Getting ready for the second leg of the Distant Worlds 2 expedition in Elite Dangerous.

Since my previous post in this series, I’ve visited a station and repaired my ship, so it’s now back to full health. After getting that done, I had made my way towards Omega Sector VE-Q b5-15, the second waypoint in the Distant Worlds 2 expedition, pretty directly. I just made one short stopover at Thor’s Eye. There’s an obsolutely gorgeous ringed gas giant in that system, which I just had to have a look at. I also explored the black hole in that system for a little while as it had been years since I’d seen one – the last time must have been just after the game launched in 2014.

From what the expedition’s organising team had communicated, I had assumed we were meant to be at the Omega Mining Operation by Sunday, 20 January at the latest. Once I had arrived there on that Sunday afternoon, however, I learned that the next depature date was actually Sunday, 27 January. I guess they changed this somewhat at the last minute to give people time to complete the community goals at the Omega station without lagging behind.

I did briefly try some mining on that Sunday, but then spent the rest of the week logged out of Elite as real life got in the way. I missed everybody departing for the second leg of the journey from the Omega Nebula last night for the same reason. I plan to rejoin the expedition fleet tomorrow, as I also leave Omega Mining and head for the Arkgamanon Mountain Range, the recommended excursion on this leg of the journey. The next meeting spot for the DW2 fleet are the Conflux Abandoned Settlements in the system PRU AESCS NC-M D7-192.

This time, the fleet will only have an actual week to get there. But this leg is shorter than the last one, the direct route being only a bit under 4000 ly. The plan is that commanders being part of the expedition will arrive at the Conflux Site from Friday, 1 February with the next waypoint being announced on the evening of Sunday, 3 February.

I will probably be late for this leg of the trip and will have to catch up later. I’m flying to Brussels over the weekend for the FOSDEM open source conference, which means that at the very least, I won’t be around for the jump out of PRU AESCS NC-M D7-192. But I probably won’t make it all the way to the current waypoint during this week either.

That unexpected one week extension of the deadline for waypoint 2 threw my planning for a loop, but with life and work being as busy as they are, maybe that’s just as well. I think in the future, I will have to plan my Elite play time into my work schedule, if I want to have a realistic chance to keep up with this expedition. I might just stream it all from now on and incorporate it into my streaming schedule – it will be easier for me to make constant progress in the game that way.

Speaking of streams, if you want to watch me flying some of the first leg of the journey, I broadcasted more than two hours of that trip. And like all of my streams, it got archived on YouTube.

I’ll also be keeping you up to date on here as the journey progresses, of course. CMDR Brannigan out.

Postscriptum: Today is Frontier’s 25th anniversary, by the way. Congratulations! What a fantastic job they’ve done with this game!