Tracking exploration activity

marx

marx
Time for the monthly EDSM update then! 2021. July is now tied with 2018. November as the lowest record, in new systems discovered. It's also the lowest stars and bodies scanned count since the FSS was introduced, but given that scanning and travel habits seem to have been fairly constant lately, this should come as no surprise.
So really, this is basically business as usual for 2021: this downward slide has been the general trend since the start of the year. Maybe it has started to slow recently, but it's too soon to tell. It will be curious to see where it bottoms out at any case, and what the effect of the winter holidays will be. I guess that'll depend on whether Odyssey goes on sale by then (quite likely) and by how much.

Well then, the current squadron leaderboard season ends in two weeks, so that's the latest when I should post here. Have fun exploring until then!
 

marx

marx
Time for PC exploration leaderboard season 18. Activity here has caught up to EDSM's lows, so to speak: with an estimated total of 813 billion Cr for the top 1,000 squadrons, this is not much higher than the lowest to date, which was Season 7. But this is with the 30% mapping bonus from Odyssey: so, without that, chances are that we would have a negative record.
The top 10 is interesting: there was fierce competition between #1 (IGAU) and #2 (Canonn), and the two squadrons have amassed as many points combined as the rest (#3-#10) did. With this, the total of the top ten is pretty much the same as it was in the previous season, and the drops are more visible in the ranges below. Without #1 and #2 though, the season leaderboard would have set a negative record, despite the Odyssey bonus. However, this is just another "what if" scenario.

Meanwhile, while the month isn't over yet, I thought I should still mention that over on the EDSM data, the drop seems to have leveled out. There's no new negative record there, although back then activity dropped only briefly (as in, for less than a week) to this level, while now it has held at the same low for a bit over two weeks. Well, in two weeks it'll be time for the monthly, we'll see how things go by then.
Thanks for reading, and have fun exploring!
 

marx

marx
Another month, another report, but this time with some extra stuff too. For most of 2021, activity has been on a downward trend, but this month was the first when it started recovering a bit, and going up, not down. It wasn't by a lot though, and the overall level is still low. We'll see if this will be the new usual level or not though: last year, it was around this time when things picked up a bit again, but let's not forget that that was the first pandemic year. Not exactly the best to judge possible seasonal variations by.


Moving on, folks who actually read this (so, at most a dozen people :D ) probably already know that @Orvidius over on EDAstro has added an interesting real time EDDN tracker some time ago. Now that over a month has passed since, so with enough data having been gathered, I thought I'd check those numbers with these.

First, as a recap, and for the benefit of archiving this for later. Total CMDRs covers the people who have uploaded to EDDN, and Deep Space Explorers (DSE) are those who were over 500 ly away from Sol at the time. This month, the hourly average has been 471 total and 157 DSE, meaning a third of those who upload to EDDN are those who explore outside the bubble. (EDDN assigns new IDs to uploaders twice a day, so we can't get a daily count of unique players.) As for FSD jumps, 48% of those come from DSE, and for body scans, it's 73% from DSE. Note that body scans here refer to both stars (auto-scanned) and planets (manually ground). So, how do these compare to the monthly results?

Going with the averages, it turns out that 31% of FSD jumps yielded new systems. Consider that the DSE / total uploaders ratio is 33%, but 48% of all jumps came from DSE. The difference here means that quite a number of systems people out in the galaxy have jumped to systems that were already uploaded: I'm pretty certain most of this is from neutron star boosting. Still, players out there still upload more new systems than not, so it's not just lots of folks skipping around the galaxy.

As for body scans, we have 52% of the total being new bodies. Don't forget that 73% of the total came from explorers out there. Of course, stars that are auto-scanned by honking skew this: as a rough rule of the thumb, usually around a quarter of bodies scanned are stars. So I guess there are still a fair number of systems around the bubble where not all bodies have been uploaded, even from known systems.
Another curious thing related to body scans is the per body type breakdown. I'm not going to go into much detail here (although I'll likely revisit this later), but one thing that stood out to me was how few of ELW scans are done by DSE. Depending on time of the day (and day of the week, I guess), it can go from around 25% to 50% of the total. Meaning the majority of ELW scans are done within 500 ly of the bubble: in other words, looks like Road to Riches is plenty alive even in these days. For Water Worlds (47% of which are Terraforming Candidates) and High Metal Content Planets (12% of which are Terraforming Candidates), the ratios tend to be much more favourable towards DSE.

