The first of the planned Livestream events coming from Frontier Developments in the lead up to Chapter Four of Elite Dangerous: Beyond update ran recently revealing what’s in store for players who choose to jump into the upcoming beta on PC.

The visuals are getting a boost with changes to the lighting including colour grading. The general gist of it is that you should find that the stars and surroundings will more greatly influence how environments look within the system’s you are visiting. Another little bombshell was mention of a night vision mode – with the lighting changes more than likely making visibility on the dark side of worlds even more difficult this seems like an obvious addition and a neat touch as well.

Updates to exploration include an analysis mode that’s part of the new scanning processes and is used for highlighting areas of interest that need further investigation. Players can also launch probes to get even more data on planets. It does mean that this requires more work now than the current one button scan, especially if  you have equipped the advanced/surface scanners, but all of this data has value and gives players more ways to earn credits or prestige within the game.

The cockpit UI gets some attention too with some screens optimised to make room for new features including the codex and squadrons and others to make better use of space or communicate their intent more clearly. Players who rely on these screens to manage their ships are likely to appreciate anything that makes this work more efficient.

There’ll be three more Livestreams down the track covering additional changes so there’ll be plenty more to see before the update is released (hopefully) at the end of the year.

Elite Dangerous is out now for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The PC beta for Chapter Four starts at the end of the month.