An Exciting Journey: Distant Worlds 2

For those that follow the show, it is no shock that I’m a major fan of space and space games. Between our “Summer Of Star Trek” and Star Wars games every winter, I find any excuse to take off into the black. It’ll make sense then, that when I play Elite: Dangerous, I tend to play as an explorer. Even from the first time I played, I was eager to set a course straight away from the bubble of populated space. The game has done it’s best to recreate our galaxy to as true a form as possible, and procedurally generate the rest with the Star Forge engine. This leads to many strange and fascinating sights, like binary stars with a planet in orbit around both of them.

Years ago, I made the trip to the supermassive black hole that rests at the center of the galaxy in a ship type called the “Type-6”. It’s basically a tug boat. At the time it was a long and grinding trip filled with mistakes and learning. As I was reaching the core, the first major expansion launched and an expedition set out from the core to get a large group to the farthest point from earth as possible, Beagle’s Point. If my computer at the time could have run the expansion, allowing me to boost my jump range, I would have joined up with them. Sadly, I had less than half the reach needed to make the final jump, and if I couldn’t make the trip, I’d rather get back to populated space and upgrade my ship so I could do it on my own at some point.

In late December, a major update to how systems and planets are explored, and the team behind Distant Worlds decided to launch another round. As soon as I heard I rushed to sign up and tweak my ship to get as much distance as I could. Now that I have the range I need to cover the distance, I’m ready to set out to get as far away from people as possible… along with 10,000 other people. That’s right, 10,000 Commanders have signed up for the journey. While not all will make it, some will drop out from boredom, some will crash their ships, some will fall asleep at the stick and burn up in the stars, many others will.

This is something I’m very excited to do. And I’ve planned it into the show schedule. Around the time we are putting into Beagle’s Point, I will be covering the original Elite from 1984. Hopefully, there will be some interviews to go with this episode talking to some of the organizers of this expedition and some of the Frontier development team.

If you’re in the black as well, feel free to reach out to me in-game (PC) at CMDR Kitty Face (yes, seriously) and maybe we can help each other keep the space madness at bay. Or, if you want to follow along with everyone’s trip, you can do that at the main site, here.