News The Engineers (2.1) feedback and planned updates

Zac Antonaci

Head of Communications
Frontier
Greetings Commanders,

You may well have seen our recent posts after The Engineers (2.1) which highlight some of the feedback that we’ve taken on board and changes we’ve made based on that feedback. You’ll have noticed that we’ve made a number of server and point updates including a host of immediate bug fixes and balances to NPC behaviour as well as allowing you to select the experimental modification type from Engineers, reducing the rare allocations to make the unlocking of Engineers easier and local news article at Engineers bases to give more information on where to find specific materials.

However, that’s not all, as ever we are working hard to ensure that player feedback is at the heart of Elite Dangerous and we just wanted to share with you a few more changes that we are planning for our next major point update. We are aiming for the end of July/Early August (there may be a few minor point updates and stability fixes before then).

In order to continue to address the feedback raised regarding both the grind and RNG nature of The Engineers we’re going to making the following changes;

- We will be adjusting the way the surface scanner works to allow you to see what materials are available from any given planet. This should make locating materials far easier.
- In addition we are making a number of changes to the lowest level blueprints. This includes improving the positive effects of low level upgrade results as well as reducing the cost and simplifying the materials needed.
- We’re also increasing the number of units you get for each instance of a material you find. This means instead of getting one unit of a material, you will get multiple units of that material. This will allow you to increase the number of attempts at each Engineer.
- We’ll be increasing the number of materials spawned when surface mining. Again, to make the process easier and the materials easier to gather.
- The likelihood of finding rare materials in these instances will also be increased, meaning it will be easier to use higher level blueprints.
- And we will be reviewing the balance and locations of non-planet salvage and reviewing the possible USS locations for each material

Not to mention the changes that we’ve made in the recent point update. To be able to select your weapon upgrade and give you control over what module you leave with, reducing the requirements to unlock certain Engineers and increasing the visibility of where materials can be sourced, should help to make the Engineers more accessible and more rewarding for players venturing down to the planet surface in search of a new upgrade.

As always the development team will continue to read and review your feedback to allow us to make the best possible experience for the community.

Thank you for your continued patience and support.
 
How about removing the mission-only commodities required for blueprints, or at least giving us another way to get hold of them? That's the most frustrating thing about it for me - sitting around waiting for modular terminals, for example. The description says they're "ubiquitous", yet there's absolutely no way for us to get hold of them other than praying to the RNG gods to give us a mission (that we're allowed to take) which returns a few of them.

Then...osmium and praseodymium. Technically there are two ways to get hold of them - mining or missions. However, the only missions which have either as a reward are mining missions, so there's zero choice; it's mining or...mining.
 
Thanks for the update Zac,

any news on the storage issue for modules and Cargo?
and any news on the bug fixes for the turrets resetting to fire at will every jump?
 
Zac,

Is there any way the output of different class items can be tweaked as well? One of the biggest complaints also is the fact that some people have been doing lower class tier upgrades and getting better results than higher class tiers. Can we just make it to where a class 5 will always be better than a class 4 upgrade and so on? Keep the RNG, but just minimize the range that the needle can bounce between for each upgrade.
 
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Thanks Zac, these sound like some very welcomed changes. The general vibe as is apparent on the forums is that Cmdr's are becoming frustrated with the length of time these materials take to acquire. So the proposed changes will be very welcomed, and especially the new and improved surface scanner.

Will it also be possible for level 1 through to 5 upgrades to be overlapped less percentage wise ? For instance it seems to be a problem in particular with rolling for a level 5 FSD upgrade and then finding out it is worse than the previous level 4 applied before it. Due to the positive affects being overlapped to widely. (If that makes sense to you)

many thanks and and look forward to your reply regarding this.
Flimley. :)
 
Fair play, you guys are fantastic. Thanks again to the devs for their work :) This all sounds really good! Can't wait to see how the surface scanner functions. The recently added surface salvage mission animations are wonderful.
 
Wait, does this mean that almost every problem we have with the engineers will be fixed by then? Thank you so much!
I'm just hoping we can get station (module) storage now, but I don't see the lack of it as completely gamebreaking since I personally use most of my ships for specific roles anyway.
 
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We will be adjusting the way the surface scanner works to allow you to see what materials are available from any given planet. This should make locating materials far easier.

Yay!

If they could just change the Wave Scanner so it had different signal types per-material, rather than per-"deposit type", then they wouldn't even need to increase the material spawn rates, as it'd let us search 'intelligently' for the materials we want. :)
 
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