 It's been an action dense 5 and a half days since update 14 dropped into the Elite Dangerous Live game and the Thargoids begun their invasion of the largest expanse of human occupied space the bubble. In this video we'll tell you everything we currently understand about how the war system progresses, share some crucial beginner survival tips for entering Thargoids space and give you the latest updates on the community wide effort to push back the bugs. If you enjoy our videos as always please do like, subscribe and ping that notification bell to see all our future content. You can also directly support our work on this channel by joining our Patreon, links to that and everything else are below. When the unidentified Interstellar Anomalies codenamed Taranis, Leigong and Indra arrived they immediately deployed around themselves a huge caustic cloud or maelstrom and began flooding the surrounding star systems with Thargoid vessels. In the opening hours of the war it's fair to say that the player base was somewhat shell shocked but we're a curious bunch nonetheless and many commanders, this one included, headed to the maelstrom systems to investigate our new neighbours. If you're not experienced with the maelstroms or the surrounding space for yourselves then it can be somewhat of a traumatic experience. High predictions into the system are extremely likely and new to update 14 extremely hard but not impossible to fight, interdictions in supercruise by immediately aggressive Thargoids are almost 100% guaranteed. If you enter the maelstrom itself then expect high levels of caustic damage, patrolling Thargoids, explosive caustic mines and something in the middle, that whilst hidden from the player base at the moment doesn't want you getting any closer and if you attempt well suffice to say as things stand you will fail and likely visit the rebuy screen. As we mentioned last week as well as the maelstrom systems there are 4 other new system states that the war has brought with it and if you view the new Thargoid war mode tab in the galaxy map you'll be able to see how many systems contain a maelstrom, how many systems are being affected by that maelstroms presence and what the status of the affected systems is. Nearly all the systems immediately adjacent to the deployed maelstroms are now flagged as Thargoid controlled. When a system is controlled by Thargoids it is completely devoid of human life. All orbital and surface starports are abandoned and completely inaccessible with either active landing pads or blast doors over the mael slots closed preventing access. Suffice to say travel through a Thargoid controlled system is not safe. Intedictions are extremely likely, stopping anywhere in normal space will rapidly be followed up by swarms of various flavours of Thargoid, there's nothing there for us currently best avoid. Throughout from the maelstrom you'll find systems under Thargoid invasion, as the name implies the nasty nettles are in the process of invading these systems and it's here that you'll find the true Thargoid front line and war ranging on various levels throughout the system. The Thargoids appear to be somewhat systematic when attempting to overrun a system and will take the system port by port rather than stretching their resources across the entire system. As such some ports may be shown as damaged and on fire others will be under direct attack and many will appear to be completely normal. Where stations and ports are still active you'll be able to pick up anti Thargoid supply hauling or evacuation missions and completion of any of these missions will help count toward the defence of the station and ultimately the entire system. Further from the maelstrom you'll still find systems that are quite literally being assessed by the Thargoids as potential invasion targets, they are shown on your galaxy map with a status of Thargoid alert. Thargoid activity within these systems is likely to be on the light to non-existent side and again you will find AX missions hauling and evacuation missions if the system has a population. You could also find signal sources within that that contain Thargoid activity of particular interest and non-human signal sources showing a level of threat for. When dropped into these sources have a chance of spawning a Thargoid probe. After a few seconds that probe will be retrieved by an autherus interceptor which by our best estimates at the moment we believe to be a Thargoid reconnaissance asset. Destruction of the autherus is likely to be beneficial to the state of the system lending value to preventing invasion. It also seems logical that stealing or destroying the probe itself would likewise be beneficial when it comes to defending the system but that has yet to be specifically proven or stated. Finally there is a system state of post Thargoid recovery. This system state will show when the Thargoids have been driven from a system and it's likely that it will spawn hauling requirements at any damaged star ports at the very least. It's still early days in the war and as things stand we've obviously not seen a system like this. I'll talk more about what systems to target to make best use of your time in a moment but first I'd like to speak a little about the community reaction to the outbreak of an all out war with the Thargoids. One of the biggest issues when dealing with a large scale metagame like this one we're facing in Elite Dangerous is the dissemination of information into the community and the inherent lack of a cohesive focus when it comes to coordinating community efforts to achieve specific goals. On day one of the war the first and loudest voice in the community to be heard perhaps unsurprisingly was that of the Anti-Xeno initiative. Historically in prior Thargoid skirmishes they have