USS: Elite Dangerous
Elite Dangerous Tips for Beginners
Flying from port to port may be an easy way to make money, but it does lack any sort of adventure. We don’t all want to dig up minerals and ship them across the galaxy all day. Some commanders can’t think of anything more painful than shipping 120 tonnes of biowaste to an agricultural station.
For those commanders, and many others, there is a saving grace in Elite: Dangerous. That grace comes in the shape of Unidentified Signal Sources, shorted to USS by the Elite: Dangerous community.
Visible around star systems during Supercruise, whatever can be found at each Unidentified Signal Source is almost complete randomized. If you’ve got missions in your Transactions tab there’s every possibility that in a USS will be a trader/pirate/samaritan who wants to ask for you to change allegiances.
When you’re just randomly flying around they can contain randomly floating goods or even battles between Wanted characters and security forces. Whatever they’ve got, it’s always worth investigating them if you’re not doing something incredibly important. You never know what you’re going to find.
Investigating these random spots in Elite: Dangerous often leads to a bounty of goodness being bestowed upon you. Most importantly though, they just break up the monotony of wandering through systems on mission after mission.
Except when your objective is time sensitive. While fines are only small, they can add up if you drop into a USS only to be blown into space bits by that guy flying a Python.
They can take a few minutes to show up so don’t expect to leave a station and suddenly be surrounded by random events to fly over to. New ones appear pretty frequently, so much so that you could see multiple opportunities pop up between entering a system and flying towards your destination.
One small additional note here too. For the love of all that is holy (or unholy) check the goods to see if they’re stolen or not. If they are, you’ll have to venture into a dark world of silent running and speedy boosts towards stations if you’d prefer avoid fines to paying them.
