"Our amazing team at Frontier is continuing to deliver on an incredibly ambitious vision for Elite Dangerous. There have been major Elite Dangerous deliveries every 2-3 months, with smaller point updates in between – a stunning total of 148 deliveries over the last 15 months. For The Engineers we decided to take a bit longer, to ensure what we deliver is great, but also to give us a chance to revisit many of the features in the game already. This is in addition to the great new features we have already hinted at, and of course more of the story, more on the ‘barnacles’ and their origins, more on aliens, and much, much more…

The Engineers are individuals that are mavericks in some way. Each has some sort of expertise from their pasts that they have made into a business – tuning all sorts of aspects of your ship to improve them. They do this using exotic and often hard-to-find components. Most Engineers are very secretive, working behind the scenes for the military or other shady organisations, and so you need an introduction, and need to find out how to find them. Missions can lead to introductions to Engineers, and some Engineers will introduce you to others, providing a more directed path for those that want that sort of approach. There is progression with each Engineer too, as you build up your relationship with them by doing missions and earning their trust.

I am delighted to announce The Engineers (Elite Dangerous 2.1) will be available to players with beta access in the week ending 8th May."

David Braben

The Engineers and Elite Dangerous 1.6

The Engineers (2.1) is the second major release in the Elite Dangerous: Horizons season of expansions that started with Planetary Landings. The Engineers adds Loot and Crafting and the eponymous Engineers themselves as the headliner features, but also delivers a massive number of new gameplay elements.

Through the engineers, you will be able to improve and upgrade the stats on every module of your ship, and add rare, experimental effects to your weapons for some special outcomes. We’ll be showing more of these weapons in the coming newsletters, but here’s one example of the abilities that you can implement.

Click the image to enlarge.

Our second big announcement today is that Elite Dangerous 1.6, available to all players of Elite Dangerous, not just those with Horizons, delivers significant changes to the core gameplay experience for all players, headlined by a completely re-vamped mission system and having its own vast number of additions and changes, and it will go into closed Beta and be released at the same time as The Engineers.

In the next three week’s Newsletters (starting this Friday) we’ll be going into both 1.6 and The Engineers, with articles written by Executive Producer Michael Brookes about all of the new features coming to the game, artwork, in-game images and much more.

We’ll be following up these weekly newsletters with ‘Countdown to Beta’ livestreams on the following Thursday, where we discuss the information in the newsletter with the developers, show you on-screen examples and answer any questions you have about that week’s content.

We thank you for sharing the Elite Dangerous journey so far. We have taken our time with The Engineers and 1.6, and we think you will like the results. The future of Elite Dangerous is incredibly exciting - and it starts in three weeks!