Follow my long-haul space journey on EDSM’s interactive map.

I’m now underway as part the Distant Worlds 2 expedition and spent a few hours in Elite Dangerous yesterday, visiting the first two sightseeing spots on the way to the second expedition waypoint. My first stop, Shapley 1 is a very unusual nebula that is quite beautiful. I set down on Moon A1 in the system Fine Ring Sector JH-V C2-4 and enjoyed the vista for a while.

I then carried on to HR 6164, roughly 1400 light years from Earth, to enjoy what is colloquially known as “The View”, a system with a Type O star, a neutron star and two black holes. I hung out at the tourist installation next to the neutron star for a bit before landing on one of the planets next to the beacon that marks “The View”. I did completely forget, however, that I had outfitted my ship with quite puny thrusters to save weight and to improve my jump range. Which led to a bit of a rough landing in the 3.3 g gravity of that planet – this took my ship hull down to 23% health. Ouch.

The rough landing, let’s not call it a crash, will necessitate some repairs on a station. Luckily, I’m not that far out of the bubble yet and there are still outposts with repair facilities on the way. I just hope this won’t happen again when I’m actually in the black, very far from aynthing, in a few weeks.

I’ve been mapping my progress so far using Elite Dangerous Market Connector and the EDSM website. The program extracts jump information out of my local game log and syncs it to the EDSM server. You can see my current position on this interactive map and also explore the general progress of everyone taking part in DW 2. In case these Commanders have submitted nav data like me, they also appear on this map of the expedition’s movements.

I had used EDMC and EDSM before, but never to track my jumps in the game. Now I kind of wish I had done so from the start. Because that would mean I coult plot all of the 7607 hyperspace jumps I’ve done since the game went live in 2014 (my hundreds of hours spent jumping in the Alpha and Beta releases don’t count, of course). All in all, I’ve travelled 122,083 light years on my main account since then. Well, at least I’m tracking it now that I’m going on the longest single journey by far that I’ve ever undertaken in this game. Better late than never. CMDR Brannigan out.