impact decals
- Visual improvements and additional balancing of all ship weapon and skimmer weapon bullet impact decals
- Re-balancing of the Thargoid Portal VFX for the new lighting scheme
- Atmospheric VFX (steam) added back into hangars
- Updated lighting for Thargoid structures
- Weapons thumbnails updated to frame correctly in Outfitting view
- Canopies at Settlements now have working lights
- Dim light mode setup for use in the livery as the "Lights off" mode
- Reduce flashing on exterior of damaged stations
- Improvement to ship shield material and VFX when hit with a humanoid weapon
- Trails of DSS Probes have been re-balanced for new lighting and will now rescale to various lighting conditions, so they are always visible to the player when probing a planet
- Fires now cast more light in rooms
LOCALISATION AND TEXT
- Fixed government type not being localised properly on the conflict zone vendor panel
- Updated localised string on the on-foot CZ death screen from "Killed by" to "Defeated by"
- Replace hard coded "RANK" with the correct rank string for ‘wingmates’ when on foot.
MEMORY AND OPTIMISATION
- Fix for memory stomp when generating planetary nebula information
- Fixes and stability improvements to the portalling system
- Correction of the video memory streaming budget to prevent Out of Memory crashes
- Multiple improvements and fixes to reduce memory spikes
- Replace excessively large and wide spotlights with something more visually fitting, and which is more performant
- Additions to the portalling system (Kinematics) that further increases performance
- Optimisation for shadows as directional shadows now included in the portalling system
MISC
- New Ident created
MENUS
- Split up the control binding menu into 4 parts: general, ship, SRV and on-foot - each part can be set to its own preset.
MINING
- Fix for ice asteroids changing colouration when being detonated
MISSIONS
- Fixed a softlock in the mission board
- Fixed the conversation camera snapping abruptly at the end of conversations
- Adjusted how modified micro-resources are added/removed to/from the locker or backpack by missions to prevent errors
- Updated mission-giver mission counts on the mission board, depending on the number of missions available, removed text that could become incorrect due to this value changing
- Made illegal missions display purple in mission-giver details panel (to match narrative panel)
- Disabled mission help button on mission board, except in specific panels (the mission details panels)
- Odyssey missions no longer always fail if the player is critically injured
- Missions that do not have specified locations no longer fail on critical injury
- If the player is at the location where the mission takes place then being critically injured will cause the mission to fail
- If the player is heading towards the mission location, or has successfully completed the objective and then left the mission location, a critical injury will not cause the mission to fail
- Mission payout balance changes
- Missions will now correctly appear in the incident report when relevant
- Missions now apply fines if an item they entrusted to you for the purpose of that mission is not then used to complete the mission
- Harder missions have had their pay-outs increased - this mostly affects missions that require the player to perform illegal actions or adhere to a strict condition
- When a mission rewards an item, the value of the items or quantity offered should now more closely scale with the value of the mission's credit reward
- Negotiation balance changes
- Mission negotiation is now slightly easier when requesting the smallest option
- Negotiating on a mission that rewards an item should now more consistently result in higher quantities of that item
- Very successful negotiations can now result in up to twice as many items being offered as a reward
- Resolved some networking issues that would cause a mission from one player to update or block progress on another player's mission when they were both performing similar missions in the same instance
- Poor negotiation attempts will now cause more of an impact on your reputation with that faction
- Text changes and fixes
- Fixed various items of text failing to translate or translating incorrectly
- Improved some wording on HUD objectives
- Improved the feedback and clarity of several missions' transaction panels
- Fixed depot-related missions in Dromi, Matet, and Otegine not opening the depot immediately
- Fixed some instances where a mission could be abandoned to either dodge or increase influence unfairly
- Fixed some passenger missions at damaged starports being inaccessible
- Donation missions no longer display high threat levels
MULTICREW
- Fixed physical multicrew role icons not displaying correctly for players not in instance
- Changed players in physical multicrew passenger roles (idle or gunner) to use the multicrew icons
- Restored behaviour where outfitting and livery are only disabled in ships when you have people aboard your ship: not the whole time you have a crew
NETWORKING
- Fixed several instances where transferring cargo between your ship and your SRV could cause the client's inventory to become out of sync with the server
- Killing humanoids in multiplayer sessions should no longer leave apparently living humanoids in the ragdoll state for some clients
NEW PLAYER TUTORIAL
- Fixed the "Disembark" button not working at planet port at the end of the on foot tutorial
- Fixed the starter package details location display to show the correct location instead of just Matet
- Change icons for tutorial start flow buttons
ORGANICS \ GEOLOGICALS AND SCATTER
- Fix for rocks snapping into position on terrain as the Player travels towards it
- Fix for bullet decals not displaying correctly on some organic types
- Fix for ‘Horizons Organics’ canning incorrectly
- Fix for mineable objects not appearing on some Organics
- Hitcheck fixes and improvements for all organics and geologicals
- Geologicals frequency of firing update to be able to change based on planetary conditions (e.g. volcanic conditions)
- Update and improvements to how organics and geological receive colouration, based on in-game planet and star parameters
- Multiple Visual improvements to the organics billboards seen at distance
- Large amount of improvements & additions to the organic and geological shaders for new assets
- Large amount of improvements & additions to the ‘Horizons Organics’ and Geological shaders, including Thargoid Barnacles
- Large amount of visual improvements to organics and geologicals - including texture changes, model tweaks, LOD improvements and colouration improvements
- Visual improvements to Thargoid Barnacles
- Improvement to the weapon decals able to spawn on scatter rocks
- Efficiency improvement to the organic billboards seen at distance
- Geologicals and organics all updated and balanced to respond to all wind strengths
- Organics no longer clip into scatter rocks
- Scaling changes for some organic types
- New Fumerolas updated to have spouting VFX
OUTFITTING
- Modules browser: Replaced Filter button with sort dropdown
POIs
- Fixed some hitcheck issues on the Crashed Type 9 POI
- Wrecked Sidewinder model updated so the doors at the back are closed
- Wrecked SRV model updated so there is no longer a hole behind the large salvage panel
- Player collision fixed for the wrecked Federation Fighter POI, to prevent players getting stuck