 This is Witchspace news for Friday the 4th of February 2022, I'm CMDR Buur. In Elite Dangerous News this week, new hotfixes are deployed as Fdev continues its radio silence, a new mystery emerges in-game to be decoded, the Odyssey material helper gets a powerful new feature and more. To make sure you don't miss any of our videos hit like and subscribe and remember to click the little bell icon and select all notifications and if you'd like to help directly support this channel you can also join our Patreon via the link in the video description. In what seems to be an emerging pattern in Elite Dangerous the lack of a specific CG this week signals the arrival of a new mystery and discoverable story element into the game. Sure enough late on Thursday a Galnet News article arrived rallying commanders to uncover a beacon hidden deep in the HIP 290 system that it's hoped will be used to bring the terrorist organisation known as the NMLA further into the light. Scanning the beacon not only delivers an encoded message to the in-ship inbox but the Galnet article that contains part of a larger cypher key very specifically states that anyone who scans the beacon will receive further instructions in subsequent days. The information here is quite clear, more is coming to make sure you're involved, scan the beacon. The beacon itself is super easy to find, just travel to the HIP 290 system, drop into the navigation beacon right next to the arrival star, scan that, return to super cruise and check your navigation contacts in the left hand panel and you should see the beacon sum 30,000 light seconds away deeper into the system. The past year and a bit has seen interesting threads, plotlines and rich galaxy changing lore that are all interwoven dropped into the game and it all kind of feels like we're building towards something. Commander Mitokondria's excellent infographical map of the Colonia Connection Superhighway got a further update this week adding as it did the recently deployed Brewer Corporation's Phase 3 Colonia Bridge Starports. As we've mentioned before the map also contains significant Tritium mining hotspots and tourist sightseeing opportunities and POIs as well as documenting the infrastructure that lines the route. It often goes unrecognized that there were existing a string of starports already between the bubble and Colonia prior to the recent deployments but what the starports and megaships of the Colonia Bridge initiative are doing adds significantly more granularity to that highway through the stars and as Frontier have stated previously it's expected that the new starports now being deployed will help to form smaller micro bubbles populating the route between humanity's galactic islands of civilization. But more significant space based starports in the route will provide a nice guiding light for anyone or indeed anything heading Colonia's way. You'll find a link to Mitokondria's map in the description below. The must have tool for anyone working through Odyssey's suit and weapon engineering tree got a new and significant update this week that adds one particularly valuable feature. The Elite Dangerous Odyssey materials helper which we featured on this broadcast before has always done a sterling job of advising the likely types of buildings and situations where commanders might find certain materials but with this most recent of updates the tool now tracks and displays specific details on exactly what settlement on what planet orbiting what star the materials are being found in the most abundance and it goes about hoovering them up from commanders own logs as the tool runs in the background. If you're running through Odyssey's tens of thousands of surface settlements and are struggling to find some of the rarer items then the tool will be able to guide you very specifically to where other users of the material helper have picked up that specific item. Whilst the intelligence it gathers is likely to become somewhat of a self feeding circle as more commanders find the things they are seeking as a result of the tool the tool then reports more commanders finding the things in those places and so on and so on the inherent usefulness nonetheless for elite struggling map gatherers out there cannot be overstated. You'll find links to the tool in the description below or if you're running the tool already just click on the about tab to be redirected to the download links to the latest version. This week quickly saw two hotfixes deployed into the game to both stabilise the client and address issues arising from January's patch 10. Most notably the scooping of planet side materials by SRVs should now be back to normal operation which will please almost every commander who owns both spaceships and SRVs. However the unusual almost near silence from the Frontier CM team continued this week as January's end came and went leaving the community with no fdev livestreams or the now customary monthly significant development updates that had become the signature of the company's engagement through the latter half of last year. Of course the community has weathered months of inaction and a lack of significant updates from Frontier before. The last period in elites often tangled history we refer to here affectionately as the Doldrums and during that period Galnet got turned off, community goals ceased completely and the Thargoids ceased their advance withdrawing back to the Pleiades but importantly before it happened Frontier announced that it was happening. What they didn't do was state specifically why. As it turned out they'd redeployed their internal resources and were working on what we now know to be Odyssey. The current state change from the Cambridge developers therefore appears to be something very different. Fdev went into Christmas riding a wave of enthusiasm and positivity after a very troubled year albeit with a growing amount of disquiet and anxiety surrounding the company's lack of meaningful engagement whenever the scratchy subject of Odyssey's release onto the consoles was raised. At the start of Arthur's pre-Christmas message to the community he stated quote We will have a full development update in January 2022 and lay out our plans for communicating with you through updates, streams and social channels unquote. Now we've passed into February however that very clearly hasn't happened and importantly the company hasn't really said why so the current tsunami of tumbleweeds doesn't appear to be something similar to what we've weathered before. So what's going on here? 2022 was undoubtedly always going to be a pivotal year for Elite and if Fdev are not specifically announcing a cessation of activity in the game then we have to assume that they're still lining up for the year ahead. When last we heard the plan was for fleet carrier interiors to be deployed into the game with update 11 and I quote Arthur here very early next year. So last year the subject of ship engineering was spoken about by the company and a review of the engineering process was promised for this year. There's the evolving storyline in the game with the likely crescendo moment of the Azimuth saga, there's the ever expected console announcements to come, we've also have hinted settlement defence missions and the continued optimisation of Odyssey. Arth also stated in his Christmas message quote Outside of fleet carrier interiors the development team are hard at work on new features unquote so presumably the addition of more features is to come further down the line. Whilst the lack of live streams and dev updates etc this month from the company certainly feels unusual update 10 pretty much arrived when the community expected in January certainly here at the burp pit we feel there is no reason at this point to believe that update 11 won't also be arriving in-game on time as promised. It was also confirmed today by forum based community specialist Paul Crowther who we like to think of as the fdev community team equivalent of Thunderbird 5 that the planned community team meet and greet is still taking place later this month in Cambridge where around 100 commanders, yours truly included will be present meeting fdev's public facing team. Our hunch is that update 11 and more news will have been delivered to the community before then so at the very least the CMs aren't overrun with commanders all asking about the current silence. Are you planning on seeking out the beacon for the latest in-game lore mystery? Are you planning on visiting Mitochondria's map of the Colonia bridge or just what do you think fdev are up to? 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 07 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.