A warning just went out to Elite: Dangerous commanders across the galaxy: the Thargoids have returned, and they’ve probably pretty angry about you shooting their space barnacles. Frontier have been teasing the return of Elite’s aliens for a while now, but they’re arriving in the next big update later this year.

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I just got the warning in my inbox and it reads as follows:

“This is an urgent message from Commander Edward Lewis.There are forces out there that don’t want you to know the truth, but I have to make this public.

“I found a ship in HIP 17044. A Federal cap ship, shot to pieces. They were carrying the data the Feds stole from Professor Palin. The crew is dead, but they discovered something important about the Unknown Ships.

“There’s beacon in the wreckage broadcasting a message, over and over. It proves what we suspected. They’re back. And the whole galaxy needs to know. The Thargoids have returned.”

You can see the beacon in the video above, in which it spells out “Return Thargoid” in the NATO phonetic alphabet. If you want to see it in-game, head to system HIP 17044, go to the second planet, then select the Asterope system in your galaxy map and head 10,000ls toward it. You should then find a distress beacon containing the eerie warning.

In the announcement, Elite co-creator and Frontier CEO David Braben suggests there’s more to the Thargoids than you might think. We’ll start to understand their behaviour as the encounter rate ramps up.

“The Return will be a dramatic ongoing event for the Elite: Dangerous galaxy,” says Braben. “Story events have hinted at the Thargoids’ return for a long time, but the Thargoids are returning at a moment when humanity is at its most divided.

“The Federation and Empire are at each other’s throats, a second tiny human-occupied bubble has scattered humanity’s greatest pilots, and Thargoid scout ships are drawing near. They have already probed our space, infiltrated our starports and found humanity to be vulnerable. What happens next will be decided by every Elite: Dangerous player.”

It’s coming in Q3, so we should have it by the end of September at the latest.