 If you've ever struggled with the gathering of materials for engineering your ship in Elite Dangerous then it looks like that situation may be about to improve and there's an opportunity for you to influence how this side of the game could change. To make sure you don't miss any of our videos hit like and subscribe, remember to click the bell icon and select all notifications and to help directly support this channel you can also join our Patreon via the link in the video description. In a surprise move the Frontier Elite Dangerous Community Team reached out to the player base in an extensive forum post and posited 7 possible ideas to improve the material gathering and engineering experience in ships. The ship based engineering system and in particular the gathering of materials to affect those engineering upgrades has often been the subject of extensive and vociferous complaints from the community with words like grind being thrown around fairly liberally. It's long been such a cause for complaint that the system has become the poster child for everything detractors of the game feel is wrong with it. When asked commanders talking about what they don't like about Elite Dangerous will almost always default to talking about what they feel is the grindy nature of gathering materials for the often necessary upgrades. If you're fairly new to the game then you may not be aware that the system present in the game at the moment is actually considered to be a significant improvement on what the engineering system originally shipped with. Gathering one material these days will yield 3 of that material by the time it reaches your material storage. Originally one gathered meant one stored and tales of how those using the precious oh so rare materials on a module would yield random results in any direction meaning you could end up actually making the engineered module perform worse yes really will likely trigger just about any commanders of the old guard. These days whilst the engineering system has undoubtedly improved given the sheer weight of the public opinion on its issues over such a long period you'd be hard pushed to argue that there wasn't room for more improvement to be made and that those improvements are perhaps long overdue. Frontier started revisiting some of its core horizons level gameplay systems some significant time before Odyssey launched looking at and improving the payouts from systems like combat bonds and anti-xeno operations to name but 2 and now it's finally time for engineering to get a look in. The post on the forums from senior community manager Bruce Garrido pictures several ideas and asks the community to feed back on those ideas though primarily focused on the area of material gathering itself although there is one suggestion from Frontier regarding the engineering process. So what changes are being proposed? The first suggestion focuses on improving the availability and rate at which materials of grade 1 to 3 are gathered suggesting that both the rate and availability should be increased to decrease the amount of higher grade mats that are traded in to gather these lesser materials. A suggestion is also made around the number of higher grade materials gathered in a given instance with the question being asked should that number be increased. Frontier are also asking what materials specifically tied to the rarer BGS states commanders are finding harder to locate and asking what materials the player base feels should be made more readily discoverable. And they're also asking the slightly harder to quantify estimates of how long it takes to earn a given engineering module. The post then moves into some of its more intriguing and dare I say exciting suggestions. Frontier is pitching for feedback on the idea of unique repeatable missions offered by the engineers themselves that would reward the materials needed for that given engineers upgrades. But wait it gets better and this is far and away my favourite suggestion. Frontier are kicking around the idea of allowing materials to be exchanged for items that are not obtainable via the games commodity markets. The specific examples given being exploration data, bounty vouchers, void opals and thargoid hearts. Enabling such a system would in theory allow all commanders to earn the materials they need for an upgrade they desire via a gameplay mechanic that suits their particular playstyle. Reading that suggestion in particular out loud in the burpit homestead produced an audible gasp of approval from all those gathered. The final suggestion on the post is the only one that doesn't concern itself with material gathering specifically, Frontier clearly feeling that matte gathering itself is predominantly where most of the issues lie. The devs are postulating the idea of changing the amount of materials for any given tier of upgrade to be a specific cost rather than the current system of there always being an improvement but sometimes only very small incremental improvement with it, somewhat at the whim of the deities of RNG. If the material gathering was made significantly more accessible then I don't personally see this last problem being one that desperately needs a resolution as it would in theory at least be much more common for players to have mats going spare. With that said personally I'd prefer a definite goal to hit with a number on it rather than a range with the required mats landing somewhere in that range. Those last few pixels sometimes left at the top of an upgrade when you run out of mats and time are in my opinion an unnecessary annoyance, better to just have a number to aim for and be done with it. I'm not personally one of the great engineers in the game, the sheer time sink involved for me personally involved in obtaining mats has meant that whilst I've engineered a couple of ships fully and tinkered here and there with a couple of others I've never really been able to fully experiment with the system and get heavily into building specific ships for specific jobs and that's always been a regret for me. As a result my own admittedly biased opinion about everything FDV is proposing is basically yes all of it please with whistles on. I struggle to imagine a scenario where anyone who has played Elite Dangerous and messed with the engineering system on any level wouldn't agree to making the material gathering more accessible but I'm acutely aware that I'm not every man and of course opinions vary. The opportunity that is being presented to us here as a community is a huge one. As I've mentioned the engineering system and in particular the gathering of the necessary materials is one of the biggest single complaints that is directed at Elite Dangerous and justifiably so. Frontier have often been accused in the past of not listening to their player base again justifiably so but given the changes that we've seen to Horizon's level content based off of these feedback requests in recent times I would suggest now that they are listening to their community's feedback and there has therefore never been a better opportunity for you to get your voice heard and being as it's currently entirely ship focused these proposed changes are relevant to all commanders no matter what version of the game you are playing be it Elite Dangerous Odyssey or Elite Dangerous Horizons. Frontier have said that they've heard the feedback about engineering and material gathering for Elite Dangerous Odyssey specifically but as with the previous rebalance feedback requests they've done they are handling them one subject at a time. I've linked to the forum post below do check it out. So does the fact that Frontier are even talking about these changes give you hope that the engineering system will become more accessible to more commanders do you even engage with engineering yourself let us know in the comments below that's it for now thanks very much for watching if you enjoyed this video consider subscribing to the channel and maybe take a look at one of our other videos linked on screen right now.