 This is Witchface News for Friday the 19th of May 2023. In elite dangerous news this week, caustic sinks are engineerable again, Thargoid scouts come off the caffeine and more fixes arrive in the latest patch, the fdev livestream has some juicy tidbits and promises a sneak peek at update 16 and there's a fascinating stealth change which could significantly impact on foot mat gathering and anarchy factions. As always if you enjoy our videos please do hit the like button and if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and click the bell so you don't miss any of our elite dangerous content. You can also join our Patreon if you'd like to help directly support our work, links to that and everything else are below. Frontier extended the regular server bounce and expected downtime this week in order to also deploy a patch to update 15 fixing a few issues that had surfaced following last weeks unlocking of the tightened Thargoid vessels at the centre of the maelstroms. As you'd expect there are a number of fixes mentioned in Sally's patch notes which I've linked to below this video but here's a quick rundown of the bigger headliners in case you missed it. In elements the material needed as part of the recipe to unlock caustic sink launchers have now been added to the loot table of caustic generators within the maelstroms. Unintentionally the material was only previously available from killing Thargoid scouts and interceptors meaning Thargoid combat was a necessity to obtain them. This issue has now been corrected and the material can now be gathered from the debris left behind by exploded Thargoid caustic generator mechanisms in the clouds surrounding the titans. On the subject of caustic sinks prior to update 15 the sinks could be engineered in exactly the same way as heat sinks, same blueprints, same engineers. Whether this was intended behaviour or not is unclear but when the sinks got reclassified as experimental equipment with update 15 the ability went away. That ability has now been restored with the update of 15.01 and so you are once again free to engineer some extra ammo into them, a highly recommended action by the way if you haven't done it already. The familiar Thargoid scouts got unintentionally amped up and super-hitty with update 15. As of Thursday's fix they've been returned to their previously still very aggressive but not quite so killy nature making encounters with them eminently more survivable. And on the system map the stacking of multiple fleet carrier icons feature that was introduced with update 15 is now working as advertised tidying up the system map significantly and making the interrogation of a given fleet carriers available services eminently more doable. As I mentioned there's a bunch of other fixes that came along with the patch and as always those patch notes are linked below. Yesterday evening UK time Frontier hosted their now monthly frameshift live livestream you may remember that the new cadence of livestreams to a monthly format was announced on the last show one month ago and yesterday's stream was the premiere of the ever so slightly revamped new format. One of the reasons for the change in the show's rhythm was to allow it to be more content rich and be somewhat more of an event and that new ethos was very apparent in last night's show hosted by community managers Sally Morgan Moore and Arthur Tolmey. Whilst some segments of the show will be familiar from the previously bi-weekly offering that's to say super cruise news roundups stellar screenshots and community creations etc the show last night as well as premiering a new seasonal paint job obtainable via twitch drops also featured two competitions to win gaming hardware in the form of an Elgato Stream Deck XL which acts as a very nice button box for elite dangerous if you don't count yourself amongst the streaming fraternity and a Corsair HS60 headset that features the delivery of actual shaking haptic feedback direct to your noggin during gameplay. The stream also featured a compilation video Fdev had created showing clips of various streamer's reactions to the Thargoid Titan Vessels from update 15's launch day I've linked to that below if you've not seen it. But the main event was definitely not one but two developer guests visiting the live stream to talk about their work on update 15 those guests were designer Curtis and senior audio designer Robin. Curtis who also made his first appearance on a frontier live stream on last month's show spoke about the challenges of designing the maelstrom and titan experiences and Robin spoke about the music references he used when creating the audio scape for the titans even drawing inspiration from other video games citing the horror sci-fi game Dead Space as an example Robin also brought along audio examples of the music created for the titans and both spoke about the collaborative process that exists between gameplay design and audio and how that pipeline works day to day. Both developers also spoke about seeing players reactions online live on live streams once the update was available and what it's like to work on something for such a long time and then finally see it in the hands of players for the first time. It's always worth listening to the now semi regular developer interviews from frontier and I've linked to the start of that conversation below on youtube if you want to cut up with it yourself. As part of the overall conversation yesterday there were a few nuggets of information that are absolutely worth underlining and highlighting. Whilst it was recently confirmed by frontier that the thargoid surface sites we've become used to are huge crashed thargoid vessels that are being disassembled by the thargoid scavenger drones present there the team did make mention last night that those sites whilst similar to the titans we now see active are not themselves the same class of titan vessel. The titan vessels in the maelstrom share some obvious design and aesthetic similarities but they are in fact 3 times the size of the surface vessels. Quite what the difference is between the ships beyond size is still an unknown but when we finally enter the titan ships it's likely that what we'll find inside will be markedly different to what we see currently wrecked on planet surfaces. There's been some speculation amongst the community about the exact nature of the electromagnetic toroidal event that periodically occurs when