I also tried coming up with some player estimates based on the EDDN data for squadrons, but the end result ended up too uncertain to be usable. Well, I think that we can at the very least say that the two (EDDN uploaders and squadron explorers) are comparable in size. Which comes with the usual caveat that we have no idea about how many explorers are in squadrons and how many aren't - and I guess this is true for the entire player base, regardless of main activities.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and go shoot some planets!
 

marx

marx
Let's see September on EDSM then. This time around, there was a week-long Community Goal that gave points for scanning and mapping Earth-like Worlds: there was one such before, back in 2020 December, but that one was for Ammonia Worlds instead. Back at that time, the impact of that CG showed up nicely in the data: this time around, it hardly did. So, let's compare the two, and see how they turned out!

The obvious first difference would be that this time, it was ELWs, which are regulars in the Road to Riches that people use to farm credits and rank, while AWs aren't. There's more though. Back during 2020. December, overall exploration activity on EDSM was twice that of 2021. September, and yet, the AW CG had five times the participants of the ELW CG. (10,710 and 2,152.) Of course, overall CG participation levels have changed during that time, but I'd say that the chief reason was the difference in rewards: the AW CG gave a double-engineered DSS to its participants, which was new and exclusive at the time, and a 4x bonus for exploration data (as opposed to the 3x LYR bonus) for the duration of the CG and 3x for two weeks after.
Compared to this, the ELW CG offered far less in terms of rewards: a discount on Saud Kruger's passenger ships and their liveries, and depending on the participant's position, free cabins and passenger ships. In a nutshell, the rewards were far less compelling this time around. With less overall activity going around either way, it's little wonder that there wasn't really any visible impact on the charts. Back during the Ammonia World CG, there actually was a spike in AW scans: as I mentioned above, this time around, the likely reason there wasn't one was also that folks are farming the Road to Riches for credits and exploration rank anyway, and all the ELWs around the bubble are more likely to be entirely up-to-date than all the AWs at the time were.


So, moving back to the month's EDSM activity in itself then: last months slight increase turned back down, and we're back to the lowest level before. Last year was the same, with numbers starting to climb from the beginning of October to the middle of January. It should be interesting to see how things will go this time around, as back then, there were no content updates (no updates at all, in fact), and there was the Epic give-away. There aren't any large content updates scheduled this time either, another Epic give-away sounds unlikely to me, but we'll see if Odyssey will go on sale for the winter holidays or not.
Plus the end of the current squadron season is coming soon(ish), so we'll see how those results compare to these.

Thanks again for reading, and have fun!
 

marx

marx
It's time for the results of PC squadron exploration leaderboards, but with something extra this time around: thanks to TSCG, I have data on the top ten on the consoles for seasons 18 and 19. (See the newest subsheet.) The last time I looked at that was back in season 6, and things have changed since. As seen in the post linked above, back then PC would make up 73-75% of the total: now, it's 65% for season 18 and 63% for season 19, with PS being at 17% in both seasons and XB at 18% and 20%.

Bear in mind that since the consoles don't have the Odyssey bonus, and the squadron leaderboard tracks (mostly) credit sales, the PC results would be somewhat inflated - but by how much, we don't know, as we have no idea how many explore in Odyssey vs in Horizons.

Compared to the Season 6 numbers, the consoles seem to have fallen roughly the same as PC did. Of course, PC season 6 (as DW2 ended) was an outlier in how many credits the top ten amassed, especially the top two squadrons, and there was also that the LYR bonus still counted as squadron points too then. So take this as a rough estimate, with a pinch of salt.
Still, it looks like the consoles gained ground in exploration: we'll see how that'll change once Odyssey gets released for them, although that should be quite a different launch than what the PC had.

Also, I added a count of how many pages of squadrons the game listed for the last two seasons. For PS and XB, they were 471->474 and 732->737 respectively, while PC had 2,673->2,662. It's an interesting little statistic, and I'll fill it out for all the previous seasons, thanks to data from @Ian Doncaster . Bear in mind though that a single data sale of anything is enough to put a squadron onto the leaderboard - but it's still interesting to see these numbers.


Moving on to the full PC season 19 results then...


