 Late on Friday, new content arrived in Elite Dangerous associated with the Thargoid Spire sites that landed in the game with update 17. These sites now have new on foot missions attached to them that come with significant grade 5 ship material rewards for their successful completion as well as having a positive effect on the progress of the war against the Thargoids. Just to recap, late on Friday it became apparent that following a Galnet News article, new missions were popping up at the rescue megaships associated with the war that are dotted around the bubble. Professor Palin it seems has found a way to contaminate the Spire refinery compound that is gathered from the tops of the new Thargoid Jack in the Beanstalk like spire structures and is recommending that the contaminant he's created is inserted back into the spires as the spires are servicing the needs of the Thargoid Titan mega vessels in some regard. In order to get hold of the contaminant however there is first a mission from the rescue ships that sends you to a spire site to gather the required materials. Upon delivery of those materials you are gifted a contaminated pineapple like spire refinery mineral. You can then get a mission from the rescue ship to travel back to the spire, insert the past its sell by date space pineapple into the spire and thereby upset the flow of whatever the refinery is doing for the Titan, presumably undermining the Titan in some regard. Whilst the first half of this mission double act rewards a corrupted pineapple, the second half that requires the aforementioned deviled fruit rewards between 6-10 biotech conductors modified embedded firmware or exquisite focus crystals worth noting if you're in the market for those mats or could at least use them to trade at a material trader. It's worth highlighting here as well that this means we have missions picked up in a ship that require on foot actions and that then reward very significant ship based materials for those on foot actions. It's good to see a further meshing of Odyssey and Vanilla Elite Dangerous where the obvious separate layers that the two games inhabited previously had been one of the criticisms levelled at FDF and the feet based Elite expansion. The ever-vigilant Commander Mechon of the AXI has produced a quite excellent and very succinct video called Sabotaging Thargoid Spires Explained in 2 Minutes and unsurprisingly the video does exactly what it says on the tin and you'll find that linked in the description below. As you can imagine Sabotaging Aspire vexes the resident Thargoid somewhat and very much changes the nature of the normally somewhat calmer environments that had recently become authorised kill and credit farming facilities. What the presumably detrimental longer term effects of Spire Sabotage are we've yet to find out. I'm assuming Thursday's Thargs Day Tick may well possibly hold more answers in that regard but we'll have to see. One final point worth noting all this hoo-haar shenanigans and RG Bargy kicked off almost a year ago to the day when the Taranis Stargoid arrived in the bubble closely followed by its seven equally ugly siblings. Upon their arrival each titan took immediate control of multiple systems around themselves. If the current rate of Thargoid attrition around Taranis continues and the AXI in particular seemed determined that it will then excluding any as of yet undiscovered mechanics Taranis will be the first of the eight titans to find itself with no controlled systems within its sphere of influence. What happens after that we of course don't yet know but it seems likely that situation will prompt something at least. As things stand now that we have the tools and the knowledge to free up one Targoid bubble it's only a matter of time before the others are also liberated. And from when we learn any more we will of course let you know right here.