Cheating is bad behavior, but doing it in a sandbox MMO is several orders of magnitude worse. While Elite: Dangerous has certainly done its best to lessen the effect of hacks and cheats, one player of the internet spaceship sandbox has uncovered a particularly insidious utility that features some worryingly deep levels of ship customization and an apparently extremely active community.
This hack program shared on the Elite: Dangerous subreddit has a wide variety of options to let users fiddle with practically every part of your ship’s performance, from power plant heat, to shield strength, to weapons fire strength among other features. The finesse with which these values can be adjusted also means cheaters can create a ship that’s nearly indistinguishable from a regular ship in the heat of combat. Furthermore, the utility has an active Discord community with users actively helping one another stay hidden.
According to the post, a report with chat log exports from Discord and screenshots was filed with Frontier in late December. Beyond a canned response, there appears to have been six months of radio silence since the support ticket was submitted. Some of the game’s devs were also directly approached with this same information, but no additional action beyond the standard reply has evidently been taken.
The post on the subreddit is enlightening and well-sourced, but there’s also an excellent video from YouTuber CMDR Exigeous that goes over hacking utilities like the one outlined in the Reddit post and its overall impact on games like Elite: Dangerous. You can find that video below.