Compared to the previous season, the top 1,000 performed almost exactly the same as then, just a tiny bit higher. However, this was only because the squadrons outside the top 10 performed better than during the one before before; the top 10 saw a significantly lower total, it being only just a bit higher than the current lowest record holder, season 8. Of course, there's the Odyssey bonus to consider there, so without that, chances are that this season would have set a negative record. (Unless squadrons outside the top ten used the LYR bonus in significant numbers, which I doubt they did.)
Even inside the top ten though, much of the difference comes from the top three squadrons being much closer together than during the previous season. Last time, the first two squadrons raced each other, and both surpassed the others by a big margin, this time, they didn't. If anything, this season was more of a return to form. It's quite interesting how the actions of the top three squadrons can influence the total though. I suppose it's also that there aren't that many large squadrons dedicated to exploration.

Meanwhile, over on EDSM, things might be slightly declining again, but with less than two weeks since the month's start, it's too soon to tell.

Thanks for reading, and see you in November then!
 
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marx

marx
Another month, and unfortunately, more bad news. Activity on EDSM has continued its downward trend, and has now set a new negative record. Originally, it was at its lowest after the FSS reveal shot exploration in the legs, reaching its nadir for a few days just before the Chapter Four update was out: now, the slide since the start of this year has gone low enough that activity has stayed under that level for a longer time.
In comparison, the monthly number of new systems discovered has halved since the beginning of 2021, and is a bit less than a third of the previous peaks (which were just before the first Beyond update, and later DW2's first stages saw the same level of activity).

So yeah, that's where we are now. I wonder how much of this might have been driven by console players being put off by Odyssey having been postponed for them: after all, that was pretty much the only major thing that happened back in January. Not that there's much for explorers to look forward on PC either: new content is only scheduled to come next year, who knows if it'll have anything for exploration, and even the tiny content of new tourist beacons have missed their promised release date and have gone MIA since. But hey, almost every ship's jump ranges will increase double-engineered FSDs coming to classes 3-6 now. Hooray. Well, it should be interesting to see by next month if that'll impact anything, but I doubt it.
Then there'll be the additions to fleet carriers coming by the end of the year, although I expect we'll likely see those (or at the very least their effects) next year instead.

And that's that. Just to make it clear though, none of this is a significant drop recently: it's a result of a steady decline for almost a year now, with only a small bump interrupting the trend for about a month. In fact, it's remarkable how one could barely tell when Odyssey released if they were just looking at the charts : the only thing that it brought was one day's sharp drop, as the servers were down for a while. Otherwise, it was business as usual. (As opposed to the Beyond Chapter Four update, which brought a huge upwards spike, and which DW2 kept sustained for some months.)

Well, that's all then. Thanks for reading, and see you next month with squadron activities as well!
 

Orvidius

Orvidius
I drew some roughly year-long trend lines into the graph to show the decline. Not statistically valid trend lines, as I just eyeballed it. But you can clearly see a steady decline over the course of a year.

Click to embiggen.
 

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marx

marx
Oh yeah, as a reminder: the sheet linked in the first post has a number of nice charts, they can be used well to illustrate things. Let me just make some screenshots and put them here, so that people don't have to go looking for them.

Here's the weekly moving average of adjusted new systems (all new systems uploaded minus revisited systems), from when the FSS was revealed.
These will be thumbnails, click on them to enlarge them:
exploration-activity-01.png
For a smoother line, the same as a 30-day moving average:
exploration-activity-02.png

It's interesting to note that after the FSS reveal, it only took three months for exploration to be halved, before the Chapter Four update's launch brought in a spike, and then DW2 boosted it even higher a couple of weeks later.


For bodies, I'd say the more relevant statistics are bodies scanned per system. The auto-scanned Stars per Systems statistic tends to see little variation, probably only as a reflection of how many explorers go farther from the core. Planets scanned per Systems is done manually, on the other hand, so that had larger differences. Compare Stars:
exploration-activity-03.png
To Planets:
exploration-activity-04.png
Planets / Systems shows nicely the part when players were abandoning DW2 in droves and rushing back to the bubble without scanning.


So, something new. I just made a systems chart for this year, with a trendline applying simple linear regression (in other words, don't use this for any serious predictions):
exploration-activity-05.png
It doesn't mean that new systems will hit zero next year, but it does show that the trend has been pretty clean in 2021 so far. Earlier years for which we have data have certainly been more varied than this.

I think I'll make some nice new charts to better illustrate the PC exploration squadron leaderboard trends as well, but those will come later, as there aren't any currently.
And hey, at the year's end, I might as well post screenshots of the charts again, so that they are easier to look up. I'll do that in two months then.
 
