 This is Witchspace News for Friday the 10th of January 2020. I'm CMDR Buur. In this week's news we break down the patch notes for the first bug fix of 2020 and the Thargoids resume their attacks. But is it all it appears to be? Remember to hit like and subscribe and click the little bell icon to get notifications. You can also join us on the Buur Pit Discord server and you can become a supporter of this channel through Patreon or YouTube membership. Links to everything you need are in the description below. Late yesterday afternoon Frontier released patch notes for the first bug fix of 2020 for Elite Dangerous. We're going to take a run through these patch notes now and break down some of the highlights. There are a fair few significant bugs, stability and crash fixes in there, something that is sorely needed in certain areas of the game. If there's something particularly relevant to you and you don't hear it in what follows, check out the patch notes. They're quite extensive so are definitely worth a read. Suffice to say I've linked them below. The first thing of note is that the generation of the arcs virtual currency has had a balance pass with particular mention made for exploration gameplay. We're presuming that this should mean exploration will now generate more arcs than it has previously. Something that will hopefully make the exploration fraternity much happier. The collective voices of Operation Ida I'm sure will be cheering loud as a bug in the background simulation that meant some of their deliveries to Thargoid damaged stations were not being counted and instead disappeared into the ether has apparently been fixed. The background simulation is also having some granularity added to its available faction states. Being added next week are drought, infrastructure failure, terrorism, natural disaster and public holiday. As with the current states, these new states have knock on effects to the systems economy and security state all of which could be counted by state specific player action being taken. As an example, drought will see an economic downturn that can be counted with deliveries of unsurprisingly water and emergency supplies. Terrorism could target prosperous factions and can result in security and influence costs. Counters to the state include legally selling weapons to the system authorities and assisting with bounty hunting in the system. Conflict zones have been given some attention which should now see an end to the problem of empty conflict zones spawning and capital ships opening fire on friendly ships. One of the biggest changes rather than a specific fix is coming to exploration. Currently when scanning a systems planet with the FSS, the generation of geological and biological sites can cause a long delay with the scanner while the sites are generated. As of the patch, the FSS will now instead immediately generate an indication on screen of the likelihood of bio or geo sites being present based on the topography and chemical make up of the planet, either unlikely, likely or very likely. Based on this indicator explorers can then make an informed on the spot decision as to whether the planet is worthy of further investigation. As the indicator system isn't 100% accurate, it's just an educated guess, commanders can wait for the FSS to finish its sweep and have the sites generated as they are currently before deciding whether a body is worthy of a visit. Giving players the best of both worlds. Newly discovered asteroid belts in a system will not now spam messages for each belt individually but will now instead be condensed as much as possible into one message. Some big fixes are coming to multiplayer deep core mining which, if successful, should now make it actually possible to do. Previously it was so bugged certainly every time that we tried it here that it just wasn't usable. Amongst the many fixes, subsurface displacement missiles are fixed in multicrew and seismic charges will no longer instantly detonate in multicrew or wings. Also a speculative fix has been put in place to stop collector limpets damaging ships when retrieving mining fragments. Here at the burp pit and in our discord community there was a collective whoop of joy when we read that the ship rubber banding bug that was introduced in the infamous September patch last year has finally been eliminated. After Tuesday's patch if you have the funds then you should no longer lose that treasured crew member you've been levelling up for a year when your ship is destroyed. What was the most dangerous job in the galaxy now comes with an escape pod and you'll be able to rehire your lost crew member along with your ship rebuy. Anti-Xeno pilots rejoice a raft of fixes are headed your way including the splitting of instances when fighting Thargoids in wings, Thargoid hearts becoming immune to damage and the patchnotes also state that the occurrence of Thargoid heart cycles resetting should be reduced. And finally the markets for high-end minerals are about to be subject to the supply and demand market forces in line with other commodities in the game. This won't mean that the market for void opals, painite and low temperature diamonds etc is about to completely tank but it will mean that players will need to seek out the best price much more than they do at the moment. Forcing some longer journeys in space with heavy cargo holds, something that will no doubt have the pirate fraternity rubbing their hands together. The patch itself will drop on Tuesday the 14th of January around 9 30 am UTC and the servers are expected to be offline for about three hours at least while the patch is applied, it may be longer so we might need to be patient. Going forward Frontier are looking to implement the same system for future patches this year with a short beta test and then a further dev period followed by the actual patch dropping as we've seen this time around which seems a very sensible way to move forward to achieve the best results. It does feel like fdev have listened to the community and whatever your feelings in recent times about Ili particularly after the September update we are finally here, patches are happening, players are included in beaters again and lots of bugs that were getting nearly everyone down are finally being addressed. There's been an understandable amount of negativity around Elite Dangerous in the run-up to 2020, if Frontier can get this right and these bugs continue to be squashed then this year will hopefully continue as positively as it started. We are now less than six months away from the launch of fleet carriers and less than a year away from the 2020 paid content expansion, it's certainly going to be an interesting year. This is just patch number one, there's plenty more to come, has your favourite bug been addressed? Are you encouraged by what you've seen in this patch? We'd love to hear your thoughts. If you saw our Thargoid report video yesterday then you'll already know that the Thargoids renewed their attacks on human outposts in the Pleiades and the Witchhead regions after a five month break following the flattened nose they were given or beak or proboscis or whatever they have during the Enclave Interstellar initiative. It goes without saying that the hordes of AX pilots who have been somewhat kicking their heels in the bubble and surrounding systems have sprung into action like a pack of rabid nuclear mutated ferrets chasing down Earth's last remaining bunny with the AXI player group leading the charge. As of this recording Solano and Asterope have been cleared of the Thargoid menace, leaving three systems in the Witchhead sector and the Atlas system in the Pleiades now vying for their attention. We don't really know why the Thargoid attacks suddenly stopped, it was never really made clear via story or fdev. So right now we don't know if this new wave of attacks represents a new front in the Thargoid advance as the greeny meanies once again attempt to head north into human space or it's just an artificially generated mechanic to create some gameplay. Their sudden reappearance coincides with Frontier announcing this week that the regular community goals and interstellar initiatives have been stood down for six months whilst they concentrate their development efforts on bug fixes, fleet carriers and of course the 2020 paid expansion. We'd like to think that their reemergence is part of some greater plan and that this was always going to happen at this point but with Elite Dangerous you can never really tell. There was no infestation precursor event to these attacks the targeted systems just suddenly went into a state of incursion. As far as we're aware right now it wasn't telegraphed by the Eagle Eye network and there are no infested system states to be cleared before next week's Thargy tick. Where we are this time next week only our future selves will be able to tell us. It's been a busy week what do you make of this flurry of activity? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. That's it for now thanks so 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.