It took Commander Nick Sticks 9 weeks and 6 days to drive across the planet. Piloting his SRV (Surface Recon Vehicle), he coated the complete 2,785km journey to circle Eol Prou FB-I b25-50 1, a small astral physique in Elite Dangerous, in two hour bursts.
Sticks’ journey carved a route throughout plains, over the lips of craters, down via the bowls – and up out once more, naturally – and into valleys completely trapped in pitch-black shadow. He documented all the journey in a thread on the Elite Dangerous boards.
Sticks isn’t the one one – there’s a rising membership of gamers circumnavigating planets. The query is: why?
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“What really inspired my circumnavigation was what happened to Cmdr Tannik Seldon during the ’Aquarian Job’ race,” Commander Alec Turner, founding father of The Planetary Circumnavigation Club, tells me. The race included an SRV driving stage and there was a bonus for finishing the race with simply 1% hull left. “Tannik had smashed his ship up pretty bad and then gone on to drive the SRV stage. When he recalled his ship it blew up on landing. Rather than just self destruct the SRV and start again Tannik decided he’d drive to the nearest planetary base, buy a new ship and complete the course from there.”
Strong plan, however the nearest base was on the opposite facet of the planet – “it took him most of the week,” Turner provides. Nonetheless, that is what seeded the concept of doing a whole circumnavigation.
Turner discovered a planet, Pleione three A, which had a radius of 170km, about half the dimensions of the one Sticks would later circle. “I expected it to be pretty epic,” Turner tells me. ”I knew it was going to take some time and I hoped it might each check and enhance my ‘fliving’ abilities” – a hard-to-pronounce portmanteau of driving and flying – “It was way more beautiful than I’d imagined, though.” To save fuel, Turner turned off most of the rover’s systems, which meant his windscreen would frost over – “I had ice crystals on the windscreen which tended to sparkle like glorious winter mornings.” As somebody who enjoys snowboarding, Turner says he will get “really moved by those bright mountain valley views.”
Turner used his unconventional journey to lift cash for charity, treating the expedition like a sponsored stroll. Each day, he documented his progress and directed folks to his donation drive for Special Effect. The group jumped on it – “suddenly I had all these people following the story and donating money. It was incredible, I think we raised something like £350 in the end.”
Turner sped throughout the planet managing to circle it inside every week however information of what he was as much as unfold and he had firm by the top of his journey. “A day or two before the end a few other commanders (including Tannik) managed to find me and completed the journey with me. It was really special and quite emotional.”
Another commander that joined Turner was Sticks, who was impressed to start out his personal journey.
Sticks had needed to circumnavigate a planet ever for the reason that Horizons enlargement added planetary landings on the tail finish of 2015. “I just wanted to see if it was possible,” Sticks tells me. He even made an try shortly after the replace launched however gave up after every week: “there were no materials to gather so no on-the-ground SRV refuelling or repairs [and] I suspect the planet was too big.”
Then, late final yr, “I spotted in the forum that Alec Turner was doing his circumnavigation,” Sticks says. “He was doing it right – he had chosen a small planet.” He had additionally made it a public occasion so he was drawing assist from the group. Sticks flew out to the planet Turner was attempting to drive throughout in a rover and joined him for the previous couple of classes. “Even though I knew roughly where he was and his heading it was still very difficult – the SRV really is a small dot on the surface.”
Sticks had a good time and determined to strive once more, this time discovering a much less spherical planet.
“I was on my way back from exploring a nebula out Colonia way and was just scanning all planets in unexplored systems to put my name on them,” Sticks tells me, explaining how he discovered Eol Prou FB-I b25-50 1. “This one fitted the bill in so much as it was about the right size, but also it looked interesting as it wasn’t completely round, it was like a potato.”
Potato isn’t an official time period nevertheless it’s an apt one. The makers of Elite Dangerous, Frontier Developments, don’t handcraft each planetary physique within the sport. They are, as an alternative, every generated algorithmically with a view to populate the galaxy with lots of of 1000’s of planets. This generative course of saves time however gamers have discovered it might result in some boring planets.
“You can’t get funny-looking rocks with a radius smaller than around 200km,” Elite participant Varonica writes on the game’s forums. “There’s something with the planetary mesh that prevents bumps and depressions at less than that radius. In fact the bumpiest bodies tend to be in the 300km to 500km radius, larger than that and they smooth out due to gravitational attraction, smaller than 200km radius they smooth out due to technical issues with the planet mesh, so it appears [Sticks has] selected an ideal potato.”
On December 27th, Sticks began his journey from the centre of a crater on his potato planet. With his rover getting as much as 30kph on the flat, however extra usually averaging 15kph, Sticks was settling in for an extended journey. And that is again when he was planning on driving in a straight line.
