Introduction

‘A few got to be deadly, but Elite … well, we were special. People respected us. Being Elite meant something out on the Frontier …’
‘You’ve been to the Frontier?’ ‘To it, through it, past it,’ the woman smiled. ‘Don’t tell no one, but I got as far as the Formidine Rift1, not many folks can say that! No one has gone past it and lived to tell the tale.’
‘The Formid …?’
‘Edge of the galactic arm. Take a line from Reorte to Riedquat to the edge of the arm and … keep going.’ The woman grimaced. ‘Stars thin out, you can see the whole galaxy just hanging there. I took a fancy to going exploring after I lost …’ she paused, a sadness creeping across her face, ‘… had some time to spare. Quiet for the most part, until …’
‘Until what?’
‘Let’s just say there was some serious shit out there, stuff you wouldn’t believe. No really – no one believed me, said it was all a fabrication. I had no proof you see and they edited my memory afterwards. Ah, it’ll all come back to bite them one day, it’s all there in the Imperial databanks somewhere – and they thought the Thargoids were trouble …’

– From Elite: Reclamation, by Drew Wagar

A strange old woman, an Elite combateer2 and a line out to the Frontier. This was the clue from the book Reclamation back in 3300 (2014).

Notes for Future Explorers

Ideally, you should:

  • Have a 50+LY jump range for an easy trip (jump estimates based on a range of 68LY)
  • Bring a Detailed Surface Scanner so you can find… things
  • Bring an SRV or two for surface… stuff
  • Fit an Automatic Field Maintenance Unit to keep modules in one piece
  • Make sure you have a repair limpet controller for your hull
  • BUY LIMPETS 🙂

The trip is over 31,000 LY in total. It starts in the bubble, heads out to the black and finishes back in the bubble. So it is a round trip.

It’s comprised of 16 waypoints (plus two extra optional ones), some of which are only a few light years apart, but two are nearly 5,000LY and one is a whole 12,000LY which is the trip back to the bubble from way out in the black for the final waypoints.

Historical Note

Back in 3302 (2016), ships only had a 35LY jump range at best, the route plotter only did 1,000LY maximum, and we had no surface scanner, it was a lot tougher to find this stuff!

Elite: Reclamation came out in 3300 (2014) and by this time in 3302 (2016) we had the start of the Thargoid story, people had been hyperdicted and we had found some Unknown Probes (to be renamed Thargoid Probes fairly soon).

That Thargoid story was running in parallel with this one and both were aimed at the explorers in the game. Drew Wagar and Michael Brookes both felt there was a lot of content for traders and for combat, so this was for us explorers3 4.

From the Colonia Expedition

Ninja visited the Conflux Site during the Colonia expedition, remember the logs? Check your archive in game from Codex → Commander → Archive if you’ve been before, or:

So what are these bases about?

Who sent the ships out here planting these beacons and who then came and setup the bases?

                 

Ready to get started? Right On, Commander…

                 

Drew’s Footnotes

  1. This had its genesis in the ending of Elite Reclamation, when MB asked me for some mystery ideas. All the authors chucked ideas in, but The Formidine Rift was the one that got Michael excited, so we developed it from there.
    We were aiming for a sort of “The Da Vinci Code in space” 🙂
    BTW – Formidine is “Fear” in latin. We wanted it to be spooky. 🙂 ↩︎
  2. The identity of this woman will be revealed later in the quest. ↩︎
  3. Historical note. The Formidine Rift idea was actually concocted by Michael Brookes and myself prior to the launch of ED. We were both working through in a private writers’ forum hidden on the main fdev forms. We discussed a “raxxla-esque” type of story (raxxla itself was off-limits to the writers) that would play out in game and I embedded the first clue in Reclamation during 2013 as it was being written. ↩︎
  4. The way it was supposed to work is as follows.
    Michael Brookes and I collaborated on putting a small code in the text of systems scattered across the bubble. This was done when Michael Brookes was creating the starmap for the stellarforge in an Excel spreadsheet before ED went live. Michael Brookes didn’t want the rest of fdev to know about it either as he thought it might get stopped, so it was a bit of a secret pact!
    We embedded a code “EBP” in various systems across ED and seeded the galaxy. These systems had Greek mythological names as a clue that they were linked in some unusual way… It was supposed to be a bit like “Bad Wolf” in Dr. Who ↩︎