Image credit: Nat.
Elite: Dangerous‘ aliens, once prone to terrifying yet ultimately peaceful encounters, have started reducing players’ ships to space dust. Of course you know, this means war.
After two years of hints and intrigue, Elite: Dangerous‘ aliens, the Thargoids, revealed themselves in all their flower-shaped, fleshy glory earlier this year. First contact was peaceful, albeit tense.
Players’ ships went haywire in the shadow of these hulking monstrosities, but when death seemed imminent, aliens would just scan player ships and be on their way.
In the wake of a big update, that’s changed. A player named Commander Reliant Owl was among the first to report a Thargoid alien attack (via PC Gamer), saying that the Thargoid shredded their shields and made short work of their ship.
Here’s a video of the encounter:
“I thought I was going to make peace with it,” Reliant Owl wrote on Reddit. “But it just zapped me!”
Think strength in numbers might solve the problem? Think again. 21 players tried to bring down a Thargoid ship at once. None of them made it back.
Other players have reported similarly violent encounters, with a few saying they managed to escape before getting squashed like puny space ants. One player, jcollasius, claims to have used a research drone to painstakingly take a “Thargoid Cyclops Tissue Sample” from an alien ship while it beat them down.
In another experiment, jcollasius also found that it’s possible to “feed” escape pods full of NPC humans to Thargoid ships. They accept these offerings and seem to remain peaceful until you stop “feeding” them:
Players have also found that when they try to scan Thargoid ships, they receive a series of strange codes. There’s now an ongoing effort to decrypt them in hopes of figuring out how to avoid getting slaughtered by diabolical space pinwheels.
The strangest encounter happened to a player named Nat, who claims that they somehow got a Thargoid ship to “shut down,” at which point they were able to get in close and observe it.
They didn’t find anything that explains why the Thargoids are suddenly going on the offensive or how to fight them. Eventually, the ship powered back up and left.
A player named Commander Badalloc has put together a guide on how to encounter a Thargoid, if you’d like to try for yourself. Remember to make sure your valuables are accounted for beforehand, though. And probably make peace with your god, too.
Comments
13 responses to “Elite: Dangerous’ Aliens Have Started Killing Players”
Yep I multicrewed with two friends and we escaped only by the skin of our teeth when encountering one of them. It one shot killed the ships we deployed in and we got the hell out of there with about a les than 1/3 Hull. My mate’s Anny was a twisted mess when we got to a station and inspected the damage.
I managed to perform a biopsy with the research limpets from founders world:
https://youtu.be/Iw_ngVHDc4g
Let’s. Get. Dangerous!
Can you have to hold down control and hit x repeatedly to enter witchspace? This was how you could get to the thargoids on the origianl elite. Anyone tried the shortcut?
Those assholes!
There are two Thargoid groups, a peaceful one and an aggressive one. This is established in some of the extended lore.
And despite playing since the original beta… with two accounts… and intentionally travelling to high Thargoid areas, I’ve still not seen a live one.
I’m not so impressed with how Elite has been handled by the devs, The return isn’t as exciting as this article makes it out to be. We need more content, More ways to interact with the world, But all we seem to get is more grind, Yay my expensive ship was destroyed by aliens.. How are you finding the Return thus far?
Give it time – they always do a release, a few bug fixes and drop some new content… and then after a week or two stuff happens.
The graphics improvements are nice, the UI improvements (20K route plotting thank goodness, better messages) are good, and the T10 Defender will be in game soon – probably after a new CG.
I don’t really think about the grind, as I just play – I’m active in a couple of explorer groups, and do expansion work with EDA Kunti League (one of the Aussie factions and I think the largest Aussie/NZ groups in game). So lots to do.
Yeah i’ll stick with it, 🙂
Feel free to add me in game. You should be able to work it out… 😉 Also I’m pretty active in the ED Australia & NZ FB group. We’re having a meet at PAX.
🙂
I’m ps4, My pc is not so great lol,.
I have it on PS4 also, but no HOTAS yet and seriously shite with the PS4 controller at flying…