 This is Witchbase news for Friday the 9th of September 2022 I'm CMDR Buur In Elite Dangerous News this week we have the latest news on the location of the Interstellar Anomaly following a dramatic change in its appearance Frontier livestream with developer guests and the East India Company offers free commodities for a month to coincide with players transferring from console If you enjoy our videos please do like and subscribe don't forget to click the little bell icon and turn on all notifications to ensure you see all our Elite Dangerous videos and community posts and if you'd like to directly support our work on this channel you'll also find our Patreon linked below We start this week with news from the East India Company player group As we've reported a few times before the East India Company has established trading posts that are able to provide commanders with commodities such as Meta Alloys, Modular Terminals, Fujin Tea and Lavian Brandy in exchange for the widely available Fleet Carrier Wonder Fuel Tritium These commodities are needed to unlock some horizon level engineers in Colonia and the bubble and can on occasions be challenging to source As an extra layer of assistance to commanders that may be about to transfer from the console side of the game to the PC side, more on that in a moment they are offering those commodities free of charge for a month from the 12th of September To benefit from the free drop all you need to do is mention Operation Consolation when you place your order with them For more details and to gain access to the East India Company services you'll find a link to their Discord in the description below this video This week's episode of the show was hosted by community managers Arthur and Sally and as well as the regular mix of news and community highlights the duo were joined by two members of the Elite Dangerous Audio team Robin McGovern and Matthew Florians Elite Soundscape is always a community highlight with good reason and the opportunity to hear more from members of its team in person is never one to be missed In the interview the team talk about the process of creating audio for our favourite space game the attention to detail that is placed into objects that you might suspect as having no audio attached to them at all Starport Forest Domes for example and some of their personal favourite highlights from the game The team also played some Thargoid noises from Elite Dangerous as they appear in the game but then also played the source noises that were the starting point for those effects before any processing was added to them which was particularly interesting It's worth noting at this point community manager Arthur was keen to point out on a number of occasions that listening to things in the game that we might not have previously thought of listening to was worth doing a point that was born fruit recently when it came to tracking the anomaly that appeared in deep space recently near Barnards Loop more on that in a moment It may be that Arthur was quite rightly merely attempting to highlight cool audio cues in the game that we may simply have not heard or it may genuinely be that pointing your FSS scanner at anything in the game may produce more information than we realised worth making note of it in either case And while we're talking all things frontier a reminder that as things stand the console account copy option giving console commanders the opportunity to copy an account save over to the PC platform is due to kick in on Monday next week assuming no problems are detected with it between now and then either way we'll post on it on this very channel when we know more Thursday morning this week brought with it some unusual downtime to the game servers and a fairly substantial patch the patches arrival was heralded the night before by a post to the official forums from senior community manager Sally Morgan Moore that contained some limited patch notes and an image the patch notes stated simply that an adjustment was being made to lens flares to ensure that they were visible on all quality settings and were visible at the correct ranges the image which was extremely unusual in and of itself for a set of patch notes was of a Coriolis starport but was named transmission.png and below it was a string of hexadecimal numbers the hexadecimal numbers when ran through a widely available web-based decoder produced the word coded so there's clearly more to the image than was first apparent if you open the image in a text editor it produces as you'd expect a page of complete gobbledygook however at the very bottom of the gobbledygook was a line of binary numbers that very much stood apart if you ran that binary string through an equally readily available binary decoder it spelt the words just because you can't see something doesn't mean it's not real cue the sound of thousands of tinfoil hats being very carefully placed on heads when Thursday morning rolled around multiple commanders who had been tracking the unknown interstellar anomaly or Stargoid as it had become known more colloquially began reporting that they had lost visual contact with it it could still be heard on the ship's FSS and all indications were that it was indeed exactly where it was supposed to be but the mysterious Stargoid swirly thing of doom had disappeared from the sky as you can imagine the tinfoil grew hotter as the collective community theory generator went into overdrive had it cloaked somehow had it stopped altogether and was just waiting had it whatever