Any tips how to return to Elite after some... time?

If you've lost your carrier due to insufficient funds, you ought to find all your ships at some station and having received back most of the 5bil that you invested in the carrier.
 
As for my Cmdr (Childovthor) he has just made it out of his sidewinder to an Adder and no Engineers are unlocked.
You have a great time ahead of you.

Nobody has mentioned yet... You can play Odyssey and skip the on-foot content (although you will be presented with the training mission on your first run) and just play it as horizons - at least then, when the 4 new ships release, you should be able to buy each for credits in EDO, where, currently, if you stick to Horizons 4.x Live, I'm under the impression they would be Arx purchases.

Plus, you never know, the EDO on-foot activities may be fun for you also!
 
Thing is - you don't need to get there, but in ED you have to grind through all the engineer crap to get anywhere.

Not currently panto season, but IMO (and some others)

OH NO YOU DON'T!

Steve
One of my alts was trying to see how far they could go without Engineers.
I only decided to start unlocking them when they were going up against Thargoids, and then only for the Enhanced Thrusters on an I Courier.
Even if hat isn't required now the Glaives have been withdrawn.
 
OP
In case you never, ever, saw it, the EDO trailer gives good flavour to the expansion...
Unlike some of the "Digital Dreams" marketed, it is actually in-game footage recorded when the game was incredibly janky...

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAb3nH5Eilo

I happened to re-watch that the other day, quite by accident, and couldn't help but think" WOW! They really nailed it, it took them some time to work out the bugs and flesh out the features a little, but they really nailed it".
 
One of my alts was trying to see how far they could go without Engineers.
I only decided to start unlocking them when they were going up against Thargoids, and then only for the Enhanced Thrusters on an I Courier.
Even if hat isn't required now the Glaives have been withdrawn.
Try to level your alts to combat rank dangerous first - then we can talk about it again. Or was I deadly? I don't remember.
 
Try to level your alts to combat rank dangerous first - then we can talk about it again. Or was I deadly? I don't remember.
I took the pre-built Python MkII out to a High Res - it has no engineering or 'special' stuff... It took out a few elite / Deadly NPCs, just not as quickly as the G5 engineered vanilla I too into a Haz Res later.

Quite fun, really, as I had to consider that, in comparison to my usual combat ship, it was pretty fragile!
 
So, the last time I've played Elite extensively was... a few years ago, with occasional returns for doing events for my buddies via GeForce Now, since I didn't have a good laptop to play anymore.
Otherwise, I feel so... estranged from the Elite.

Reasons?
  • I don't have access to pretty much every Engineer. Likewise with the Guardian hardware.
  • I don't have experience with the AX, which means...
  • ...all the trophies and unique awards since the whole Thargoid Mothership affair flown waaay away from me.
  • I didn't have touched the Odyssey content.
  • And after playing X4 Foundations (btw, just look Frontier, how Egosoft filled in what Elite lacks, especially industry management), I feel that Elite is quite... bland, outside of exploration, mining to some degree, and recently the AX combat.
  • Not mentioning being effectively cut off from all those fun stuff for ARX (especially ship kits, COVAS and capital ship customizations and ATC COVAS), because... well, I didn't have luck in my life.
  • Also all those pre-engineered stuffs and FSD with SCO (the "Alcubierre Afterburner")... :'(
Just recently got the newer hardware with Ryzen 5 3500U with Vega 8. With FSR, it works. Kinda. But still, much better than the laptop I've used to play Horizons before (i3-5005U + GeForce 920M).
Do you have any tips for return? I don't want to feel overwhelmed by the changes, and pushed away (especially after ARX inflation) by them...
I just came back after a couple of years. I never did Guardian (except the FSD booster), nor Thargoid grind, and didn't want legs, so I left and went to X4. I recently re-animated this game because I read about the new Python. I didn't read where the new Python was just a new/upgraded FDL. My FDL was relegated to the dust bit quite some time ago as mostly useless to me, so I may not have come back had I read that somewhere. But here I am. For a while anyway. :)

I 'discovered' the new SCO variant of the FSD, and wanted a few of those. So I had to reacquaint myself with the material grind gameplay mechanism. Ugh. But before that, I had to relearn how to fly a ship, dock with a station, land on a planet, drive a SRV, etc., etc., ad nauseum. In doing this, I noticed some new things that were plesant to find, and others that I wish I hadn't remembered.