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marx

marx
Before I sum up November in the update - it won't be long - there was something else: I added a number of new charts, and overhauled the squadron data somewhat, adding some extra information there. There's a new sheet called "Charts - Squadrons", to illustrate some of this.
Moreover, at the bottom of "Charts - daily", you can find a larger chart with the dates of important exploration-related events marked: you can see how those changed, or didn't change, how many new systems players uploaded.

Also, since it doesn't look like many things are happening monthly, I'll most likely be switching from monthly updates of the EDSM statistics to updating them at the same time as squadron seasons end.


So, looks like November was time for good news and bad news. The good news: November was almost exactly the same as October. The bad news: November was almost exactly the same as October.
To elaborate: this was good news because after an almost full year of near-constant decline, things have stabilised for a month. But this was bad news because we're still at a record low level of activity, and it has stabilised there.

As an interesting side note, the second phase of the Colonia Bridge trade CGs gave out the new class 3, 4, 6 double-engineered FSDs. This doesn't seem to have done much to exploration activity though, and judging by the participation numbers, it was only to around five thousand Commanders anyway. Otherwise, these are not yet available through tech brokers to anyone, but Frontier have said that they will be there - just not yet when. (They also said that the third phase CG will be in January, again giving out double-engineered FSDs, plus improving tritium supply along the megaships.)

That's all then. See you next Thursday, when the current squadron leaderboard season ends!
 

marx

marx
Another squadron leaderboard season ended yesterday, but I didn't get around to posting the write-up. So, let's see how that worked out with exploration on the PC: Season 20 has shown signs of recovery. It hasn't reached the level of the first Odyssey season (17), and also wasn't quite at previous regular levels yet, despite the Odyssey buff - but compared to the previous season, it has improved. More interestingly, this was more due to increased totals outside of the top ten than inside it. The number of squadron pages increased this season, after the slight decreases of the previous two seasons, so that's a related positive sign too. It still seems like there was some healthy competition in the top ten though, and not just two squadrons racing each other for the gold trophy.

No info on the consoles yet: if somebody could send me those (at least the top ten), I'd be grateful, and include them in the data of course. Oh, and I'll update the EDSM numbers a few days later, so those will be added to the season comparison too.
 

Rogue I

Rogue I
marx said:
Another squadron leaderboard season ended yesterday, but I didn't get around to posting the write-up. So, let's see how that worked out with exploration on the PC: Season 20 has shown signs of recovery. It hasn't reached the level of the first Odyssey season (17), and also wasn't quite at previous regular levels yet, despite the Odyssey buff - but compared to the previous season, it has improved. More interestingly, this was more due to increased totals outside of the top ten than inside it. The number of squadron pages increased this season, after the slight decreases of the previous two seasons, so that's a related positive sign too. It still seems like there was some healthy competition in the top ten though, and not just two squadrons racing each other for the gold trophy.

No info on the consoles yet: if somebody could send me those (at least the top ten), I'd be grateful, and include them in the data of course. Oh, and I'll update the EDSM numbers a few days later, so those will be added to the season comparison too.
Click to expand...
I got the Xbox Exploration top ten from last season. Should I post it here or send it to you directly?
 

marx

marx
I added yearly breakdowns of the 7-day moving averages to the "Charts - daily" sheet, with exploration-related events marked on them (it's easier to tell them apart here than on the full timeline chart), but I'll be inserting screenshots of them here too. Before that though, since I updated December for this, might as well sum up the month here too: nothing much happened. Activity seems to be holding at the same level as last month, maybe trending up ever so slightly - but it could just as easily be some regular fluctuation. So, after sliding down for most of the year, the end of 2021 saw exploration activity stabilise at the lowest level to date.

Well then, here are the charts, all on the same range so it's easier to visualize how the years' activities compare to each other. Plus some short recaps and mentions from me.
First off, 2017, the year of Thargoids:
exploration-activity-2017.png

This one isn't a full year, it only starts tracking from 2017. April 1, as earlier EDSM data wasn't nearly as complete. It's worth noting that while the "official" confirmed return of Thargoids was with the 2.4 "The Return" update, the actual first recorded encounter with Thargoids was on 2017. January 5. Still, as the update later in the year expanded on the Thargoid content and investigations, you can see how high activity went.
It's also worth noting that according to the (rather sparsely updated) official numbers from Frontier, the time between 2016. March and 2018. March was when players explored the most, with an average of 114,702 new systems per day. Granted, that's well beyond just 2017, but at least it covers the entirety of it... and as it turned out, the new developments that affected exploration in 2018 started just after March anyway.

