 This is Witchspace news for Friday the 29th of January 2021. I'm CMDR Buur. In this weeks news, Frontier places a new mystery into the game. This weeks Q&A from Frontier, the Fuel Rats new milestone and the Odyssey expedition is open for signups. If you enjoyed this video remember to hit like and subscribe and if you'd like to help support the work of this channel you'll also find us on Patreon, links to everything you need are in the description below. On the Supercruise news livestream on Tuesday this week, Frontier announced that a new mystery for Commanders to solve was being placed into the game. Invoking memories of the Halloween 2020 Adamastor mystery, the team at Frontier advised the community to keep a watchful eye on transmissions from the Pilots Federation and that this mystery would be much harder to solve than the Adamastor event. Challenge accepted. Earlier in the week Frontier had tweeted a picture of two mega ships flying side by side and upon closer inspection it became apparent that the two mega ships appeared to be dredgers. Dredger ships are large material consuming vessels that suck in material at the front and crunch it down into constituent material parts inside, literally large space varying crushing machines. They appeared in the beta version of the Elite Dangerous Horizons expansion but never made it into the full game and suddenly Frontier are tweeting pictures of them and telling us a new mystery is being inserted into the game. Tin foil hat firmly in place, let's do this. From the mention on Supercruise news we knew the mystery was going live on the regular Thursday tick and sure enough around the time that CG's normally kick in a Galnet article appeared in game as well as a tweet detailing a partially received distress signal that appeared to emanate from within an 18 light year bubble of the system where the signal was picked up. So now we have a distress signal and a search area to work in but nothing more. The tweet contained an image of a ship traveling near what appeared to be debris in a system with a rich metal content world orbiting very close to its parent star. Here at the pit at least we took that as a clue and started searching systems matching that criteria inside the given search zone. From the looking about that we've done since yesterday it appears that Reddit and the official forums at the very least took a very different approach and simply brute forced the search of every single system in an 80 light year bubble. One source that we've seen put up a spreadsheet that detailed just under 5000 systems that in theory at least needed to be searched. The website Steam Charts tracks player numbers via the Steam platform on PC. Yesterday at the peak of activity just on PC and just via Steam there were over 11,000 people playing Elite Dangerous. If just 10% of those people were engaged in the search then that's 1100 people searching that's less than 5 systems each on just one subsection of one gaming platform. Suffice to say then the search didn't take long and without giving you spoilers the mystery of who sent the distress signal and why they were in distress was solved in just a few hours with a simple brute force search. It later transpired that the image that was used in the tweet was actually a marketing image from 2017 and wasn't related in any way whatsoever to the mystery at hand. Neither it seems was the dredger image tweeted earlier in the week. The problem with the quickly solved mystery event yesterday was two fold then. The community is hungry for new content in Elite a game that they love and will latch on to anything new in the game with the tenacity of a hungry bear. There's also quite a lot of us what was blindingly apparent yesterday and indeed at the previous Adamastor event was that as a community we are very very good at crowdsourcing a simple blanket search. So there it is. I won't spoil what was found but I will say that it was in a singular system that we were looking for. The name of that system you'll find in the description below this video. The thing that we were searching for does contain some text logs that do contain some new law and that law ties into very much the current events and if you're following those events they are worth seeking out. I have also put a link to the logs themselves below if you'd rather just read them without all the space travel. As promised Frontier released a new Odyssey themed questions and answers post to the forums today this time the Q&A was directed specifically at the subject of ships and vehicles within the new expansion. Whilst taken from questions from the community the Q&A is still very light on any real meat and Frontier are clearly being very strategic still in what they're choosing to answer at this stage. The one significant nugget we did garner from the Q&A was that multi-crew commanders will now at last be able to use the SRV of a ship that they're riding in. Whether this means the whole multi-crew system is being given a revamp we don't yet know but the SRV feature will be really good to see. There was a question asked about ship launched anti-personnel and anti-vehicle weapons. The answer that came from Frontier only appeared to answer the anti-personnel issue and didn't address the anti-vehicular portion of the question. So I've reached out to Frontier for some more clarification there as currently in the game there isn't a way of directly targeting, tracking and attacking installations or vehicles in a meaningful way from a ship apart from an extreme close range blunt force approach. They did also confirm in the answers that ships will need to land before commanders can leave the ship meaning we won't be seeing any combat drop style deployments and Frontier confirmed that there are no engineering plans for the SRV. We're assuming that means the current SRV in the game as Frontier have yet made no mention of any other new surface vehicles. If you want to read up on the answers Frontier gave we've linked to the post in the description below. The player run emergency rescue service the Fuel Rats made their 100,000th rescue this week and celebrated with a competition to create a piece of art commemorating the milestone. The fantastic winning piece by OSSA Major is linked in the description below and Professor Solace sends word this week that the Odyssey Galactic Expedition is currently taking sign-ups for their journey from the bubble to colonia to Beagle Point and back again if you've ever fancied that well trodden route but didn't want to go it alone. Leaving on the 20th of February the expedition will be returning sometime in August and whilst all platforms are welcome one of its aims is to give console commanders something positive to focus on in the game whilst they wait for the Odyssey expansion to drop. You can sign up via their discord server which is linked 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