 This is Witchbase news for Friday the 1st of March 2024, I'm CMDR Buur In a Titan sized Elite Dangerous news this week, some Caustic restrictions are lifted and the devs clip the glaives wings. In the latest Frontier Unlocked, Fdev punches hard with yet more details on what to expect in 2024 and the Thargoid War enters the endgame as the community begins its Titanic assault on Taranis. You know how this bit goes, please like, subscribe and ding that little bell so that YouTube shows you all our content and if you'd like to directly help our work here at the Buur Pit you can also support us through Patreon, links to that and everything else are in the description below. Just a quick note, today's video contains spoiler information and footage from the current in-game events throughout, if you're sensitive to that please stop watching now. In a surprise move late yesterday, Frontier suddenly announced that they had made some unexpected changes to the systems driving the ongoing war with the Thargoids which is now reaching its peak. Ever since the release of the Thargoid pulse neutraliser, commanders have been able to pierce the caustic clouds of a Titan maelstrom and find themselves face to face with an active Thargoid Titan. These colossal alien starships are, aside from planets, amongst the biggest and arguably the most impressive objects in the game. Accessing the neutraliser itself and the necessary caustic sinks needed to negate the effects of the maelstrom cloud were locked behind the requirement to gather materials from the Thargoids and the clouds themselves. All very good if you're comfortable or even enjoy those most extreme and challenging of environments but honestly a complete showstopper if you don't. All this is further locked behind the necessity to traverse Thargoid space itself to reach the maelstroms, space that is controlled by all manner of Thargoid vessels but in particular the loathsome glaive hunters, a Thargoid unit whose sole reason for being is to hold you down, prevent you from jumping or even running away and then slowly destroy your ship. Again if you're comfortable with Thargoid combat killing a glaive is a largely trivial issue, if you're not it can be a complete showstopper making even accessing Thargoid space impossible. No Titan touring for you then commander. All that changed however yesterday in what is clearly a significant effort to encourage all commanders to experience and see the pinnacle of the Thargoid war experience, front here not only stopped glaives from hyper or interdicting incoming commanders but they also removed the material gathering requirement from the pulse neutraliser and the caustic sink modules and just like that just about anyone can now at the very least visit a maelstrom and its inhabiting Titan mothership. I've put some thoughts about this at the end of this week's show so I won't harp on about it here, all I will say is in my opinion this change is long overdue and I can't recommend visiting a Thargoid Titan enough, it's still dangerous but it's also now largely achievable for just about anyone. The release of update 18 earlier this week brought with it the Guardian Nanite torpedo and with the arrival of the torpedo we now finally after over a year of war have the means to destroy a Thargoid Titan mothership. As you can imagine the availability of the weapon was immediately followed by assaults on multiple titans across the bubble but far from being the titan ending super weapon we perhaps expected the results of the attacks were met with a degree of confusion. Once the nanite infused torpedoes were used on the titans heat management system rather than just destroying the targeted titan they instead cause it to expose the thermal core of the ship on its underside which is something we reported on earlier this week. What wasn't fully understood at that point however was that the exposed core contains eight layers of what are essentially Thargoid hearts that must be collectively wailed upon by the entire community using conventional off the shelf AX weapons in order to do enough damage to eventually hopefully at least destroy the vessel. The status and progress of that assault on a given titan can be seen on the Thargoid war filter of the galaxy map and is represented by a series of concentric rings. Those concentric rings or hearts are now being worn down by a massive single focus community effort. Every time the core is exposed more damage is dealt to it and eventually it retracts into the titan. All that collective damage from across the community is being collated and when damage is done collectively to a given heart it's then destroyed and the next heart is exposed to attack and the cycle continues. As a community we're currently engaged in a massive game wide boss fight and as at this recording it's the titan Taranis that is absorbing the vast majority of the attention. The hearts became tougher to destroy following the thargsday server tick as Taranis took control of another system and a titans damage resistance is linked to the number of systems it controls so progress in the first part of the fight was startlingly quick. It has slowed somewhat now we also believe there might perhaps be some sliders being tweaked at front here to ensure that Taranis lasts into the weekend at least to allow as many people as possible to experience what is happening. Right now in the game. As we've just reported all the kit necessary to assault a titan is now available off the shelf at one of the many Aegis Megaships dotted around the bubble and there are no barriers to acquiring that gear beyond credits that includes the enhanced AX weapons and torpedoes that are ideal and purpose built for the job at hand. SRV specialist galactic stuntman and co-host of lave radio Alec Turner has produced a one-stop quick start infographic guide to getting equipped and taking part in a titan assault. You can see that on screen now and we've also linked to that in the description below this video. Right now Taranis is taking an absolute beating it's difficult to be certain but we think it extremely likely that sometime today or early Saturday UK time the galaxy will see its first titan destroyed. The second edition of Frontier's newly reworked monthly live stream series Frontier Unlocked aired on Twitch and YouTube this week and as was the case with the premiere show last month Elite Dangerous was very much the closing headline act. FDF's head of community PR and comms Arthur told me was joined on the sofas by Zach Cochran the former community manager on Elite Dangerous and now the junior product manager for the game. The pair talked at length about the happenings in the game right now and what's coming in the future and there were a few interesting easily missed subtleties to the conversation that will walk through for you now in case you missed it. The pair started by talking about the recently deployed update and the opening moments of the assault against the Thargoid Titans that have besieged the bubble. They were both also keen to point out however that update 18 was not just about the Titans and that it also introduces more narrative elements that will be introduced in the coming weeks and months. They did make a very solid point of stating that the fight right now was very much with the Titan Taranis and that as a community we should focus for now at least on hammering Taranis. For future Titan Assaults the team said that cleaning out the systems around the Titans first will make the assault