interacting with a thargoid titan vessel. We ourselves speculated that it represented the start of the EM pushback pulse that players experience when approaching through the caustic clouds but frontier did appear to confirm last night that the effect is in fact a direct result of player interference in the titan describing its appearance as happening when the titan was grumpy or upset so it does for the moment at least appear to be a defensive measure of some type. I'd suggest perhaps more science is needed to determine precisely what is triggering the event. It's inevitable with any release into a live service game that the player base immediately wants to know what's in the next update and when it's arriving. It appears that answer may be coming sooner than perhaps some of us might have suspected. During last night's live stream Arthur mentioned that for the next scheduled live stream on the 15th of June the plan is to show a sneak peek preview of update 16 to the game and not only that but there's a chance that they may even have an anticipated release date for the update by then. Typically Fdev doesn't talk release dates until quite late in the day when they're fairly confident they can hit that date. This is obviously still game development and things are subject to change but for the team to even be talking about showing update 16 at this point must mean that it can't be that far away. When we know any more we will of course let you know right here. My thanks to commander Syman in our discord server who noticed a significant change to the mission boards this very morning that has important and potentially far reaching consequences for anarchy factions and for commanders who might be struggling to get involved with elites on foot components. If the good commanders observations are correct and indeed not as a result of an unexpected bug then anarchy factions appear to be handing out smuggling missions for ships that can pay rewards in odyssey on foot materials. After Syman brought it to our attention we immediately headed out to see if we could replicate Syman's findings and I can confirm that very quickly we started seeing the same things. Ship based smuggling missions given by anarchy factions from orbital starports and odyssey surface installations some of which include odyssey on foot materials as part of their rewards. As no one appears at least to have noticed this before today we're assuming that this was likely stealth added in 15.01 yesterday but it's obviously entirely possible that it was added last week and no one noticed. Whatever the case this has an important dual pronged implication. Ever since the launch of odyssey one of the best ways to gather large amounts of odyssey materials needed for the engineering of on foot weapons and suits was to raid settlements and steal what you needed from the many cupboards and lockers dotted around the settlement. This act can be accomplished stealthily and without anyone knowing but frankly the most time efficient and I would argue fun way to achieve the same thing is to relieve all the staff at the settlement of their existence and then just take what you need rinse and repeat. In any ordinary settlement this heinous act of completely self serving and glorious mayhem results in a significant notoriety penalty backed up by a bounty of Olympic proportions that comes with its own problems. Many players therefore chose to focus their let's call them attentions on factions in the game based on the principles of anarchy devoid of law and order the killing of whose citizens garner no such penalties. Great for the shopping spree murder hobo commanders but sadly not so great for the factions influence levels and long term progression prospects. Upon the release of odyssey anarchy factions across populated space rapidly found their BGS efforts being utterly devastated as swarms of commanders went on murder and chaos fueled collectathons and despite some quick fix measures from FDev to prevent their complete collapse they've struggled to shore up their influence levels since. If the change that we're seeing this morning is intended behaviour and at the time of recording we have no reason to believe otherwise then commanders will now be able to gather odyssey mats from performing ship based smuggling missions. If you're struggling to get a foothold, no pun intended, in odyssey settlement gameplay then engineering your on foot kit is absolutely the way to significantly improve your chances in just about any situation. The problem with that however is that for the engineering to help fill the gaps in your on foot proficiency you have to participate in on foot shenanigans which is the very thing you're struggling with in the first place. By adding in the opportunity to gather on foot materials via ship based smuggling FDev are now leapfrogging the problem, breaking the vicious self enforcing cycle and allowing those without the on foot proficiency that want to engineer their chances somewhat the opportunity to do so. The added bonus of this is that in order to get those materials players can now perform smuggling operations for anarchy factions doing so positively affects the influence levels of the anarchy faction and negatively affects the influence levels of the faction being subjected to the anarchists I don't care for your rules smuggling activities. It remains to be seen if the change has the desired effects but in theory at least it's a beautiful fix for two problems. Players lacking confidence in the on foot arena that want to gain some on foot materials can do so without having to participate in likely frustrating largely un-engineered on foot gameplay and anarchy factions get a significant leg up from the player base in the battle to not get the stuffing knocked out of their positive influence battles in return. Side note also a brilliant excuse to do some smuggling. For the longest time Odyssey and vanilla Elite Dangerous have sat almost as separate layers of the same game to each other. We have seen some previous small signs of a proper merging of the two and this latest change would seem to be yet another step down that continuing path. Long may it continue. Have you noticed any Odyssey materials as rewards for in-ship gameplay? Were you watching Frontiers livestream with the devs on Thursday and will you now be engineering your caustic sinks again? 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.