First minutes of gameplay & starter area
Don't be discouraged when you start playing. The game got a very steep initial learning curve. It is not too difficult, you just need practice.
Play the game, don't let it play you. You don't need giga bucks or the hottest perfecto ship. Have fun, the rewards will all come to you.
Keybindings & ship control
forums.frontier.co.uk
Don't be discouraged when you start playing. The game got a very steep initial learning curve. It is not too difficult, you just need practice.
- There is no pause - the game runs when in menu. The Elite Dangerous universe runs in real-time. Don't accept a mission you cannot complete right now, the game clock/calendar does not stop when you exit the game.
- The first time the game starts, immediately switch out the half-size cargo racks that come with the starter Sidewinder by default for full-size cargo racks.
- Once you leave the safe starter space there is no way back. You can explore systems outside the Pilots Federation as long as you don't dock outside it.
Play the game, don't let it play you. You don't need giga bucks or the hottest perfecto ship. Have fun, the rewards will all come to you.
- Try not to fixate too exclusively on any single goal or you will likely get frustrated. Break it up occasionally and do something completely different in the game for a while.
- Try to do as many things as you can manually. Learn to love doing the taking off and docking yourself. Learn to approach planets and stations manually. This will make you feel much more like an actual pilot and it will enhance your enjoyment of the game. In the end this is a game about flying spaceships and the automation of core mechanics takes away from that. Avoid it like the plague!
- Don't watch videos or use detailed walkthroughs for things until you have given them a go yourself. Early adopters had amazing fun finding out how to die, how not to die, and how to 'win'. Once you have watched someone else doing it, the sense of achievement can just vanish. If you have given something a good go, but it's beyond you, fill your boots.
- Check the age of any thread, post, website or video - the game has changed significantly many times, lots of stuff is now superseded.
- Rebuy (insurance)
Always fly with enough credits for rebuy! You can see rebuy cost in the right hand hud in the cockpit. Until you've earned 100'000 credits, the pilot federation stops paying your ship insurance. So for your first couple of hours in-game you have literally nothing to lose but your first couple of hours. So die. Die often. Die as creatively as you can. Once you pay for your own insurance, then dying comes with a price. So for the first couple of hours, take advantage of your status, and figure out all of the key mistakes that will get you dead. You start with a free sidewinder; if you die, you restart with a free sidewinder. So you have - literally - nothing to lose.
You can see rebuy cost in the right hand hud in the cockpit. You can also find it on external sites like https://coriolis.io/ . It's basically 5% of your current Ship value, including all changes and loadouts. If you die and can pay it, you can get back your old ship. If you can't pay it, you're back in a loaner Sidewinder. When you die you, provided you have the money for the rebuy, you can choose between being incorporated in the last ship you piloted or the free Sidewinder. If you choose your last ship, you'll respawn either in your current system, if a suitable station is available there, or the last system you docked. Otherwise, you're back in Eravate (IIRC - one of the core systems anyways).
If you have any ship in storage when you can't cover the insurance then you will be offered the chance to use a stored one, or you can sell the stored one or any modules to make up the rebuy cost or you can have a free starter sidewinder.
Keybindings & ship control
- You can supercruise to travel quickly around a system without jumping to another one. Low wake is to enter super cruise to travel within the system and is subject to mass lock. For high wake you jump to another system and this is not subject to mass lock.
- Don't high wake when the planet/sun is red.
- In supercruise, throttle down to 80% at 7 seconds from destination. You can exit supercruise as soon as both gauges are in the blue sections. You will always drop out within 9 km from your destination. Waiting longer to get closer to your destination in supercruise doesn't have any effect.
- If you can't jump to a location because it is blocked by a planet, unlock it and supersruise around.
You can also bind a key to engage/exit "Supercruise" (rather than just rely on the conditional "Toggle Frame Shift Drive" key), that saves you having to unlock your destination.
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- Bind a key to "next system in route"
- The only way to see your ship direction of travel is the space dust flying past you.
- Flight Assist off is irrelevant in PvE below expert. Above that it's only relevant if you are fighting a more agile ship in a ship with low pitch rate or to make the most of the lateral/vertical acceleration of your ship
- PIP in SYS increase shield strength, PIP in ENG go to engines and give you more thrust, boost recharge, and higher top speed. Weapon give more weapon energy.
- Joysticks and thrusters are great for immersion and may help you become a better pilot, but mouse may provide more precision. Joysticks and thrust allow more degrees of movement and inputs at once.
- By default, when you buy a ship things like a size 4 slot will have a size 3 cargo rack in it. Assuming you have the funds you can just sell that and buy the bigger on.
- Gimballed (or turreted) weapons will (try to) lock automatically onto enemies. Gimballed will only lock onto your selected target and fire from your fire button, turreted will depend on your settings for them.
- The leading (or trailing - again a setting) aiming circle is there whenever you use weapons with a finite speed, to show you where you should aim in order to hit the target, provided the target is friendly enough not to change its vector in the meantime.
- Don't target something before firing a collector limpet to have it collect all the stuff.
- Cobra Mk3 is a good beginner ship that want to try many different activities
- Don't rush to get in a big vessel - they teach all kinds of bad habits and allow you more wiggle room that make you learn manouvering much slower. Smaller ships need to compromise so teach better building habits too.
