you can't take a photo like that and NOT tell us more about your duct tape wall of switches.
"Don't rush into an Anaconda, do Engineering first...."
- Thread starter Starshot_Jigawatts
- Start date
I've written about it before but can't find the thread, so I've put a bit about it below:I play keyboard only using the original keys from the BBC micro version (mouse only to click station menus) so quickly ran out of keyboard shortcuts so created this homemade, poverty spec button box from gaffer / duct tape & foam card - I chose silver as "space".
The buttons were intended for an arcade machine build but I re appropriated them for this controller, they're connected to 2 x zero delay boards and plug in to the keyboard usb ports.
The pac man stick controller moves the cursor around the menus and the massive "nope" button in the centre is for hyperspace.
My sister in law calls it the choc-a-block controller as it is similar to the computers in the old tv show and I apparently look like the presenter playing E : D.
This has been missing from my life. honestly great work. As Vedmo stated - very Lakon. But you do need to have wires pointlessly routed across a few of the buttons.
Ugh editing a double post. meh
Deleted member 182079
D
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I play keyboard only using the original keys from the BBC micro version (mouse only to click station menus) so quickly ran out of keyboard shortcuts so created this homemade, poverty spec button box from gaffer / duct tape & foam card - I chose silver as "space".
The buttons were intended for an arcade machine build but I re appropriated them for this controller, they're connected to 2 x zero delay boards and plug in to the keyboard usb ports.
The pac man stick controller moves the cursor around the menus and the massive "nope" button in the centre is for hyperspace.
My sister in law calls it the choc-a-block controller as it is similar to the computers in the old tv show and I apparently look like the presenter playing E : D.
View attachment 202609
Question though, is that thing on the right... the Tritium tank?
Well the problem is....I wasn't asking for help exactly. More like giving my opinion that I was enjoying the game immensely until something very un-fun jarred me out of my experience. A lot of people have agreed with me - more than I expected honestly - and a lot don't. But here we are 14 pages later in what has been a pretty good discussion all told, so I'm good with it.
I had only vaguely become aware of the "trading down" materials tactic when someone else said it here in some detail, and I believe I thanked that person. With the holidays and all, I hope everyone understands that I just have not read or seen every single post on this thread. When I haven't had time to read and engage, I have "liked" posts from my phone to at least show appreciation and acknowledgement.
But I certainly would NEVER have someone stop what they are doing and carry me around the galaxy in their Fleet Carrier. Just...no way, that's such a burden. I'm not asking for that kind of a thing here and wouldn't expect it.
Yes I have engaged with others who have made some.....assumptions that I found less than flattering. Doesn't mean I don't appreciate ALL the input.
The most Lakon thing is when one of the wires disconnects at the back and I have to hot fix it usually during a battle. It usually ends up with manually shorting 2 wires together to jump out.
That is 5 liters of the chiltern brewery's finest ale to fuel the pilot.
Question though, is that thing on the right... the Tritium tank?
Yeah, this is "real" cross platform pvp of Elite, this thread 
As they say, best pvp in Elite is in forum.
But, on more serious note, you know what was my issue with game mechanics as a new player(but only after I learned about Inara) ?
Outfitting. And at this point, I don't know engineers even exist.
So, missions make credits, game shows you that. I made some credits, exited noob zone, time to get myself another ship, Cobra mk3. And get myself A rated modules. So I bought cobra and 2 A core modules. So happy.
But still needed more modules, so I flew from system to system, station to station. It took me more than few hours to find all the modules I wanted.
So my all-night session was jumping around, supercruising to different stations, docking, finding the right module and fitting it on ship, or not finding module and moving on to another system, another station.
So happy and proud when I finally got stuff I wanted and could afford, and for the rest I was writing on paper in which stations I could buy modules when I aquire more credits. Good game.
And then I find out about Inara... Shock... Disbelief...
I was like:What?! This 3rd party website knows all about Elite and my cmdr and gets all info from the game?!
And the game couldn't tell me where to find stuff, how far, for how much, etc. but Inara could?!
