 This is Witchbase news for Friday the 4th of August 2023, I'm CMDR Buur. In Elite Dangerous news this week, new surface discoveries are made as update 16 arrives in the galaxy, Elite Dangerous takes a chilling turn as new Thargoid behaviour is observed, CMDR Ascorbius premieres his latest CGI Elite themed epic and more. As always if you enjoy our videos please do hit the like button and if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and ding the bell so you don't miss any of our Elite Dangerous content. If you'd like to help directly support our work you can also join our Patreon, links to that and everything else are below. CMDR Ascorbius who's been making videos centred around the universe of Elite Dangerous for the last 6 years is about to premiere his latest creation and first video since June of 2021. The latest masterpiece is a three part story video created with 90% CGI mixed with some in game footage and featuring original music created by S1 Studios UK. It's taken over 9 months to create the video and the last in this particular series was released in 2020. The premiere is happening at 7pm UTC tonight that's Friday the 4th of August and the remaining 2 parts will be released on consecutive Fridays until the weekend of the Elite Community Meet which itself kicks off the day after the final video on Saturday the 19th of August. You'll find a link in the video description to the YouTube premiere of CMDR Ascorbius, Elite Dangerous the Aftermath, Salvation and Consequences and if you're there Rene and I will see you in the live chat. CMDRs Rickson and C1701D from the Hull Seals Cyber Seal Division sent word this week that they are taking over maintenance duties on the Elite Dangerous Market Connector third party app. If you're unfamiliar with its operation on a basic level EDMC is a small app that can be run in the background on a PC while Elite Dangerous is active that gathers information from a CMDR's logs as they perform actions or visit stations in the Elite Dangerous Galaxy. The app then passes that information back to a number of Elite Dangerous data gathering networks and sites that then pull those huge amounts of data and redistribute it in an easily digestible form to anyone that wants to use it. Whilst being furiously useful and powerful in its base form one of the bigger advantages of EDMC is its ability to utilise plugins to further enhance the user's experience or gather very specific types of data. The research group Canon for example make extensive use of the EDMC to steer members of the exploration community to places of interest for further investigation. If you're a user of EDMC and running it is something we highly recommend here at the Burpit you likely won't notice any immediate changes but this new steward ship from Rixon and C17 does ensure going forward that EDMC continues to build on the already fantastic legacy that those who came before them on the project have built. If you want to grab EDMC for yourself you'll find a download link below this video. And some late breaking news just as we were going to press today Frontier released 7 new Explorer themed ship kits into the game. The kits called the Survey Pack are currently available for the Cobra Mark 3, Diamondback Explorer, Asp Explorer, Python, Imperial Cutter, Federal Corvette and Anaconda. One important note they are usable only on the live 4.0 codebase on PC so they won't work in the old Horizons legacy version of Elite. The kits are 13,520 arcs each and feature 4 individual structural pieces and 6 paint jobs. Spinning radar dishes folks, spinning radar dishes. Before we get into this next section I'll give you fair warning we're talking Update 16 and everything new that's been discovered thus far. If you've not experienced this stuff for yourself yet and you would rather not hear about it here first stop watching right now. For those of you still here let's get cracking. If you saw the video we published on Wednesday this week then you already know that the new Thargoid Hunter variant the scythe had as expected been released into the galaxy by our new gloopy neighbours. What you might not know is what became apparent about the scythe not long after we published that video. We already knew from images that fdev had released to the community around a month ago that the scythe had a penchant for occupied escape pods. Fdev had shown it scooping up hapless human popsicle victims with Thargoid collector limpets in a live stream broadcast found footage style clip. Thargoid chips as a whole have been seen making a beeline for any available occupied escape pods in the game for many years now pretty much since their arrival in January of 2017 two years after the release of the vanilla game. Whilst the deployed thin pits were somewhat of a surprise for the scythe's appearance their propensity towards collecting readily available sources of protein floating in space wasn't so far so creepy weird. Later in the evening on Wednesday however we started seeing a trickle and then eventually a flood of reports from numerous community sources that something else was afoot. Researchers began reporting interdiction encounters with scythe outside of Thargoid occupied space close to the front line systems in the war for sure but in multiple star systems that were not currently at least under any kind of Thargoid influence what so ever. This was in itself a disturbing revelation. Prior to these encounters the Thargoids had restricted their engagements to systems that were in a specific Thargoid war state of one or another. These attacks however were taking place in regular star systems, the Thargoids it appears were pushing out of their space and not playing by the rules we'd become accustomed to but what could their motivation be, brace yourself dear viewer it's about to get much more