Frontier is going live with the 1.1 Beta today. If all goes well it should be released to the rest of us in a week or two if I remember correctly.

It comes with a huge list of fixes and tweaks. I've pulled some that I'm most looking forward to:

(my comments at the end)

NEW FEATURES/CONTENT

• Route planning extended to 1,000 ly (currently 100 ly)
• Pilots Federation rank decals (finally something besides the skull)
• Add explored system details on the right hand side of the cartographics shop (it will be great to know why a system is priced as it is)

TWEAKS & FIXES

• Added in LOD levels for the holographic guide markers on the landing pads. This should fix the issues with the guides vanishing randomly since there should always now be some mesh to render regardless of what LOD the parent hanger is set at
• Added a chevron to the landing pad schematics to help indicate the direction that a player's ship should be facing when docking (this drove me nuts when I was just getting started)
• Add a 'planning route' graphic to cover the loading of the plot (I hope this gets rid of the useless auto-generated jump lines that clutter the view)
• Add the Repairable component to several modules that otherwise couldn't be repaired by AFM modules. Discovery scanners, Detail scanners and Thrusters are all now repairable in the field
• Store whether the system map was entered from galaxy map or cockpit, and invoke appropriate transition out back to the previous state
• Implement sort by Mass, Power Draw and Name for outfitting items (I'd rather sort by module type, but hopefully this helps)
• Interdiction can be a Crime (as it should have been all along)
• Have different combat bond values for each ship type
• When the player accidentally hits an AI ship damage is accumulated. If a threshold is exceeded (by multiple hits or a powerful weapon like a rail-run), the ship turns hostile. The AI ship will "forget" the damage before it turns hostile:
  • if the AI ship recharges its shield to 100%.
  • if a (currently 30 sec) timer runs out.
• Fixed the incorrect engine stats so they give the appropriate benefit (3C thrusters are the same as 3E due to a copy/paste error apparently)
• Sort the commodity screen trade data drop-down menu alphabetically
• Tweaks to reduce stuttering around planets caused by surface texture generation (yes!)
• Make low influence minor factions able to generate missions at a comparable rate to influential minor factions

Neat, though I keep hoping for changes to the map to make it less clumsy to use. The scrolling up/down thing and the way it highlights planets by the level the shadow/guidepoint and not the level the planet graphic occupies gets really annoying if you aren't on mouse/keyboard.

YESSSSS. Such a game changer for someone that prefers to spend a lot of time exploring deep space (like me). The general shittiness of the Galaxy Map is my only major complaint about the game right now.

@reverendk: @nophilip: Agreed, the galaxy map needs some work in my opinion. I'd like for the view clipping planes to be less fiddly as well, and to be able to turn off the jump routes completely. Those lines that are supposed to be showing you everywhere you can go with your current amount of fuel are completely useless to me, and do nothing but obscure the view when trying to search for particular star systems. Speaking of searching, I'd also like to be able to apply more than one filter at a time (show me all Federation extraction systems, as opposed to just one or the other).

I'm positive it will continue to improve. That seems like a monstrous number of changes and tweaks in just a month of work. It bodes well for its continued development, I think.

Oh man, that landing graphic will help so much. I always hate going in for a smooth landing, only to have to be delayed by turning my ship 180 degrees cause I landed in backwards.

@butano: Just remember that the number is on the far side of the landing pad when approaching it from the correct direction. If it's on the near side you're coming in the wrong way.

I hope they make some additional changes eventually. One, it doesn't matter which direction you land on external pads, and two, they don't bother to spin you around when you take off. If I choose to enter the hanger and I'm facing the wrong way then sure, spin me around to back me in to the hangar. Otherwise it just wastes time. And if they'd made the pads circular you could get rid of the vertical component of the spinning entirely.

I don't know who "engineered" their landing pad system, but it's pretty illogical from top to bottom.

@bane: I know right and i never remember what side to come in from.

Update 1.1 went live a little over an hour ago!

What if it played Uncharted Worlds the whole time?

@brackynews: That would improve things by roughly 1000% but actually what it's made me want to do is play through Mass Effect rather than boot up Elite again...

I downloaded the 1.1 update but can't really be bothered with the same old grind. I'll go back once there's some actual new content announced.

Wow, they screwed up shield cell banks big time. They've gone from "overpowered" to nearly useless. I had to go through all my ships and replace them with other modules because nothing had the power to run them except the Cobra. We'll see if even the Cobra can keep them installed once I can afford to upgrade from class C to class A modules.

As a primarily solo player all of the nerfs and tweaks they implement to "balance" PVP is somewhat alarming. Who knows if and when they'll decide to mess with the numbers and all of a sudden the setup you had last night is no longer viable. My Viper was a finely tuned machine, walking the razor's edge on both weight and power usage. Now it's all out of whack thanks to having to rip out the shield cell banks.

I'm glad I don't own a Python, though.

I really need to get back into this game. Got it during the Beta phase and played a bit but found the grind to earn funds rather tedious. I'm honestly just waiting until we can walk around our ships...that is huge for me.

After watching the recent Subnautica Quick Look, and seeing how that game did a pretty good job of giving you a ship that felt like a home base you could go exploring in, dock smaller ships to, and repair if shit hits the propeller. If Elite Dangerous gives us just some of these features, I will never leave. How great would it be to have a large ship with jump capabilities that you could use to travel to a mining location, then once you have arrived you could hop into a smaller sidewinder equipped for mining in tight quarters, disengage from your main ship and enter the asteroid belt, and return once your stores are full? Or go EVA to repair damage after an intense dogfight?

A lot of potential with this game, and I am excited to see if it eventually reaches the levels I believe it can.

The grace period for accidentally shooting people is great too.