Stuck out in “the middle of nowhere” in any game can feel like a grind if you’re trying to avoid taking the ultimate step of sacrificing yourself so as to respawn back to familiar territory and you hear many tales of that in Elite Dangerous. Thankfully I’ve had a couple of new distractions on this leg that have made the trip to Sagittarius A* nicer.

The game has a numerous background simulations running and one that has the most visible impact to players is the Stellar Forge; what you see in the galaxy is determined by this. So every star and planet you encounter in deep space is there because procedural generation algorithms determine there should be something there. Of course there are exceptions such as our own solar system and the occasional scientific discovery but the rest is all Frontier’s developers having a good old guess on what we night see. And one thing becomes fairly clear in your travels: it’s not that easy finding an “Earth-like” planet out there. So much to my surprise I found two during the last few days!

A quick flyby was all I did at this point as the data collected will be put to good use when I cash it in. Still, it was nice seeing some planets with that familiar mix of blue and green like our own. The game does a great job of rendering them from a distance which makes it a real shame you can’t fly down there to see them up close (like No Man’s Sky) because it would be an easy stop for pilots to go out and explore in SRVs… and have some fun too!

It’s less than 4000 light years to go now before reaching Explorer’s Anchorage and Sagittarius A* and I’m looking forward to that arrival with plenty of excitement. Maybe not so exciting for those who don’t play Elite Dangerous but trust me… it’s cool. 🙂