 This is Witchbase news for Friday the 5th of January 2024, I'm CMDR Buur In Elite Dangerous news this week, a new must have tool for explorers and exobiologists is released. The first great planetary expedition plans an anniversary celebration, there's an excellent roundup of Elite Dangerous in 2023 and are the Alliance lining up for a Thargoid ground war. 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. Five years ago the galaxy's favourite daredevil SRV Keneval Alec Turner was the originator and host of the first great planetary expedition. The first time a group of commanders had circumnavigated an entire planet in SRVs as a weeks long organised event. The target planet was Kume in the Chai Hercules system and this year Alec has begun canvassing to see if any players would be interested in recreating the event for its 5th anniversary in March. The plan is to recreate the event exactly as was terrain and equipment wise and as the arrival of Odyssey significantly changed planetary surfaces forever it will mean firing up the game in legacy mode. This does however have the advantage of running adjacent to the live game meaning your live character will still be available wherever to do whatever. If you're interested in recreating your experiences of the event or perhaps participating for the first time if you missed it 5 years ago then head over to the planetary circumnavigation discord server which you'll find linked below this video. Colin Ford otherwise known as Commander Phoenix Defier of the Lave Radio podcast has published part 1 of his excellent summary of the last year of updates to Elite Dangerous. The first part of the summary covers updates 14 and 15, the arrival of the game's first fully dynamic and emergent Thargoid invasion and the subsequent deployment of the authorous variant of the Interceptor and the Glaive Hunter class vessel into the game. As well as providing a solid summary of the year's content updates Colin also offers some well-reasoned and balanced criticism of the year's updates, most notably its almost complete focus on all things Thargoid and the problems that players had hardcore and casual alike dealing with the unique problems presented by the introduction of systems like the Glaive. It's easy to overlook just how much has been added in what has been one of Elite's more turbulent in-game years but Colin's video does an excellent job of rounding up updates 14 and 15 and I'm very much looking forward to hearing what he has to say about the last two updates of last year in part 2 of the review. You will of course find Colin's video linked in the description below this one. Most large portions of humanity have been on a seasonal and festive yearly break, such trivialities over of no concern to the evading slavering insectoidal hordes of Thargoids massing on the southern borders of the bubble. There was a slight increase in the number of alert systems under threat of invasion over the festive period but it was nothing outside of the usual ebb and flow that particular systems state tends to see. In the run up to the end of this year, the bubble had seen a drop off in the number of actual successful invasions. So much so in fact that for weeks running there were in fact no invasions at all. On one hand that's obviously a positive thing but no invasion also means the gameplay associated with them goes away, most notably station rescues and hauling whilst under fire from Thargoids and the associated AX gameplay. Fortunately, or indeed unfortunately depending on where you stand personally, the invasion level upped again slightly over the Christmas period ensuring that the aforementioned gameplay is now an option again. Whilst the total number of Thargoid controlled systems has increased again of late, up to 323 from its previous low of 288, it is still nowhere near its all time high of 1186 from May this year, 6 months after the initial invasion began with the arrival of the first of the 8 player tracked Stargoids which was codenamed Taranis. As the war has progressed so have the options for players to engage in it, one of the more gated of those options has been the extraction of human captive filled bio-storage capsules from the Thargoid Titan mother ships. Whilst the rescues of the millions of captured humans began, the sticky issue of what to do with the recovered and revived individuals began being discussed on the in-game Galnet newsfeed and as of this video at least, the three superpowers Alliance, Federation and Empire have now made their respective positions clear. Whilst the rescued captives had shown largely little to no physical effects from their time inside the hive, there is still the question of whether something has been done to them that we simply can't detect and whether returning these individuals to the general galactic populace can yet be entirely safe, the fear being that they have been unwittingly altered during their incarceration to serve as a Trojan horse in some manner taking human society down from the inside once activated. The Federation and Empire have made their positions abundantly clear and are taking a cautious hardline approach, keeping their rescued citizens in quarantine for the foreseeable future. The Alliance however has opted to be a bit more touchy-feely on the whole issue and has now released its captured citizens. It does seem extremely unlikely that Fdev would go to the lengths that they have to spin out this particular yarn if they had no intention of following it up somehow and so if the returnees are to start randomly hiding all the TV remotes, changing the wifi password, exploding or eating or assimilating their nearest and dearest then it seems it's likely going to happen in Alliance space and if we had our guess it would likely be with the arrival of update 18. Just to a fortuitously timed tweet from Canon Research over the holiday period, we discovered a third party tool aimed squarely at the exobiology community in the game just as my own second account character was heading out to start his own exobiology adventure and the tool has in just one week become an absolutely vital must have for me. The tool, called SRV Survey by Commander Greening 2001 provides extra on-screen HUD elements when a player is near a planet in an SRV on foot or in a ship. The extra HUD information provides tracking on the latest organic scan showing in an easy to read diagrammatic form where the last scan was taken and how far away from that particular scan you need to be to gain sufficient genetic diversity to make your next scan for that item. The tool also estimates how much each scan is worth and keeps track of what life forms you've scanned on a planet and what ones you haven't. The tool also provides aiming guidance towards specific latitude and longitude coordinates on a planet's surface and further can track visited areas and the locations of items within guardian ruins and structures and assist with detailed surveys of guardian sites as well as providing a sortable list of all known guardian sites. I've only touched on just some of the functionality that the tool has so check out the link in the video description to get the full rundown of what else the tool provides if you're interested. Overall for my own exploration and exobio I've been running SRV Survey alongside Elite Observatory and found it to be an excellent complimentary companion app and I now wouldn't consider exploring without having it running highly recommended. Are you planning on driving round an entire planet? What was your favorite update from last year and what would you like to see added in the year ahead? 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.