 This is Witchbase news for Friday the 2nd of April 2021, I'm CMDR Buur. In this weeks news, we've some useful tips and nuggets from the Odyssey Alpha, there's a new Odyssey video coming from Frontier, FDev responds regarding Apex shuttles and hordes of murder bots, there's more pre-engineered in-game rewards for this week's community goals, a Netflix documentary features CMDR Michael Holyland and more. If you enjoy this video hit like and subscribe and remember to click the little bell icon and select all notifications as that stuff really helps the channel and if you'd like to further support our work you'll also find us on Patreon, links to everything you need are in the description below. In our various travels through Odyssey and dealings with Frontier we've picked up numerous interesting and useful nuggets of information that have value but don't really fit in a dedicated video of their own so we thought we'd impart them in a nice efficient data package here, so here we go then. It's expected that Phase 2 of the Alpha will start on Wednesday next week the 7th of April and it will shift the focus of testing to feature the Frontline Solutions Surface Combat Zone system. You can deploy to surface based combat zones in Odyssey from a Frontline Solutions NPC piloted dropship using some sort of new dropship deployment method. When you respawn you'll appear in the dropship again ready for deployment. The combat zones are 12 v12 capture point based wars of attrition. Because of the way the backpack and consumable system works it appears that your ships in Elite Dangerous Odyssey may well have a storage capacity system similar in part at least to that of the fleet carrier. Currently in the Odyssey Apex shuttles you can move items between storage in the ship and your commander's backpack inventory. There are 9 new Odyssey specific engineers and engineering bases will have social spaces that rhymes. There's a mercenary elite rank as well as the new exobiologist elite rank. Existing elite ranks are getting an extra prestige tier added to them. The maverick mercenary suit comes in 3 flavours bronze, silver and gold. Extra tiers can be unlocked somehow. If you wander far enough away from a settlement the apex shuttles will pick you up in the wilderness away from the gunfire rather than on the landing pad. Around 500 to 700 meters appears to be the sweet spot but further testing is required. You can manage your suit loadouts at any terminal in a station or starport but you can only change the loadout you have on a ship or SRV. Arthur said on stream this week that he would like to see emotes in the game. Apex shuttles can't be interdicted. The Apex adders feature 6 seats inside them and Arthur has said on stream that multiple commanders in a shuttle is likely on the way. We find it curious that shuttles had 6 seats in them but that to the best of our knowledge at least currently teams like wings are only 4 players max and combat zones battles of 12v12. Dare we dream that team sizes at the very least are being increased and that will be able to carry more than 3 people in something the size of an anaconda time will tell. Ship models in odyssey appear to have been upgraded and improved at the very least. Wings are now called teams and the team beacon is on by default. Ships now feature flashing beacon and appropriate red and green navigation lights. The current alpha planetary surface details like mountains and canyons are not final. The galaxy map bookmark system has had a serious makeover and has had significant functionality added to it. The developers are interested in looking at proximity based voice chat for odyssey in the future. There are 15 new genus types of biological life coming each has multiple subspecies associated with it they are placed by appropriate planetary conditions and some are locked to specific galactic regions. You will be able to buy pre-engineered or modified weapons these are rare however. None of the mods to a weapons stats are RNG based in theory you can bypass any engineering path by finding one of these weapons for sale. The rumours section of the codex will still be present but it's expected that it will be used as a fallback position and likely won't be needed due to improvements in the exploration and discovery system. So that's what we've managed to garner in the last few weeks if you have any tips tricks or pieces of useful information to share be sure to drop them in the comments below. Elsewhere in odyssey news this week Arthur mentioned on the Thursday live stream that a new video asset was in the works at frontier detailing the front line solutions combat zone system which as we've just mentioned is one of the focuses of phase 2 of the alpha which is expected to start next week and frontier responded in a forum post this week to the ongoing feedback regarding the odyssey alpha in particular they focused on the much mentioned super cruise travel times for the current system we're locked into and the murder bot nature of the NPCs present at some installations and how it often doesn't tally to the threat level indicator of the mission. In the issue of super cruise travel times they pointed out that the system conditions we are currently locked to will be exacerbating the issue and that in the full game it won't be nearly so much of an issue at all but they are also looking at possibly addressing the default starter station position to be deeper into the system which will reduce the travel time to the vast majority of planets. They've also stated that a planned feature going forward is to have the distance to target displayed on the mission briefing meaning players themselves can easier filter the missions that they choose to take and on the subject of the hordes of NPC murder bots the issue of how and why threat levels for missions are being incorrectly handled is being investigated and changes are expected in a future update. A new video game based documentary launched onto Netflix this week and as part of its roundup of video game culture stories it featured Commander Michael Holyland who discovered Elite Dangerous while fighting leukemia in hospital. The 15 year old commander lost his battle in May of 2019 but not before rising to prominence within the Elite community. Michael's story and what happened in his final hours is nothing short of extraordinary. The documentary features interviews with current and former Frontier staffers as well as Michael's loved ones. The documentary called Not a Game is a fascinating watch overall and shows Frontier and the community as a whole at their very best in the very worst of circumstances. This week saw two new community goals go live pitching Imperial forces against the Neo-Marlinists. Both sides of the conflict are represented with separate community goals and both goals feature a pre-engineered module as a potential reward for participation. The Imperials are offering a fully engineered Class 2B long range and high capacity railgun with feedback cascade whilst the Neo-Marlinists would buy your service with a uniquely augmented Class 2B enzyme missile rack with increased caustic damage and capacity. To be in with a chance of earning the reward you'll need to be in the top 10% of commanders and if the community goal wins overall then the top 75% of commanders will also receive the appropriate module. Check the in-game Galnet newsfeed to learn more about the goals themselves and they'll finish on Thursday the 8th of April. And a couple of short and finally stories this week. City manager Arthur Tolmy hinted on Twitter today that there is something coming in April with regard to in-game events. We don't know any more than that but this stuff is always fun, if and when we find out more we'll let you know here so do be sure to watch out for that. And Reddit user BacteriaFage posted this incredible diorama featuring a 3D printed Corvette and modelled Planetscape with settlement buildings and vehicles. Just beautiful, luckily we're not the jealous types. So how is your elite going right now, are you excited for Odyssey yet or do you still need to see more detail? What are you focusing on in the main game and are you keen to see what Arthur has up his sleeves? 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, O7 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.