The Elite: Dangerous Beyond Update (Chapter One) Beta ended February 9th and will be making it's way to live any day now. A very common question on my live stream is: What should I do to prepare?
Well, in case you didn't know, this update does a complete overhaul of the Engineers feature of Elite: Dangerous. It also includes a large amount of fixes related to quality of life, including trade data, crime and punishment, and mining. So before this update comes out, here are my suggestions on what you should focus on to be prepared:
- Unlock all the engineers if you haven't already
- Dump all Grade 1/2/3 (except maybe Arsenic) materials and harvest as much Grade 4/5 as you can
- Pad your wallet in anticipation of new ship options
Unlock Engineers
This update is going to make engineers much easier for most players. Overall, I believe most of us will have better ships at the end of the day, but the unlocking process hasn't changed. You still need to complete a series of tasks to gain access to all the engineers. This is something you can do right now, and will not require the update.
Need help? I highly recommend the following two resources:
- Mini Watto's PVP guide (Engineers unlock section in Appendix)
- Inara Engineers Resource
Scroll to the Appendix in Mini Watto's guide to determine who to unlock first, and what materials are needed. If you have questions regarding the materials or the engineer mentioned in the guide, utilize Inara to cross check the information. Between these two resources, you should unlock ALL the engineers.
I make it sound so easy, don't I? This process is the most annoying and time consuming part of engineers in my opinion. Some of these engineers require rare commodoties that are limited in supply. This can take time and requires a great deal of patience. To help with this situation, I recommend you utilize the East Indian Trading Company or EIC in Elite: Dangerous. This is a player group that will gladly trade you rare commodoties for Palladium. Utilizing EIC will eliminate hours and hours of gathering cigars, tea, and other rare nonsense for these needy engineers. Do I sound bitter? I'm not bitter.
Material Preparation
The update introduces a new NPC in various stations in the galaxy. He goes by the handle: Material Trader. Essentially, he will give you materials in return for others. Without getting into too many details, here's the short of it: Gather as many rare (Grade 4/5) materials as possible with the current material cap on live, so that when the update comes, you can trade down for Grade 1/2/3 materials. For example, 1 rare material will yield 81 of a common material.
How to do this? Utilize one or more of these resources to gather some of the most rare items in the game:
- Elite: Dangerous Scavenger 2.4
- Down to Earth Astronomy Engineering Material Finder
- Inara Materials list
Some of the most rare materials are in locations like Dav's Hope, The Crashed Anaconda, and the Naphtha class tanker. These are very efficient since you can reload the instance to respawn materials. You should be doing this more than anything before the update comes out. I can't stress how important rare materials will be to future engineering in Elite: Dangerous. It's going to make your life a lot easier!
Pad your wallet
With the new update comes a new ship (Alliance Chieftan) and a ton of new ship fitting options with engineers. You're going to need credits. If you haven't already done some credit farming to pad your wallet, now is the time. Passenger missions have returned (with less credits, but still good) and other methods of credit farming are available. Utilize these and pad your wallet as much as you can. You don't want to be strapped for credits to utilize all this new cool stuff coming out.
Get busy
The update is right around the corner and will be here before you know it. Get busy farming and be ready when Beyond Chapter One drops!
Fly safe, commanders.