- Ship and Ship Module prices are NOT the same everywhere, some stations sell them at a discount!
- You can upgrade your core modules by replacing the current ones using outfitting, don’t replace a module with a smaller one until you know what you are doing (smaller equals lower number), the letters equate to the grade of the module
A are the best but very expensive
B are the toughest but very heavy
C are average
D are the lightest especially good for racing and exploring
E are the cheapest and should only be there when buying or selling the ship.
- In the left hand panel, once the basic scan of your target is complete, you'll be able to see a list of modules where you can then target the power plant (or there's a keybinding for "target next/prev module"). Once targetted the targetting reticle highlights the targetted module on the ship.
Targeting a ships powerplant can cause the ship to explode before its hull reaches 0% integrity.
- Get fast. Speed gets you past security ship scans, past NPC pirates who want your tasty cargo of biowaste..
- The nav beacon is a beacon and information terminal close (within a few ls) to the star of an inhabited system. You can select it in the nav panel and then fly to it in the same way you fly to a station and drop from supercruise. After the drop you can see the beacon as a white blip on the sensor. If you select it your ship automatically does a basic scan and downloads all info about the system. This includes all planets, moons, stations, installations, signal sources, and mission related info (e.g. location of assassination target), etc. Note that you get no exploration rewards if you download data from the nav beacon.
- You need to be 20 light years from a system to sell the data
- The Detailed Surface Scanner is not fitted as standard, it is used while in supercruise at minimum speed while you are pointing your ship at the body you wish to scan, you need to be in Analysis mode and the Head Up Display will indicate if you are going to fast or are out of range.
- If you want to get mining and get much cash early, once you can get a cobra Mk3 get ordinary mining lasers and go to HIP21991 and mine painite
- Don't believe the myth about how dangerous OPEN is. 99.999% of OPEN is safe for the 2 simple reasons 1: the Galaxy is huge so commanders are spread thin (even the inhabited bubble is huge), 2: 99,9% of commanders are friendly.OPEN is only dangerous in a few bottlenecks where agressive commanders can corner other commanders like at Engineer bases, locations for Community Goals or Interstellar Initiatives, Guardian ruins, etc. If you want to avoid the agression simply switch to SOLO or GROUPS one jump before you reach such a place and switch back when you're done there. You can see the hotspots here under 'Security Report' (Inara.cz website is very useful. Very much recommended to make an account there).
- When looking at information, make sure to check the age of the information - the game have changed significantly many times and lots of stuff is now superseded.
- Google is really good at answering a lot of questions about the game by just asking and adding "elite dangerous" in the question.
- We used to have a mega thread with 1 piece of advice from each player. It'll be one of the many threads listed under "Handy tips and tricks" in the "manuals, guides and other stuff for new players" section over here:
Alec's best of the forum (and elsewhere) [v2]
(banner image courtesy of Qohen Leth) So quite often I find myself wanting to recommend a bunch of forum threads to other players and rather than having to dig around each time I thought I'd start a thread that attempts to pull all the good (IMHO) stuff together in one place. I'm going to try...
Note: some of those links may be broken now thanks to the forum upgrade a while back.
- A few recommended third party sites are edsm / inara / coriolis
- Don't risk running out of fuel! Fit any size fuel scoop (bigger is better, but only because it refuels faster, any size can save you a rebuy), then, in your galaxy map, filter stars by type, select types KGBFOAM, tick 'apply route filter', now plot your route safe in the knowledge any star you jump to, you can fuel from!
Also, when you are refueling, you can zero the throttle to save having to 'stay in control' and the scoop will still keep working, just try to keep the temperatuire below 80 and not hit the sun.
- In addition because accidents happen and KGBFOAM doesn’t always work there are the Fuel Rats go to their web site and follow the instructions when out of fuel any where within range of the galaxy.
Home
The Fuel Rats are Elite: Dangerous's premier emergency refueling service. Fueling the galaxy, one ship at a time, since 3301.
fuelrats.com
Greetings Commanders!
This is A. C. Ender,
I've been looking for a game I can play casually while listening to music etc, but which also have a lot of depth and skill. I just recently found the game (someone saying they wish NMS had your flight model), read the stories about the fuel rats saving a commander from the deep void and seemed like I found my match. The more I read on the forums the more I think this is the game I have been looking for. With the steam sale ongoing I bought it and have just started playing.
I'm only just into the start, as my time to play is infrequent. Been through the training missions twice (can now manage to fly FA off) using mouse and keyboard. Been reading about the VR and HOTAS (which I've never done either) but it sounds appealing...
I have some general questions;
What do you wish you had known when you started?
What advice can you give for a new CMDR to enjoy the game to the fullest?
What are the advantages (and disadvantages) of playing with more than one joystick? I can see how one is beneficial as you get yaw + extra buttons on the "mouse" but a second stick seems unintuitive (which movement do you use for vertical or lateral thrusters, seems you have to pick one vector sideways which feels wrong to me).
What is high/low wake?
I intend to move to open once I can avoid dying too bad - how long would you suggest I wait for this?
A. C. Ender, over
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), there's always the Self Destruct sequence (right side HUD, ship options, somewhere at the bottom).