What kind of game mechanics is this?! I could save myself hours of game time if I only knew where to buy stuff without flying blindly? I was furious, like
So I'm looking at Inara, what will it tell me that game doesn't tell me and few minutes later, I'm thinking: Well, I had fun flying around and I was happy and had sense of achievement after all that.
So I said to myself: It is what it is. I like this game. I will play it with 3rd party stuff involved also.
I got familiar with some other sites, watched few videos, learned a lot about the game, ships, how to be efficient.
I was thriving. Got credits, mats, ships, galaxy under my thumb.
Now I have 2 cmdrs, main in Colonia and alt in bubble. Main has 15+ g5'd or almost g5'd ships, and 10+ more engineered to some level or waiting to be engineered.
And alt is not doing bad either. Has g5'd Dbx, Courier and Clipper and almost finished Challenger and Python, with iEagle, Type-9 and Type-10 in garage waiting for their turn(at this point, my cmdrs don't fly ships if they are not engineered).
But best thing is: I don't grind. Like in 50 hours of gameplay, maybe 1 hour will be spent at Jameson's or Dav's or activities like that, grinding by definition.
And I do have RL, job, wife, 2 teenage kids, dog, so it's not like I do Elite 24/7.
Moral of the story is:
Elite is a very specific game, not for everybody.
You like it and play it or not.
Grind is optional.
3rd party tools also optional(but handy).
Community is also bit different, I suspect on the older side of gaming demographics.
I know I am, played Elite on my C64 in '85.
And I need to make my posts shorter(but I never do
)
As they say, best pvp in Elite is in forum.
But, on more serious note, you know what was my issue with game mechanics as a new player(but only after I learned about Inara) ?
Outfitting. And at this point, I don't know engineers even exist.
So, missions make credits, game shows you that. I made some credits, exited noob zone, time to get myself another ship, Cobra mk3. And get myself A rated modules. So I bought cobra and 2 A core modules. So happy.
But still needed more modules, so I flew from system to system, station to station. It took me more than few hours to find all the modules I wanted.
So my all-night session was jumping around, supercruising to different stations, docking, finding the right module and fitting it on ship, or not finding module and moving on to another system, another station.
So happy and proud when I finally got stuff I wanted and could afford, and for the rest I was writing on paper in which stations I could buy modules when I aquire more credits. Good game.
And then I find out about Inara... Shock... Disbelief...
I was like:What?! This 3rd party website knows all about Elite and my cmdr and gets all info from the game?!
And the game couldn't tell me where to find stuff, how far, for how much, etc. but Inara could?!
What kind of game mechanics is this?! I could save myself hours of game time if I only knew where to buy stuff without flying blindly? I was furious, like
So I'm looking at Inara, what will it tell me that game doesn't tell me and few minutes later, I'm thinking: Well, I had fun flying around and I was happy and had sense of achievement after all that.
So I said to myself: It is what it is. I like this game. I will play it with 3rd party stuff involved also.
I got familiar with some other sites, watched few videos, learned a lot about the game, ships, how to be efficient.
I was thriving. Got credits, mats, ships, galaxy under my thumb.
Now I have 2 cmdrs, main in Colonia and alt in bubble. Main has 15+ g5'd or almost g5'd ships, and 10+ more engineered to some level or waiting to be engineered.
And alt is not doing bad either. Has g5'd Dbx, Courier and Clipper and almost finished Challenger and Python, with iEagle, Type-9 and Type-10 in garage waiting for their turn(at this point, my cmdrs don't fly ships if they are not engineered).
But best thing is: I don't grind. Like in 50 hours of gameplay, maybe 1 hour will be spent at Jameson's or Dav's or activities like that, grinding by definition.
And I do have RL, job, wife, 2 teenage kids, dog, so it's not like I do Elite 24/7.
Moral of the story is:
Elite is a very specific game, not for everybody.
You like it and play it or not.
Grind is optional.
3rd party tools also optional(but handy).
Community is also bit different, I suspect on the older side of gaming demographics.
