Up until this point my time in Elite: Dangerous was spent running courier missions from space station bulletin boards and defending miners on asteroid rings orbiting planets. It was fun, and still is, but I yearned to explore -- to leave human inhabited space.

For those who aren't familiar with Elite: Dangerous, the game procedurally generates the entire milky way galaxy. With the exception of a few hand crafted systems the galaxy is largely unknown and unexplored. The Milky Way is so vast that players haven't explored 1% of it.

Exploration in Elite: Dangerous can be a monotonous experience if you're not in the right mindset. It boils down to holding down a button to scan a system, and if anything interesting should show up on the system map, locking to it, and getting close enough to the celestial body that your surface discovery scanner can scan it. The distance necessary to scan something can vary depending on how large it is.

I left Alioth, my home system, with a pretty decent understanding of these mechanics.

My ship, an Asp Explorer, was earned by killing countless pirates for their bounties. It cost an upwards of 17 million credits (you start the game with 1,000 CR). This was the largest investment I've ever made and the first ship I ever outfitted that couldn't at least go out without my attacker having really earned it.

Most of the build guides that I read didn't include any weapons and went for thin shields to save weight and increase jump distance between systems. Going weaponless made me uneasy. If I was going to be out there for a week I didn't want to lose all of my exploration data to some overzealous pirate. That's money. That's my name under the "Discovered By" tags of planets. I didn't want to lose that. So, to keep me at ease I opted to take two small beam lasers and a chaff launcher with me. I never once fired those lasers. Eventually, deep in space, I shut them off entirely.

I had several goals on this first trip. The first, and simplest, was to earn enough money from my data to make a return on my beautiful golden Asp. The second goal was to visit a nebula. My third and most important goal was to get my name listed under the "discovered by" tag of a celestial body for other players to see. An Earth-like world would have been the golden prize, but I would be satisfied with a water-world or an interesting star.

I set a course to the Pleiades Nebula where I knew I'd see a black hole. The journey there was short with every system along the way having been fully discovered. Frustrating, yes, but unsurprising. I quickly learned that nebulae are common tourist destinations that have been picked clean of data. You still get good money for high value celestial bodies even if you aren't the first to have seen it.

I left Pleiades satisfied. I saw my first black hole and was able to take beautiful photographs of the Nebula but I was unsure of where to go from there.

One of the most important lessons that I learned in the black was that you have to pay attention to the gravity of any planets that you're trying to land on. One of the worlds I tried to drop into had nearly 1G. I aligned my ship perfectly with the surface, fired my vertical thrusters, and slammed onto the surface, bouncing off, blowing out my paper thin shields and doing 28% hull damage. So, I was faced with a decision. I could either go back to human inhabited space, sell whatever data I had collected, and patch up my ship, or continue on. After much soul searching (and forum searches) I decided to keep on (space) truckin'.

I explained the goals that I had going into this journey. Those were important touchstones for me for sure, but they weren't the main draw. I was there to see neat shit to the point where I created this "space photographer" narrative for myself to keep things interesting.

One of the biggest complaints people have about Elite: Dangerous is that it feels dead, and yeah -- I totally agree. The game feels lifeless in places where it shouldn't, but out here in the black that lifelessness feels right. I have never played anything that's able to emulate the coldness and loneliness of space quite like Elite has. It feels like how I imagine it should. It just feels real.

Elite is beautiful. The scale of worlds is breathtaking. As you approach these lifeless, seemingly tiny marbles you soon come to realize how tiny and insignificant you are. You're dust and worlds are vast.

After Pleaides I roamed aimlessly. I tried to stay as far away from nebulae as I could. I developed a rhythm: drop into systems, scan them, check the system map for anything of value to scan, scoop fuel from the star if possible, jump to the next system.

I completed my first expedition a much wiser man. I learned that you could listen to planets in the system map and it could tell you what kind of world it was without having scanned it and potentially wasting your time traveling to it. I could gauge a lot better, too. 2,000 light seconds for a high metal content world? Not worth the trip.

I became an efficient explorer, and soon a tired explorer. I understood the drawbacks of my ship's build in ways the guides couldn't and reached a point in my journey where I had enough. I wanted to return, sell all of this data, unpack everything I had learned, rebuild, and get back out there...after a bit of a break.

When I turned in my data I had learned that I was the first to discover a ton of celestial bodies. I don't have the exact number, but trust me when I say it was a ton. The first discovered bonus in addition to the money I had already earned from my data was enough to buy myself something nice.

I bought Core Dymanic's Vulture, the best fighter ship of its size. You can kind of guess what I've been doing since I finished my expedition a few weeks ago. I'll be back out there pretty soon with a better outfitted ship, however. You can count on that.

If you're curious about some of the pictures I took during my trip I set up a DropBox folder with some of the more interesting shots. Check it out here.

I just picked up this game in the last week, and your experience seems genuinely exciting. Also, that shot of your Asp against the white sun is pretty damn awesome. It'll be a while before I get anywhere near the kind of money needed to outfit a ship like yours, but that kind of play style seems like a relaxing way to pass the time.

@neo1piv014: It's super relaxing. Shortly after I posted this I made the trip out to Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the universe. That took weeks. Space looks a lot different out there than it does in the human inhabited bubble. Stars are so dense there that once you get some distance from the main star space is completely illuminated around you.

Once you get a ship that can serve a single roll you can fast track your way towards these multi-million dollar ships. The easiest way for me to get there was to get into a Cobra MK III and hang out in resource extraction zones. Start in low to high zones until you're comfortable enough to go into hazardous. Use local security forces to your advantage. Have them weaken larger ships for you. Swoop in at the last minute and take the bounty.

Make sure you've scanned them and confirmed that they're wanted or else the security will turn their weapons towards you, and bring along a kill warrant scanner to get some extra cash from your bounties.

This is a nice write up. Elite sounds so rad in theory. I wonder if the monotony of space exploration could be broken up by a score. I bet a reserved score a la Basinski could do a lot to enhance the moment of nearing a star or cresting a planet's horizon. Perfectly timed cues are a nightmare for games though. Also that picture of the black hole is cool and the right kind of eerie.

@the_tribunal: It can get very monotonous. It's best to plan a trip and pepper it with various POIs (tourist destinations) on your system map. It's easier now that you can bookmark systems in the system map. You just have to make sure you take the road less traveled to those places because straight lines are no good if you're trying to get more cash from your trip.

The way I shook things up was trying to find cool things to take pictures of. I have a folder full of them from my month long trip to the center of the galaxy and back. I wish space photographer was an official thing in this game because I would make a killing.

Been thinking about trying this for some time but never ended up taking the plunge having heard mixed things about it.

@machofantastico: Make sure the complaints you're reading aren't from people who want this game to be the last game they'll ever need. There's a lot of valid reasons why people don't dig Elite -- it not being their ultimate cyber utopia isn't one of them.

Love these kinds of stories.

@alex_carrillo: This is very true.

Even though my complaints about the game are as numerous as my positives (and I'm quite happy if I never play it again at this stage), I've still put 300+ hours into it.

This is an excellent blog. Great shots too!

@dave_tacitus: I've got some laundry list of issues with the game, but the devs seem to have their ear to the ground at least.