 This is Witchspace news for Friday the 16th of April 2021, I'm CMDR Buur. In this weeks news, the trail to the Hesperus yields results, the community management team at Frontier expands again, Phase 3 of the Odyssey Alpha arrives bringing exploration and a degree of controversy. To make sure you don't miss any of our videos hit like and subscribe, click the bell icon and remember to select all notifications and to help support the work of this channel you'll also find us on Patreon, links to everything you need are in the description below. The Ghost Megaship the Adamastor appeared in the Chukchan system during a special event staged for Halloween last year and led the community on a paper trail that eventually told the story of its doomed mission and the fate of its crew after encountering the Thargoids 200 years ago in the Colsack Nebula. We reported last week that the mystery surrounding the 200 year old long dead ship had sprung to life again recently when a new signal was detected by a comms beacon found on board the ill-fated vessel. The information obtained from that comms beacon led to a further trail this week that involved encrypted texts, cipher keys, more listening posts and light years of travel and after days of work from multiple sections of the community working together the puzzle was finally unlocked and a discovery of an often requested feature which I won't spoil here was made. I've linked in the video description to a complete method and solution for the mystery that was posted by the website Remlok Industries. It's worth a look as if nothing else it demonstrates quite dramatically the level of work required to unlock one of these things now. Frontier clearly finding their feet with this kind of stuff and making the puzzles much tougher were acquiring much more effort than the usual brute force searching that the community had proven itself to be so adept at. So a new bar has been set, Frontier had said that these puzzles would be getting tougher and they weren't kidding where normally the searches were being brute-forced in three to four hours we've now had some serious code breaking skills required from multiple individuals to get to the candy at the end. Is that the end of the Adamastor trail? Only time will tell for sure but I have a feeling we maybe haven't heard the last of the dark corporation shenanigans that led to the loss of the ship with all hands and where this stuff goes with the launch of Odyssey will be fascinating indeed. In a surprise move on Tuesday Frontier announced they'd be introducing a new member of the community team on that afternoon's live stream. It's an understandable move as the team's responsibilities are undoubtedly growing exponentially with the ramp up in a leak dangerous activity as the Odyssey Alpha proceeds and the launch of the full expansion gets closer and closer. The introduction of a new team member was not however the big surprise of the night the identity of the new team member was. In a staged panel cut panel down moment a now familiar panel fell away from our live stream screens to reveal none other than the community favorite Sally Morgan Moore. If you're perhaps fairly new to the game and don't know Sally she actually left Frontier towers around a year and a half ago after working at the company for around three years. Among her achievements at Frontier she's largely credited with the introduction of the camera suite into the game a feature which has gone on to spawn a whole sub community of astrophotographers and videographers within the game. It's almost become another career choice in Elite all of its own indeed where it not for the camera suite and in particular Commander Rini's discovery of it this very channel would undoubtedly not be what it is today. During her previous tenure with the company Sally served as product manager for Elite Dangerous but was a regular on community live streams. It's fantastic to see Sally rejoining the Elite Dangerous team alongside Arthur, Bruce, Paul and Zack and at such a crucial time in the game's life a heartfelt welcome home Sally from everyone here. Just a real quick public service announcement tickets for this year's LaveCon the annual Elite themed fan convention at the Sedgebrook Hall Hotel in Northamptonshire in the UK and now on sale running over the weekend from the second to the fourth of July. Suffice to say given the current global conditions there's high hopes that the convention can go ahead this year as planned all being well Rini and I will be there on the Saturday and we both look forward to seeing you there. And finally this week phase three of the Odyssey Alpha test launched with the introduction of the Artemis suit the bio scanner and a host of changes to the exploration system in the game. Despite exploration being one of the larger sides to Elite gameplay at this point in the Odyssey Alpha it was probably the element that we knew the least about and expectations for what had become known in the community as the plant gun were high. The patch to the Alpha arrived on Thursday afternoon UK time and sees the bubble of exploration space expand to some 50 light years and as well as introducing the Artemis suit phase three also brings a new system integrated into the surface scanner for identifying points of potential biological interest and the new first footfall experience where you can get your commanders one small step moment for being the first to walk on a given planetary surface. The patch also shipped with a