Moving on to the infamous year 2018:
exploration-activity-2018.png

This year was probably the most eventful for exploration, though not in a good way.

But first, a sweet-and-sour note to start on: back in a beta, Frontier wanted to buff the jump range of the Type 7 slightly, but since whoever was tasked with this wasn't paying attention, they managed to have it outjump the Anaconda. That was because the "slight buff" was increasing the FSD class from 5 to 6. After complaints from plenty of people, they reverted this and changed the buff to just decreasing the base hull mass. Fun fact: if that class increase were done today, the Type 7 could jump 110 ly on a full tank.

The first release of the Beyond series, Chapter One, already started off on a sour note: while Frontier released the Guardian FSD boosters, it turned out that whoever designed it didn't know how FSD jump calculations worked, and the module made ships unable to jump in most use cases. It was bad enough that Frontier removed it entirely, and we had to wait four months until Frontier added a working version of it with the Chapter Two update. That saw a lot of people grinding out the materials for the booster, and then going back out to explore again.
Some bad news came though when first the focused feedback section on the big exploration update for the year's end were first postponed indefinitely from their original schedule, then it later came not as an entire forum section with multiple threads, but just a single thread. That was the infamous FSS reveal. Many replied to the serious concerns of explorers with "wait until we see how the FSS is in action", which came on a livestream a couple of months later, which... didn't make things any better. In the end, exploration briefly reached its lowest level of activity after this, only to spike with the release of Chapter Four and climb back to previously levels. About a month later, the start of Distant Worlds 2 would spike this much higher, but that'll be 2019.

Time for 2019, the year of Distant Worlds 2:
exploration-activity-2019.png

The beginning of 2019 saw the launch of Distant Worlds 2 expedition roughly doubling exploration activity, with lots of players who never tried exploration before doing so now. Aided by Community Goals leading to constructing a station near Sagittarius A*, activity briefly set a record high, and it's impressive to see just how much it fell as the expedition stopped moving to spend time around the center.
As a funny side note, Frontier also chose to run a short exploration CG back in the bubble while DW2 was still underway. Let's just say that participation numbers on that weren't exactly stellar.

Unfortunately, Frontier's promises of new things to be found around the galaxy and engaging new mechanics didn't work out for most new players, and attrition started to take its toll on DW2 after it left the core, and on exploration as a whole after DW2 ended. Player retention (on exploration) wasn't good enough to offset the damage done in 2018, and after DW2, the rest of 2019 saw activity stagnate at a lower level than before.

On to 2020, the year of Fleet Carriers:
exploration-activity-2020.png

This year, exploration was all about Fleet Carriers, which brought some interesting effects to activity. First, when people came to know just how much carriers would cost (few people estimated it to be this many), a significant portion of explorers seemed to flock back to the bubble, to grind out the billions of credits required via the mining gold rush. Second, this effect isn't visible on the weekly moving average chart, but as fleet carriers spread over the galaxy, the usual activity peaks on weekends and lows on Wednesday became more muted. The reason for this was most likely that players could sell exploration data more frequently.

Then after carriers, we got the announcement on Odyssey, and as a welcome surprise, the first video showcase of the expansion focused on planetary exploration. Although as it later turned out, this pretty much covered everything that was new to do with exploration. (But we'd only realise this next year.) Finally, the end of the year had Frontier give away the game for free on the Epic games store, which led to an enormous influx of players: however, the increase in exploration activity was much more muted than it was in the bubble.

Then there was 2021, the year of Odyssey:
exploration-activity-2021.png

The previous year was all about Odyssey and all its controversies, starting with Frontier announcing the console split back at the beginning of the year. Following a brief rise, exploration activity spent much of the year declining steadily. The release of the expansion itself seems to have had remarkably little effect on exploration. At the time of Odyssey's release, player numbers spiked to new highs, then fell just as enormously later, but not exploration. Little wonder though, considering how lackluster exobiology turned out to be. Bear in mind that the Odyssey alpha just before April already revealed the full extent of it, so people already knew what gameplay to expect from it.