I know I am, played Elite on my C64 in '85.
And I need to make my posts shorter(but I never do
)
I would absolutely engineer your ships for you. For a "modest" fee of course.
Forumdad: That sounds like my toddler who refuses to eat food just because he doesn't like the look of it. You're describing problems that only exist in theory and aren't a problem once you give it a go.
If you don't like using 3rd party tools, engineering isn't supported in the game. Don't try, its only going to be pot luck that you advance in any meaningful way at all.
Whoever told you that you can only play the game in ways that you like and advance engineering also lied. Aside from any interesting discussions here, for the game itself they have mislead you and misrepresented the reality of how it works. There is no way i know of to advance engineering only doing one pillar activity. Impossible.
But if you actually want to get things engineered the exploit ways are great. Even the non exploit ways are great too. Since they added material traders+ 3rd party tools you almost never feel like the game has been "unfair" on you. Also why are you engineering in the first place? Is it because you're constantly losing in combat? Choose less difficult AI targets, or lower the grade of your resource extraction site so you get help from security and pick your battles.(EDIT: From having to adapt the day after the patch, while i didn't like it at all myself, i know for a fact that there is ai you can still beat 100% of the time without engineering.) I hope the person who told you about engineering didn't also tell you to go straight to the hardest stuff from zero, pick the most difficult ai level in the largest ship and die, and then complain about not showing you the one you're supposed to go to if you are not ready...
Sure the game doesn't teach you this, but the game doesn't teach you anything. Again, frontier are not like the others. You have to make peace with the fact that all the civilized stuff that the rest of the industry offers just doesn't exist here. It still works in the end, but there are very few real white knights, because its objectively not deserved.
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Thats where a player economy would come in, where everyone just does what they want and relies on the community for other things. Why not let the people who love mining mine, the exporers explore and the combat pilots blow things up? Then let everyone put the surplus of whatever they got on the market and let it all handle itself. Add credits, so people can buy their mods with credits as long as other players are willing to sell their mats for credits.
Well, I love driving on the planets in VR, it is awesome. And trying to get my codex filled automatically gives me piles of the rarest raw mats. But I can see why it is no fun to others, even after trying it. I don't see why the game should semi-force people to do it for engineering, because mat collecting with an activity you loath instantly becomes grinding.
Well if there's any activity you truly hate in elite, quit the game now.. i don't think it works that way. Even i have to do combat sometimes. Don't hate it completely. Just can't do it for more than 30 mins or so at a time. Its the same thing over and over again with zero risk once you've engineered your ship and pick the right battles. Pushing yourself doesn't make you excited, it just means you need to wait for your shields to come back. What a dud activity.
But it could work that way. That is the whole point of suggestions, to present a possible alternative to what is already the case.
Even a cross type swap would be handy, I am not combat orientated and I spend most of my time outside the bubble since owning a carrier, got raw's coming out of my ears but I have noticed a drop in manufactured and encoded which I only hope to top up when selling all my mined goods.
but gathering material does not force you to do a specific single activity, there are often several different activities to do, and even them, you still have the options of going after other material that involves activities you like alot more, and then use Material Traders...
This used to be an issue before we got material traders, and I remember how FDev time after time managed to patch out Exquisite Focus Crystals from the game, meaning you could NOT get any of those. for weeks/months...
Unlocking an engineers is a different thing, but that activity you only have todo once per engineer.
True for data and manufactored, not so much for raw mats. For some reason they are excluded from mission rewards, so you'll never, ever get them that way. Its pretty much SRV only, or maybe some via mining. They should be added to mission rewards like the rest.
I don't mind the driving its the mindless collection method I do not like.
CMDR Karrde Sun
Go to the threat level 6 Pirate USS in Nuenets in a mid size engineered combat ship or a Vulture if you really want to go for it.
Ping an FDL or Anaconda... They are a far different scenario to any Res. All NPC ships in game should be like this.
If you go in a fully kitted out and engineered Thunder bus like a Corvette then you'll ruin the experience.
Pug