HELLO, HORIZONS!!

Steam has Horizons on sale for the Chinese New Year and I picked it up!


At first blush, you don’t really see a difference between the DLC and the main game until you start looking at planets closer. I traveled back to Aura and landed on one!

Transitioning from space to planet was pretty seamless. There are a bunch of tutorials out there but really you can almost figure it out on your own. If you’re willing to just fly at a planet that is…

So I got on the planet and I was like, YEAH! Now what?!

There wasn’t really much else to do. You can drive around in a Scarab which is a Surface Recon Vehicle (SRV), but I didn’t have one yet. I flew around the planet to get to an installation on the other side. Flight is just like in space. Normal flight is slow enough to take forever. You can do it…but you’ll be flying for like 30 minutes to an hour as opposed to just a few. So you jump into what’s called Orbital Cruise, which is pretty my super cruise for planets.

By the way, this is what happens when you bounce off the ground because you didn’t pull up out of a dive fast enough.


That’s a broken canopy.

Which also brings me to changes I’ve made to the ship. I upgraded Life Support. So now I have 25 minutes (used to be 5) to get to a place to repair if I pop my canopy. Additionally, once I docked at the base, I had to drop one of my extra fuel tanks to make room for the hangar module to hold the SRV. Those are the two biggest changes. The Life Support module draws more power which put me over what my Power Plan can handle. I’m maxed in the Power Plant area, meaning I’ve got the best I can get, so I have to manage my power consumption now. Less fuel just means shorter overall journeys before I have to refuel. It doesn’t affect my single jump range. I forgot to check to see if the added weight of the SRV and its hanger lowers my range…hmmm.

So now I have an SRV!

It took me a good while to figure out how to drive the thing. There were no default key mappings and I wasn’t 100% sure what did what when I took my first crack at it. I may well still mess around with the controls but I figured out how to drive around, shoot, and nearly flip it over.

I also got lost. I got in the SRV at the base and drove around long enough to forget what pad my ship was on. Turns out you can target the base and request docking to get a little indicator. I’d very much rather have an indicator for my ship on the HUD at all times. Maybe they’ll tweak it in a future update.

Frontier changed up how the Horizons product shows up in the Steam Store. It’s now a DLC for Elite Dangerous and should cover new content planned to be released for the rest of the year.

I didn’t just play around with the new SRV, either! I got some work done. This was the result of half an hour bounty hunting in a High Resource Extraction Site in Aura. I’m also pretty close to a new rank in Combat. That’ll be cool!


Anyone else try to line it up perfect so you get this when jumping?


Fly save, Commanders!