on the Titan itself much easier and that very much ties in with observations the community has made regarding the individual Titan's defensive levels which is now shown on the galaxy map and the number of systems that each Titan controls. As part of the discussion about the assault on Taranis the team did announce that there will be a series of in-game rewards available for participating in Titan Assaults and dealing damage to the Titan Hearts. We've linked to the forum post that goes into the full details of those rewards and it is worth looking at. As well as various tiers of arcs rewards for each Titan kill you participate in you will receive a ship kit, paint job and decal. It appears that the decal specifically will be reflective of how many individual Titan kills you've participated in and that the paint jobs are also unique to each Titan kill. The forum post says that there will be a total of 8 to earn. On the live stream however there was an exchange between Zack and Arthur that sought to clarify the amount of skins available versus the amount of Titans. The direct implication from the exchange seemed to imply that perhaps we might not be able to collect 8 paint jobs and that therefore we can't kill all 8 Titans. Here's the exchange as it happened on the stream see what you think. We are going to work on giving out a sort of different paint job every time that someone kills a Titan so you'll get a different paint job for I believe there's 8 of them right now. I think so yeah. Oh Titans, you're talking about paint jobs. Titans I'm talking about. As if to underline our suspicions Arthur also mentions the unique decal they're creating which is reflective of the number of Titan kills and when referencing that decal he is very cautious to underline if humanity does ever manage to wipe out all Titans and you could have a decal that has 8 Titan kills on it this could of course be a reflection of FDF wanting to maintain the illusion of implied peril that the bubble is in they are storytellers and the dungeon masters here after all again here's the clip see what you think depending on how many Titans you've been involved in destruction and so if you are if we if humanity ever does manage to wipe out all 8 you could have a decal which is incredibly unique. On the subject of the python mark 2 there was some new work in progress footage of the ship shown in game for the first time and the first tentative details of hardpoint and utility slot loadouts were also released on the stream those details we covered in our midweek video on Wednesday which you'll find linked on screen now if you haven't seen it already the team also let it be known that the python mark 2's arrival in the game is directly linked to the current narrative and so working through of that narrative will result in the ships release and the only way we can progress the narrative right now is dealing with the Titan issue so it looks like the ship might well be linked to the end of the Thargoid war we are wondering here if the pythons currently top secret feature that we discussed earlier in this week is somehow linked to captured Thargoid technology at the end of the war and on the subject of after the war the team made specific mention to shut down any rumors or speculation about when the python mark 2 power play 2 or the mysterious other brand new feature coming to a leak dangerous that fdev announced last month will arrive promising again it is all happening this year at one point in the stream Arthur and Zack did reveal how much of the galaxy has so far been explored by commanders this is something that happens every year generally and there's nothing particularly unusual in that the number is also usually in the grand scheme of things hilariously low this year it is 0.06 percent no huge surprises there it's a big galaxy what was intriguing however was what Arthur said as part of the number reveal oh all right well there you go 0.06 percent of the galaxy has actually been explored in ten years actually that's a phenomenal well yeah it's a normal amount of space considering it's a one-to-one scale of the galaxy so well well done oh seven commanders particular commanders like Picard is out there on his nine-year mission he counts 0.0000001% of that so well done for that but and keep going commanders plenty to explore and more reasons do so coming up in case do you miss that he said commanders planning to explore and more reasons to do so are coming up it's obviously a quick almost off-hand comment but it does perhaps allude to the fact that fdev have exploration in their sights in some regard at least for the future with such a busy year ahead you can bet fdev are keen to get more players into the game and as part of the live stream this week they also announced that a new deluxe edition of Elite Dangerous that comes bundled with Odyssey was being released on Steam at the price point of £21.99 the price of the base game and Odyssey individually has also been adjusted to £14.99 and £9.99 respectively it is without a shadow of a doubt a huge year for Elite Dangerous we're now facing the culmination of the Thargoid war a conflict that has evolved and developed for a year and a half this year there are at least four new ships entering the game power play is finally getting its long overdue rework and it seems PVP might similarly be getting the meaning to its existence that it has long craved alongside that power play overhaul and along with all that there is yet still another brand new feature coming to Elite Dangerous that has yet to be revealed having recently been through a financial firestorm Frontier as a company has endured refocused and reforged itself as it stands the communication coming from the company with all things Elite Dangerous at least is exactly what the community has long cried out for we're being told about the game's future we're being told what shape to expect that future to arrive in and when as fans of Elite Dangerous we've all been through an impossibly tough time since the launch of Odyssey but it does seem finally that those challenging times are properly behind us the current events unfolding in the game are for sure not without their challenges but as we've reported fdev have now thankfully finally removed the significant barriers to entry for those events anyone who knows me well enough will tell you in a heartbeat that I'm not a Thargoid guy I don't generally actively seek out the space-based Thargoid conflict experiences what Frontier have achieved by incorporating a fully dynamic Thargoid war into the wider tapestry of Elite is for my credits honestly bold and quite amazing but I've been happy to appreciate it mostly from a distance the pinnacle of the conflict however the maelstrom and the Titan attack experience in my opinion has to be experienced by as many players as possible it is when taken in the context of the wider Elite Dangerous multi-billion star galaxy absolutely jaw-dropping I don't know how long what is happening right now and perhaps more importantly whatever is about to happen next is going to last you might chew through the odd rebuy in the doing but I cannot recommend it enough if you're in or can get to the bubble no YouTube video or stream can truly do it justice and we might not see the like of it ever again once it's finally over did you watch the frontier live stream what did you think of Arthur's comments on exploration and have you joined in the assault on Taranis 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