The current year looks to be another one where Elite: Dangerous is stepping on the gas. Or considering we’re talking about internet spaceships, is it more like pushing on the throttle? Either way, Frontier Developments’ first Unlocked livestream of this year brought plenty of new things for players to look forward to as it mapped out the sandbox’s content plans for 2025.
The year’s worth of updates are broken up into five phases, with the next phase bringing a new ship in April known as the Corsair, a medium-sized multi-role ship from the extremely fashion-forward manufacturer Gutamaya. Work on the new craft is still being done, so hard numbers on its stats and fittings weren’t provided, but the devs did say that it has “super impressive” cargo capacity, “very strong” weapon hardpoints, and is the first in its size class to be able to field size 7 thrusters.
From there, the following phases of content updates follow a seasonal track and are a bit more vague. Summer will bring another new ship and vanguards, which were described as a “spiritual successor” to the current squadrons guild system in Elite that will bring a separate UI to communicate, ways to let the guild leader set objectives that will grant perks for other members, and possibly a shared bank to let members share modules and ships. Autumn will bring a third new ship, and winter brings another ship and an undisclosed new feature. The devs also promise to continue to fix bugs and improve quality-of-life for the game.
As for right now, the Phase One portion of Elite’s 2025 is the Trailblazers update, which has introduced the new colonization feature that lets players establish colonies in otherwise uninhabited areas of space. While FDev has explained in an earlier post that this functionality is effectively a beta, it also says that it is feature complete and promises that progress will not be wiped, as the studio needs to take feedback and adjust things like resource amounts and time and distance to complete colonization tasks. Speaking of adjustments, one of the primary resources needed to establish a starting station has already seen its numbers ramped up.
Meanwhile, players appear to be eagerly taking part in the colonization land rush as they disseminate information, discuss where things stand, and ask for help from others to get wanted materials ferried in, though there are plenty of comments that otherwise ask for further increases in other materials and the allowed distance to start establishing a colony.