I still have zero interest in 'legs' or whatever it's called now, so I play Horizons (not legacy). I've noticed that more than a few of the game mechanics have never been completed, and likely never will be, but the relearning experience will kill some time for me. I'm still waiting for the next big release of that 'other game' though. :LOL:
 
  • I don't have access to pretty much every Engineer. Likewise with the Guardian hardware.
  • Also all those pre-engineered stuffs and FSD with SCO (the "Alcubierre Afterburner")... :'(

You could wait till the devs change Engineering this year. Because it will be easier after that.
 
Like I said - I have laptop with integral GPU (Vega 8) with allocated 2 GB (from total of 20 GB); with FSR it's fine (in space, at least), with Odyssey installed.
So, actually, install the Odyssey, give it a spin, and tune up with driver override settings, and perhaps kick in the FSR (unlike DLSS, it'll work on GeForce 1660 Ti).

PS: Old Horizons was relegated as a Legacy version, after release of the Odyssey, while the newest version was taken up to be on-par with the Odyssey (minus the space legs). You should have a copied profile from the time of the upgrade.

Ok well i got my not able to launch game issue fixed, so i've tried both Odyssey and Horizons "Live". As it was my first time to run Odyssey it threw me into the on foot tutorial thing, and I could certainly feel (and see via the monitoring software i run) that it might push my humble 4GB 1650 Super a bit too hard, playable but not smooth and that was without combat or other players etc.

So i'll carry on with no space legs for now, in part because of that borderline performance, but also because i got stuck on the second hatch to cut open (it just really did not want to run smooth all around the cutting edge, and seemed to leave a bit that never cut through?). I love Fallout 3 (without using VATS) and other FPS like games, but Elite i'm fine being ship bound. Maybe if i find/buy a stronger GPU in the future i'll give it a full go.

Thanks for the tips guys, nice to see the community still well and happy to help newbs as we stumble in (y)

EDIT: Ok i like the "Concourse" part of Odyssey, even if i can't actually buy a drink from a bartender, just getting out the ship to see the view of the space dock is worth running Odyssey on my limited hardware. The rest of the game, the Horizons space stuff all runs decent enough as in Horizons. I was not expecting this, in a good way. Well done Frontier for making the Concourse look decent.
 
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I’ve just reinstalled after an almost exactly 3 year gap. Not sure what to do first, I’ve unlocked all the engineers - I stopped playing after coming back from doing the Colonia ones. I’ve got a decent amount of cash and a few decent ships heavily engineered - the only one that isn’t is my long jump range anaconda that I bought and set up for my Colonia/Sag A* trip.

Thinking of diving in to Odyssey combat properly but the limited time I spent with it before my break I found the enemies very bullet spongey. Never got into the thargoid stuff, think I’d need to go back to unlock guardian blueprints, I only got one for the FSD booster before.
 
My advice is to upgrade your client to the latest version.

Team Play
Grouping become semi-easier and joining another CMDR's ship than the halo join will net you equal BH, data, etc. than the %margin for joining another ship via Halo. It's quite disappointing but that is how it is, and from my experience, it's worth joining the other CMDR's ship to get full credit: Excellent way to assist new, and returning, players get around the Bubble or out to those far reached places e.g. guardian structures and pull your ship to the system.

Engineers
This may be a bug but it's a bug that benefits the players. Start with the ones you have unlocked and engineer each one to rank 5, and by doing some will unlock others. There are websites that offer a unlock-in-order-of type guide. The importance to ranking your reputation with each engineer to five is the benefit that it reduces to completes the next prerequisites for the next engineer. You can literally daisy chain them out and begin pinning common use blueprints to upgrade your fleet modules.

BIG TIP HERE: Go to Dav's Hope and do the circle with two SRVs until you have capped out on all available materials with an inventory cap of 150 (forgot which tier they are). This will take two boring sessions, but the time spent will give you enough engineering materials to rank up your reputation with engineers. Do the same with Jamison's Crash site for Encoded and go to Orrere system for the Anaconda crash ship for raw materials. This will jump start you into unlocking engineers - trade up or down material only on what you need to get the reputation rank then move onto the next engineer.

ANOTHER BIG TIP HERE: There are several systems around Ross 775 that have High Grade Encoded signals that you can do the exit game/restart game to reset the instance to farm rank 5 manufactured materials: Very helpful to trade down or lateral to max rank your modules e.g. Armour, Hull Reinforcement, and several weapon blueprints.

Unlocking engineers has a tendency to be a snowball effect. Once you begin to see the ship's stats improve then you tend to pursue and install the next one, and the next, until you have everything tuned out to your liking.
 
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