creepy worse. The community's initial investigations turned up one key fact, the one thing that the newly attacked commanders had in common other than their proximity to the war ravaged systems was that they were carrying occupied escape pods in most cases because they were running humanitarian missions out of those same war ravaged systems. I told you to brace yourself it wasn't due to that last revelation however the worst was yet to come. We soon began hearing reports that passenger vessels were being assaulted by scythe outside of Thargoid space. These aren't the Medivax style mass escape pod style missions, these attacks were on fair paying civilian evacuation missions and worst of all the Thargoid thimpits we'd seen deployed already were being supplemented in the attacks by a new Thargoid biomechanism, the Thargoid breaching drone. This insidious device acts in a very similar way to a regular human hatchbreaker limpid, it quickly attaches itself to the underside of the targeted ship, breaches the interior via the cargo hatch forcing the passengers into escape pods that are then quickly scooped up by the weighting constellation of collector thimpits. And not only it seems passengers and escape pods are at risk, if you're transporting any human cargo such as slaves etc near the Thargoid war zones you can expect a scythe attack. Whether Thargoids find so interesting, useful or indeed tasty about humans we have yet to determine, I do think it likely however answers are coming. Where I just told you to brace yourself, yeah we're not there yet. Update 16 wasn't done with us. The discovery of the ill-fated Thargod cultist mega ship The Dedican yielded 10 fully voice acted logs from individuals onboard the ship. It also prompted a Galnet News article recording the Dedican's discovery and making note that the ship was completely devoid of human life and none of the ship's thousands of escape pods had been recovered. As far as fleshy meat bags go, the ship had it seems been stripped bare. So that bit where I told you to brace yourself, here it comes. I mentioned at the very top of this piece that we were delving into heavy spoilers, I'm going to give you that warning here one more time as we're going to play a very small excerpt from one of the very unsettling Dedican logs. I've added a chapter heading to this video so that you can actively skip this particular bit if you really don't want it spoiled. We're including this clip because we know our videos are watched by some folks who might be away from Elite Dangerous right now or who might not be involved directly in the Thargoid storyline but nonetheless appreciate being kept in the loop about where the game is headed. So for those folks and for anyone else taking in context with everything I've just relayed about the sides and their behaviour here is a small excerpt of Elite's current dark path. A reminder, there are a total of 10 quite excellent audio logs to be collected from the Dedican Megaship and still update 16 wasn't done with us yet. Thursday morning we awoke to see reports that overnight more discoveries had been made. Inside the Thargoid Warzone's players were now seeing new Thargoid structures on tenuous atmospheric worlds. When probed with a surface scanner some planets are now playing host to what's being called a Thargoid Barnacle Matrix. The sites are markedly different from Thargoid surface structures that we've seen before that we now know to be downed mycoid infected Thargoid hive vessels. The new structures as of this recording at least feature no accessible interior space and must be because of their sudden appearance fairly newly deployed. Unlike the downed capital ships the structures are not inhabited by Thargoid scavengers Our experiences with the site personally seem to indicate that human ships above the site will remain largely unmolested by Thargoids in stark contrast to just about everywhere else inside Thargoid controlled space. It's on foot or in an SRV however that the site shows its teeth. Attempt to infiltrate the site on the ground and it quickly deploys Thargoid Revenant drones of a similar nature to those seen after update 15 in human settlements controlled by the Thargoids. I say similar these Revenants whilst just as aggressive when they detect your presence do seem to have a shorter detection range than the drones occupying turf captured from humans. Once the sentinel light drones have been deployed an escaping ship or SRV need only go a short distance before the floating mechanisms give up their pursuit. The barnacle matrices themselves contain within their boundaries 3 distinct formations that have been identified. Those formations are the barnacle matrices themselves of which there appear to be 7 with what the game refers to as coral trees and a central upright structure called a toughened spear root. The coral trees drop a new caustic commodity called Coral Sap when fired upon. As of this recording no materials have been discovered at the new sites that we're aware of. What if any purpose a barnacle matrix site performs is unknown, it's also not known currently if they exhibit any adverse reaction to the presence of Guardian Technology. We do know that there is an update 17 planned, Frontier have also mentioned an interim patch between 16 and 17. The specific purpose of that update is currently unknown. Have you tried running passenger missions near the Thargoid affected zones? Did you download the logs from the Dedican? And will you be attending Commander Ascorbius' premiere later today? Let us know in the comments below. That's it for now, thanks very much for watching, we'll be back later this week with more videos, until then, O7 commanders follow the greens on the way out and do keep clear of the toast rack. We very much look forward to seeing you next time.