It won't take you long to generate enough income to buy your first Hauler, but there are bigger and better trading ships to strive for. You feel like you're interacting with a computer, not a massive space-colony where millions of people live. The menus are fine, and easy to navigate using the buttons on your fightstick, but could do with some more personality. Frontier's grand vision for the game talks of disembarking at stations and walking around them, talking to other players, but this is a long way away. Here you can refuel, repair your ship, buy and sell commodities, invest in a new ship, or pick up and turn in missions. Once you've landed you interact with the starport through a menu. The orchestral music that plays as you enter the bowels of the station is brilliantly stirring, and I love the echoing announcements that cheerily warn you not to break the law. I've docked hundreds of times and I'm still not bored of it. Approaching the giant, rotating station, sliding through the slot, and carefully settling down on the pad is such an amazing experience. This is absolutely my favourite thing in Elite: Dangerous. You'll be assigned a landing pad and given about ten minutes to get inside the station and land. Approach the station and, once you're within 7km of it, use your computer to request docking. There's a frustrating delay when you shift from deep space to an 'instance' around a station when playing online, which shatters the illusion of your journey being seamless, but I'm sure they'll fix this. Otherwise you might get tired of all those long, silent drives through space.ĭrop out of supercruise and you'll see a station spinning in front of you. Just pretend you're listening to a futuristic radio station if you're worried about killing immersion. You'll spend a good portion of your time as a trader in this mode, hurtling down the cosmic equivalent of a freeway. I wouldn't mind if they sped it up a little in future updates. You'll get better at supercruising the more you play, but it's still a slow process.
This sends you flying through space at several times the speed of light, and the trick is to carefully manage your acceleration so that you don't ping past your destination. Once you've reached the system that contains your delivery point, you'll have to activate frameshift again and enter supercruise mode. You can only jump a certain amount of times depending on how much fuel your ship can hold, so for long journeys you'll have to stop off at stations along the way to refill your tank. You'll cascade through a tunnel of swirling light and colour, like that bit at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, before being spat out at the other end next to the system's star.
Once you've undocked and set a destination, you activate your frameshift drive-I have this mapped to a satisfyingly clicky metal switch on the Warthog's throttle-and jump to the next system. The actual process of trading is fairly uneventful, but even so, you can't just switch your brain off and hit cruise control. Seeing all these player-controlled ships buzzing around makes the world feel so much more alive than in the alpha, but you can play the game alone or with a closed group of friends if you want to. I notice this when I'm trying to undock from a station and find myself in a queue waiting for other ships to move so I can slip through the tiny entrance slot. Multiplayer is a lot busier now that Frontier have dropped that infamous £100+ beta price tag to a more reasonable (but still pricey) £50. It's the quality of the simulation-the sensation of weight and motion-that makes Elite so much fun to play, even when you're doing something as tedious as ferrying random cargo between space stations.
Space colony cargo transport simulator pro#
I'm using an outrageously expensive Warthog, but if you're looking for a cheaper alternative, Saitek's X52 Pro is good too. It's perfectly playable with a gamepad or mouse and keyboard, but having a throttle and stick makes you feel connected to your ship in a way neither of them even come close to. You should too if you have access to the beta.