always had the infrastructure and tools in place to coordinate their own community which currently numbers somewhere around 13,500 commanders and focus those resources as a cohesive and extremely effective anti-thargoid force. The AXI very quickly identified and assessed the systems under threat and very efficiently began issuing directives to mobilize their forces. The AXI's defense targets channel in their discord server provides a live feed facility that other discord servers can pick up and mirror and as the rest of the community began to mobilize and organize that feed got picked up and incorporated into other community discord servers assimilation of the wider picture the Burpit discord is one such example. As we've mentioned in our previous videos this new struggle against the Thargoid Swarm is very much attempting to emulate the needs of more conventional warfare and as such actions that benefit the allied forces very much don't just center around combat and nothing else. Logistics and the movement of both goods and people are just as vital to success of the human campaign and very shortly after the AXI began its movements we likewise saw the haulage specialists at Operation Ida and the evacuation pilots of the PDES begin directing and mobilizing. All the actions and feeds of these major player groups are now being amalgamated and disseminated across multiple existing and established community discord servers as well as being incorporated into a number of dedicated war council style discord servers that house faction and squadron leaders observers and members of the elite dangerous content creation community. The end result of all this is that we're starting to see the flow of information increase alongside player activity as targets and tasks ranging from reconnaissance and science through to hauling, evacuation and attack start to be handed out. There will likely never be a singular commanding presence in the community as there are a great number of individual and faction needs and wants that will always override a greater voice if just on a personal level but we are now starting to see significant beginnings in the areas of organization and coordination to prepare for the eventual strike back. Rather than list every single feed in this video I've placed a number of extremely useful resources such as the community discord servers that I've mentioned and some really useful spread sheeting and forum postings that have sprung up as folks attempt to analyze what the game is trying to do and get that information to commanders hands. On screen you can see the top systems currently being focused by the community and I've also reposted this list in the description below so you can copy and paste a target easily into your galaxy map. If you are thinking of heading into the front line but are perhaps a little nervous about it then here are some really useful tips. The golden rule with forced thargoid encounters is run cold and run fast. Thargoids usually can't see you if your ship has a low heat signature and as is the case with scout craft if they can see you they can be outrun. The best thing I can tell you is if you are hyper or interdicted is don't panic. Immediately drop a heat sink as you continue to boost away from the thargoids with plenty of energy pushed into your engines. As your ship's heat increases to around 10-15% drop further heat sinks as needed and keep boosting away as you charge your frame shift drive. We've seen some limited evidence to suggest that running a cold ship in the region of around 14-17% in supercruise can significantly decrease the amount of interdiction suffered but I stress that this is very limited evidence and we could use more science in that area if anyone fancies testing it out more extensively. If you're new to thargoid combat and you don't yet feel quite ready for the bigger death daisies at the moment I can highly recommend going after scouts in the active conflict zones around still active stations and starports. If you use the off the shelf experimental AX weapons for example there are no unlocks needed and the scouts fold very quickly under sustained fire and there's plenty of them. They explode in a cloud of caustic goop avoid that where possible and they often loose off caustic warhead missiles. If you get the stuff on your hull you can run decontamination limpets or if you're quick enough land at the station or starport to rearm, repair and remove the goop and then get back in the fight. A lightly engineered T10 with 4 AX turrets really does come into its own in this role with some hull reinforcement, judicious use of limpets and a station nearby it's almost unstoppable in the anti scout role. Once you get the hang of it the time on target you'll get around threatened stations is insane and the bigger thargoid ships in the instance will largely leave you alone if you don't bother them too much. There are a number of serious mega ships dotted around the bubble that are selling pre-engineered AX gear in exchange for a small amount of materials. You can see the full shopping list on screen now as well as the locations to find the ships which I'll also post in the description below this video. Of particular interest are the pre-engineered heat sinks that will let you run cold for longer invaluable in thargoid infested territory. I would stress again it is still very early days in all this and 5 more maelstroms are due to arrive in the bubble soon. The next 2 of those are likely to hit on Thursday this week. Those 2 stargoids are codenamed Thor and Raging. The last 3 are expected one week later. What have you been doing in the thargoid war so far? And what ships have you been using? And what tips would you share for thargoid survival? 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.