There is a whole lot of curiosity about Elite: Dangerous’ upcoming colonization feature (as one might expect), which means that Frontier Developments had plenty of questions that it tried to answer in the studio’s last monthly broadcast of 2024.
The pre-recorded livestream drew questions from a forum thread that opened earlier this month, which offered a few important insights into how the system will generally work, though the devs stated multiple times that hard data like costs have yet to be finalized.
The Q&A session confirmed that the costs for establishing a colony will be high, but not as expensive as buying a fleet carrier; the primary cost and effort will be material-based, as establishing colonies and related buildings will require players to ferry a whole lot of goods from nearby stars to player colonies. Consequently, there will be no fleet carrier-like upkeep requirements once a colony has been established; colonies stay in-game in perpetuity regardless of player activity level, and players can go back and use colony building features any time they want.
The devs also confirmed that this system is available for both solo players as well as groups, and that players are able to place down as many colonies as they have the time and funds to do so. Whether they decide to daisy chain their way to a specific star to expand a single colony will be up to them, but colonies will need to be placed one at a time, and the devs stress repeatedly that the process for placing a colony is a serious undertaking each time.
Questions related to balance also came up: While the devs did state that they want a “land rush” sort of feel with the system’s arrival, they also will limit the ability for players to snatch up star systems at high speed or halt individual players from grabbing all of the land for themselves, pointing out once again that colonies must be placed one at a time and that colonies first need to be within civilized space. There also won’t be PvP during colonization, meaning players can’t swoop in and annihilate or blockade slowly forming stations and landing areas, while colony owners cannot permit-lock their star systems. The devs stated outright that colonization is an activity primarily built for exploration and trading-minded players.
As for when this all goes live, the colonization feature will effectively arrive to the live game sometime next year in an “open beta”-style arrangement; the studio needs to see how this works at scale and iterate on it as time goes on, and so it contends that putting it in players’ hands is the best way to do so. That said, despite its beta nature, player colonies will not be wiped.
In terms of more current events in E:D, the last Thargoid Titan has been popped, officially ending the multi-year Thargoid War which was heralded in both the in-game news post and a celebratory video. Players can also play the part of Santa Claus by ferrying gifts to displaced children; simply fly to the Frost Dock outpost in the Njambalba system with a ship capable of landing on a small or medium pad and scan a beacon outside of Frost Docks for delivery information.