raft of fixes for phase two whilst also bringing a list of known bugs all of its own I've linked to frontiers notes on those in the description below so be sure to check those out if you haven't already and you're heading into the Alpha. Far and away one of the most anticipated features of this phase was the handheld bio scanner sampling tool that ships by default with the Artemis exploration suit and so far at least it's proven to be one of the most controversial things about the Alpha. For the uninitiated here's how the bio scanning gameplay loop currently works. Surface scanning a candidate world from orbit will present you with a sort of EM spectrum style heat map that shows where life is likely present on the surface as opposed to the definite bio POIs that currently appear in the game. Upon landing and locating the life it's time to pull out the bio sampler. Triggering the device sends out a pulse similar in nature to the pulse used when searching for mining materials in asteroid or rings. For a short period the surrounding life will be shown in different color hues that indicate whether that plant will provide a good genetic sample. Once you've identified a plant you'd like to sample you then begin a mini game where concentric ring patterns on screen must be lined up as they rotate. Every time you land a successful ring line up the next ring decreases in size but increases in speed. If you fail at any section of the game then it resets to the previous ring and you need to do that ring again to proceed. This is where the first controversy occurs. The ring matching mini game is very twitch reaction based gameplay something that puts it completely at odds with the entirety of the rest of the exploration game loop. Exploration has been all about the science and all about using instruments and twiddling dials to get the results you're looking for and it still is until you get to the very last step in the process when it becomes a game about reaction times. Traditionally exploration has always appealed to the less twitch orientated portions of the elite dangerous community and now this revamp of the biological science section of their game loop is being directed very much at a reactions based success criteria. The second conversation happening around the biosampling game loop revolves around the amount of distance required to get one good sample. In order to get a good sample of a plant you need to find three biodiverse examples of it. The scanner enables that just fine but upon taking your first sample successfully that's the ring game I just described. Your hand sampler is then locked into that particular form of life. If you then sample another different form of life then the sample you've just got is completely erased in favour of the new form. We've heard at least one example of a commander aiming their scanner skyward whilst walking in order to not accidentally erase their hard fought sample collecting. These new forms of life in elite are currently clustered together in a much more realistic way than the old style in the current game where you just had isolated patches of one type of life. In Odyssey you can get three or four different types of life clustered together. If you wanted to sample all four for example you'd need to walk through the patch of life looking to sample just one type of life then once you had three samples you could move on to the next and do three of those and then the next and do three of those. The problem is that this process will see you walking backwards and forwards across the same patch of planet over and over to make sure you get all the samples before you can move forward. Imagine you're standing in a huge field full of daisies, daffodils, frogs and antelopes. You'd like to pick three perfect examples of each species, daisies, daffodils, frogs and antelopes but having picked a perfect daisy first you'll have to walk through miles of daffodils, frogs and antelopes ignoring them to get to the next perfect daisy. Rinse and repeat until you've got your three perfect daisies and then walk back through the same patch of field collecting frogs ignoring all the perfect daffodils and antelopes and so on. Possibly bad example but hopefully you get what I mean. There are further issues around the tool being discussed as well not least of which is the choice of colors being used in the scanning loop. Some visually impaired commanders for example weren't aware that the concentric rings had different colors associated with them. Suffice to say the introduction of the system yesterday has generated no small amount of feedback but that's okay. This is what the alpha test is for and if you're a fan or not of the daisy frog daffodil concentric rings sampling gun then now is the time to make your voice heard. And Frontier are listening to ideas on how to improve the odyssey experience and make it better. Just last week there was plenty of feedback asking for suit and weapon loadouts to be equipable in the station as opposed to just in your SRV or ship and that has now been changed. You can switch loadouts whilst at a console in a starport social hub. You'll find links in the description below this video to where you can add your voice to the conversation about the new features in odyssey. So how have you found your odyssey experience so far? Have you tried the Artemis suit yet or are you completely absorbed with scouring the galaxy looking for long lost mega ships? 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.