It's also worth noting the exploration CG centered around Earth-like worlds, as that was held alongside a contest for players to submit systems for tourist beacons to be included, because this was a first. However, since exploration CGs are centered around farming already discovered locations, and the competition was mostly about that too, neither of these had any sort of visible impact on exploration activity. (The previous ammonia worlds CG at the end of 2020 at least saw some increase in AWs uploaded.)

In the end, after the long decline, the latter half of 2021 saw exploration activity finally leveling off, but unfortunately it did so at the lowest point to date.

Updated a year after this post, here's 2022, the Second Year of Thargoids:
Most of the year's updates were concerned with Thargoids, hence why this is the second year of Thargoids, the first having been 2017. This time around, they didn't spur any increase in exploration, as it was all about them coming to us. Otherwise, all that was done was some rebalancing of exobio payouts, and fleet carriers had gotten Vista Genomics as part of the newly added carrier interiors. With so little happening on the exploration front from Frontier, it should be no surprise that the activity which has started from a previous record low has gotten even lower, but pretty much flattened out. (Meanwhile, the new Thargoid war mechanics introduced near the end of the year brought a substantial increase in overall player activity.) However, this was against a backdrop of Frontier dropping console development completely, and half a year later splitting the game into the live and legacy branches - so it's remarkable that these didn't seem to have much of an effect on the crowdsourced data and the PC squadron leaderboards, one way or another.

Here's this year's chart then:
View attachment 340721
Note that as with previous charts, the range is set to 70,000 top because that was around the highest it had reached before, even if only briefly.

Now, last year I wrote that "we know very little about what's coming to the game. There's a lot of speculation around new Thargoid content, for example - but we'll see.", and this time around, I can write that we know next to nothing about what's coming to the game. Frontier said that they plan to do a core feature rework, and more narrative content, and that's it. Here's hoping I'll still be around to write these at the end of 2023 then, that there'll be something worth writing about.

Then there was 2023, the Third Year of Thargoids (starting to see a pattern here, hm?):
exploration-activity-2023.png

Note: I had to change the bottom to 5,000 systems, which used to be 10,000 before, but this year the line regularly went below that.
With the key something something rework having been delayed out of the whole year, 2023 in exploration was mostly about two things. As before, the game's update were related to Thargoids only, all focused on the revamped war mechanics from the end of last year, so there wasn't much to write home about elsewhere.
The only exploration-related event in-game was the Ammonia Worlds exploration CG in March. The last time there was one was back in 2021, with the notable Saud Kruger Earth-like Worlds CG that also ran a campaign for choosing locations to add tourist beacons to. The other exploration CG prior to that one was also targeted for Ammonia Worlds, and gave out double-engineered DSS-es as reward. However, this time around, there were no special rewards, just an increased credits payout (for everyone) that lasted two weeks after the CG concluded. As such, it wasn't much of a surprise that the participation this time fell far short of the one before, even though this one ran for two weeks, while the last one had the standard duration of one week.

However, it was a surprise that contrary to what was before, the increased payout counted for squadron leaderboard points as well. This gave a moderate boost to overall points during that season.
Otherwise, the trend both there and on EDDN uploads were mostly the same: the slow and steady decline. This appears to be fairly well set by now, and assuming nothing else changes, most fits I've done would put it leveling out entirely somewhere between the second half of 2025 and early 2026. That would be quite the assumption to make though.

After all, many people assumed this year that the launch of Starfield would kill Elite. Some of the more modest (heh) expectations were that it would kill off "just" exploration. So, the other noteworthy exploration-related event of 2023 was the launch of Starfield in early September. That actually led to a noticeable decrease in EDDN activity starting about three weeks prior to the release... but well, Bethesda's new game failed to live up to many peoples' expectations. It didn't kill Elite, and it didn't kill exploration either, as by around a month after its launch, activity has slowly returned to the same level as it was before the dip, and has basically remained there since. No movement in any direction. That's somewhat remarkable on its own, really - especially as Frontier the company fell into a crisis by the end of the year.
For now, no announcements have been made, so even though this has been in the making for a long time, whatever will happen will have its effects on exploration felt in 2024. Assuming there will be any, that is.

Well, that turned out to be longer than I planned, but hey, there we have these. I look forward to updating this next year... although right now, we don't exactly have much to look forward to, as we know very little about what's coming to the game. There's a lot of speculation around new Thargoid content, for example - but we'll see.
 
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