Per week into his journey he had coated 225km. “For a lot of the time there were no sights, it was pretty flat with just the odd crater to break up the journey,” Sticks tells me. “Seeing a mountain or a large hill was a luxury. Then there would be the bumpy zones which slowed you down.”
Sticks would map his route as he went – “I never picked where I would finish before starting” – and would discover good locations to cease as he went. “For example, the centre of a crater seems like a good place to stop or right before a large feature like a mountain or a valley system.”
Despite the largely vacant expanses, driving the SRV took up a whole lot of Sticks’ consideration – “You have to constantly adjust your heading to keep on track and if you did look away a big rock would jump in your path and you would crash into it.”
For a planet with out an environment, Sticks encountered a stunning quantity of life, too. Remote sentinel drones guarding deserted cargo, pop up analysis stations, and, on January 7, he discovered pirates.
Sticks got here throughout the rusting carcass of an SRV. Scattered across the useless rover have been cargo crates full of silver. Looting the house chests, Sticks continued on along with his journey for a couple of kilometres when he heard “Ship scan detected.” They attacked the following day.
Sticks needed to name in his ship to strive for a hasty retreat. He dropped the silver out of his cargo maintain, hoping it might draw away the pirates however, as a result of he forgot to lift his touchdown gear, he was not capable of increase to security. “There was vibrant flash and I awoke at Eavesdown Docks,” Sticks wrote in a forum post.
Sticks didn’t raid any of the cargo canisters he discovered after that.
Originally, Sticks had deliberate on circling the planet in a straight line, solely deviating to go to the factors of curiosity flagged up by his radar (cargo containers, spaceship wrecks, and so forth). Around the identical time because the pirate assault he modified his route, drawing a line across the planet that will take him to Eol Prou’s pockmarks – craters, valleys, and mountains. “To spice the trip up,” Sticks explains to me. It would add lots of of kilometres to the journey, days of driving, and make for a more difficult expedition, however it might take him to the planet’s largest sights.
“The sights were spectacular along this detour, particularly through the valleys,” Sticks says.
Though one of many challenges of the later valleys, significantly when the planet had rotated simply so, was that no mild reached the valley ground:
You can see simply how darkish it might get on this video:
“Driving in the dark did have its problems as it was easy to get lost when you were in a valley,” Sticks admits. “Having stated that I nonetheless bought misplaced when it was mild!
On Valentine’s Day, Sticks was out of the darkish of the valley and crossed the two,000km mark. Nearly two months into the expedition, he turned extra targeted. “I’m not investigating each radar sign anymore simply these which can be on my quick route,” Sticks wrote on the forums. “If I see a ship within the distance and it is kind of in the precise path I’ll test it out.”
Sticks’ journey was virtually ended once more a couple of days later, this time after he destroyed a drone that was being guarded by an AI-piloted Viper. The heavily-armed ship chased and fired on Sticks’ defenseless SRV. The ship pursued him for greater than ten minutes, earlier than Sticks managed to flee. He caught the entire thing on digital camera, too:
The ultimate weeks of the journey have been uneventful however you possibly can see in Sticks’ discussion board posts that he was discovering his groove. His images start to seize the true scale of his journey, with excessive aerial photographs displaying how insignificant his SRV was compared to barren planet – solely a speck trailing tracks within the mud for 1000’s of kilometres:
After such a very long time on the planet, Sticks was often seeing the identical objects randomly spawned in by the sport. For gamers that make quick journeys to a planet’s floor, these cases are contemporary and varied, however he had seen them again and again. He began to create the range within the environments that he was in any other case shedding out on, instilling every with character. In his discussion board posts, Sticks would speak of the crashed satellites’ databanks being stuffed with previous Earth music like Alice Cooper, Hawkwind, and The Tubes.
Then, lastly, on March 5, Sticks arrived again firstly:
On the boards, Sticks was understated about his achievement: “Well, that is it I’ve completed my epic journey and really feel fairly happy.”
Sticks’ arrival meant he bought to affix The Planetary Circumnavigation Club, a small corridor of fame began by Turner that collects collectively the diary threads of gamers who’ve accomplished related journeys. There are presently solely 9 verified members, with one other unconfirmed and one disallowed (don’t ask) however it’s set to proceed rising. Commander Kris is driving spherical a moon that’s even larger than Sticks’ planet whereas Commander Bomba Luigi is making ready to loop a planet that could be a whopping 579km. They’ve nicknamed it Wilson.
“It’s not for everyone, even the normal explorers might not like it,” Sticks tells me.
The group might by no means develop very giant, then, however the gamers who do embark on such adventures are amply rewarded. Months after finishing his personal circumnavigation, the one which kicked every thing off for Sticks, Turner’s presiding reminiscence from the journey is “seeing the little mound in the middle of that crater where I first started out from. When I crested a hill and saw that again I have to admit I shed a tear. I know it’s only a stupid game really, but there was something profoundly powerful about that moment.”
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