Elite: Dangerous – Galactic Truck Simulator

With the game about to come out of early access, a reader describes his time with the game and its surprisingly helpful community.

I downloaded the preview of Elite: Dangerous as soon as it was available and quickly used up the hour you get to try the game with before you buy. I’d barely done a quarter of the tutorial missions and had no grasp of the controls but I was hooked. I brought it straight away and kept struggling with the tutorials and watching YouTube videos explaining where I was going wrong.

Slowly it started coming together. I could dock/undock and fly to a destination, that’s half the battle I’ll start in solo mode. There is no hand-holding in this game, you get a ship and are free to go and do anything you like. I spent my days off struggling with the game, not understanding why I couldn’t complete the missions or earn enough to move on from the starting Sidewinder.



Whilst at work I turned to Reddit. All my questions had already been asked, and answered. I was amazed at how unlike your normal gaming community it is, everyday there is a question from somebody just starting out and they get answers without any abuse or ‘git gud’ scrub thrown at them. I’ve learned a lot over the last few weeks and have gone from not having a clue what people were talking about to being able to offer advice myself.


I managed to sneak an hour before work each day over the weekend, running smuggling missions that built up enough credits to upgrade to an Eagle. I ran more smuggling missions, finally earning enough for a Cobra on Monday. I made my way to George Lucas station in Leesti (the adopted home of r/Eliteone for meeting up). Smuggling had got harder, apparently a more valuable ship draws more attention from station security forces. I tried some combat but found my pulse lasers were great for taking down shields but poor at damaging hulls.

Someone posted on Reddit that they were running corn and people were welcome to join. Intrigued I joined their party and asked what the hell they were talking about. We’ve been in a party every night since then, talking about different routes we’ve been trying, giving each other tips as we learnt things, etc. Back to the Corn.

Apparently one of the community goals on the PC side of the game had a reward where Shifnalport in Diso had it’s rare item Diso Ma Corn stock boosted to 50 for a limited time. This is currently one of the most profitable activities in the game, seeing me earn enough credits to fully kit out my Cobra, buy a Type 6, and a number of upgrades – all planned to optimise the corn run before upgrading to a fully kitted out Asp.

As this is a limited time event it’s almost al I’ve been doing in game. I scanned some undiscovered stars on my way to my trading ports and have even been recognised as the first person to scan 7-8 systems.

I feel like I’ve turned the game into Euro Truck Simulator in space, but we’re having so much fun. I haven’t even touched bounty hunting or mining yet, and that will still leave me with exploration and mercenary or piracy to try out. If you haven’t tried this game yet you’re missing out, there are a lot of helpful people playing the game (and a few griefers).



The people here are a lot of help too.

By reader CMDR Vegeta01 (Vegeta01 – gamertag)

The reader’s feature does not necessary represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

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