A handy little notification popped into my email inbox this morning from Frontier Developments in relation to the next update to Elite Dangerous and the good news is it’s a lot closer than expected with it arriving on the 28th of June. What’s great to see is that it appears that they are sticking firmly to the schedule that they had originally discussed. Still, it was a surprise for me to see it so quickly after Chapter One but it’s welcome. 🙂

Full details were posted in the Frontier Forums but I’ve also copied it below for the click avoiders:

Greetings Commanders,

We are pleased to announce that Chapter Two of the Beyond series of updates is right around the corner. In just under a month, you’ll be able to get your hands on the Alliance’s newest Chieftain variant: the Alliance Challenger. We’ve also got a selection of new wing missions, installation interactions, new settlements to explore and, to combat the ever-growing and ever-encroaching Thargoid threat, a cache of new Guardian weapons and technology from the Tech Brokers.

And… you’ll be able to explore it all for yourselves on June 28.

This is the first of the two smaller instalments coming as part of the Elite Dangerous Beyond series of updates, with a larger coming in Q4 of this year, bringing Squadrons and improvements to Mining and Exploration, and much more! If you’d like to contribute ideas and find out more about what’s coming in the Q4 update, please check out our Focused Feedback forums here.

Please find a summary of Chapter Two’s content below.

Summary of features:

New Ship: Challenger
The Alliance continue to refine their warships in the face of the looming Thargoid threat. The Alliance Challenger, envisaged as a frontline combat vessel, has stronger armour than its Chieftain counterpart and will be able to soak up a significant amount of punishment.

Wing Missions
First introduced in Chapter One of Beyond, we are introducing a Wing Mining Missions for you and your fellow Commanders to take on!

Installation Interactions
In a similar fashion to the Megaship interactions, which were introduced in Chapter One, Commanders will now be able to scan and interact with Space Installations.

• Scan – Scanning the installation will allow Commanders to see what they can interact with: Turrets, Comms Arrays and Cargo Bays.
• Turret hack – Disable turrets protecting other potential hackable points. This will deactivate security measures put in place to protect the Comms Arrays and Cargo Bays.
• Comms array – Get tradable data from the Comms Array.
• Cargo bay – Fire a limpet on the Cargo Bay to unlock and steal commodities and materials.

Tech Broker
Tech Brokers will allow commanders to unlock large weapons versions of the existing guardian tech weapons. These Tech Brokers will issue blueprint requests to collect Guardian data as well as materials and then, once delivered, will unlock certain Guardian modules of weapons for purchase. Will you turn you weapons on Thargoid or use them to pirate rival Commanders?

Thargoid
Thargoids continue to be an intergalactic menace! With the Alliance introducing a new ship, the Thargoids intend to up their game too, introducing new Scouts that will buff other Scouts and increase their combat efficiency.

Redacted
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A full list of details and changes will be available in a changelog at launch.

We’d love to hear what you think about this next instalment of the Beyond series of updates and can’t wait to let you discover all the content ingame!

Just because the update is considered “small” doesn’t mean there’ll be a lot of changes in there when it arrives – as soon as we see some patch notes we’ll post them up. With an additional type of wing mission (mining) they are gradually building out the options available to players wanting to make money with friends so I’m curious to see how that works out.

Elite Dangerous is out now for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.