After a long wait the latest content update for Elite Dangerous is here. Titled The Engineers it delivers more content as well as a long awaited changes to the game. The main theme here is the ability to alter your ship components by crafting upgrades. This is done with a fair bit of grind and randomness which is causing quite a bit of controversy. In order to get access the upgrades you will need to gain enough reputation with each engineer by doing missions and then you will need to gather materials for the actual crafting. It sounds straightforward but at the moment it is quite time consuming and the fact that the crafting result is in the hands of a random dice roll is putting people off and in some case at arms.

The new update is coming in two parts. One is The Engineers, patch 2.1, which is for the Horizons expansion, or Season as Frontier call it, and patch 1.6 if you just own the base game. The updates address some issues ranging from help with navigation on the galaxy map, rebalancing, improving AI, all the way up to upgrading the visuals, addressing the long-standing asteroid field level of detail issue, making planet surfaces and space station interiors more detailed, improving the lighting and others visual improvements.

The Engineers had a bumpy ride. It is the first major update from the set of four that were planned to run throughout this season, which was initially meant to run through this year. It is unclear if or how much the delay has altered the release schedule but we will have to wait and see. Frontier are treating Elite Dangerous as an MMO with a plan to release a season/expansion every year that is supposed to help the game expand and evolve.

If you want to know all the changes in the update you can check them out in the patch notes. Be warned though, it’s a long one.