it is landed maybe as these and many more wild theories began circulating an eye was simultaneously turned back towards the patch that had arrived that morning and more specifically the patch notes the notes themselves referred to lens flares and adjusting them so that they were visible from the correct ranges a couple of days prior to the patch the in-game Galnet news service had referred to the Stargoid anomaly as quote unexplained flare detected in deep space quote flare is an unusual choice of words to use for something like an anomaly and it was this choice of words that immediately began to tie the apparent disappearance and the patch notes together the tinfoil wrapped coupling of those two occurrences of the word was further compounded when commanders took into account the encoded message that was hidden in the patch notes again that was just because you can't see something doesn't mean it's not real the anomaly is referred to as a flare the patch has corrected the range at which lens flare would be visible so did we need to be closer to the anomaly now in order to see it getting closer to the Stargoid anomaly is no small undertaking previous observations of the fast-moving mysterious thingy from beyond the stars have shown that whilst it's traveling on a very definite path between systems it's doing so in interstellar space the space between star systems regular viewers to this broadcast will know however that the elite dangerous community is not one to shy away from a serious undertaking and in fairly short order commanders such as commander gray area UK commander marx antheus commander garrod and commander monster axe to name but for activated their frame shift drives pointing at the direction of the anomaly and headed off into interstellar space as a result it's now confirmed that once you get close you can indeed pick up the object visually again a quick look at the web tool created by canon research to track the anomaly a link to which you'll find below will tell you that as I speak these words the anomaly is headed towards the u chores JECC 15 zero system having left HD 38291 one report sent to us from commander gray area UK recounts leaving the u chores JECC system in their ship the aptly named are we there yet headed towards the anomaly in supercruise at the time of reporting they had passed the object at just over 80 percent of a light year away from u chores and had now reversed course and would giving chase following it back to the u chores a star the object absolutely is still visible it is still on a trajectory that can be monitored and tracked it is being chased by multiple commanders the game is still very much afoot given the patch yesterday it does appear at least that the luminosity of the anomaly we've seen in the last couple of weeks may have been unintended behavior and something that required a fix it does appear that the object was intended to be seen by commanders but only after a deliberate effort to get closer to it in supercruise and what we're seeing now and indeed not seeing is what frontier had intended all along it seems likely that with the Thursday patch notes frontier were pointing ever so gently at the object whilst trying very hard not to break our immersion surrounding the ongoing community pursuit of the object and the still unfolding plot around its appearance and presumed eventual arrival I have to say the luminosity bug that surfaced with the anomaly is in my opinion at least the most happy of accidents it injected an extra level of excitement and buzz into the game following the events in HIP 22460 and the firing of the Proteus wave and now that the anomaly has drawn attention to itself albeit perhaps less subtly and unintentionally it's become a larger community effort to monitor track and report back on the object's journey than perhaps it would have been had it been discovered later into its journey and closer to its eventual destination had we not seen it shining so obviously in the distance I'm not a hundred percent convinced that anyone would have detected it visually at all before it whatever it is arrived let alone gone to the trouble of chasing it down for hours in supercruise as I've said the chase is still very much ongoing I've linked below to Canon's excellent web based tracking solution for the object you'll also find Canon's recently published paper on the first appearance of the anomaly the community's tracking of it and theories around its trajectory and behavior as things stand the object appears to be headed toward the bubble of human inhabited space its true intention and nature are as yet at least a complete unknown this story is still very far from being over and breaking news just as we were going to press we are receiving multiple reports that we're attempting to verify saying that as many as three more unknown interstellar anomalies may have been detected incoming from other parts of the galaxy we're attempting to fact check now what is a very new and fast evolving situation but if confirmed this is a dramatic turn of events what was a curious unusual anomaly may just be the vanguard of an incoming invasion as soon as we know more we'll bring it to you here on this very channel have you detected any more interstellar anomalies are you chasing down an anomaly in interstellar space and what do you believe their intentions to be and just where do you think they're heading 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 oh seven 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