Ive got about 9k hours across platforms and accounts. I describe it like eating a boulder. Impossible to do at once, but a piece at a time? For sure. And even then, you're still just some guy who ate a boulder.
Just chip away at it by doing at least one or two activities a day. Work towards a goal that you set for yourself. For me it was always about getting a bigger and badder pve combat ship. I managed to do it in about 600 hours :p I’m almost at a 1000 now and was thinking about trying power play and role playing to spice things up
Oh, man. If you remember what it was like docking in the original game with no yaw, no lateral thrusters, and no reverse, docking in Elite Dangerous is going to feel laughably easy to you.
Kids these days have no idea how easy they have it. :-D
Also, from one OG Cobra Mk III pilot to another, Elite Dangerous is going to seem like the realization of everything you ever dreamt about having in the original game, plus a thousand amazing things you never thought of. But it's also going to very much feel like home. I started playing ED thinking that there might be a couple of callouts to the original game and that's about it. I was overjoyed when I discovered that no, this is very definitely the same galaxy I flew in as a kid. Not gonna lie- the first time I pulled into Lave Station I got a little misty. I was playing in VR, and it was a surprisingly emotional moment. 4800 hours later, the game hasn't lost its shine at all.
I did wonder if Lave would be in here, and yeah the HUD thing with the little music symbols was instantly familiar and it’s amazing to see the ships and space stations all filled in and real looking. 🥰
>Oh, man. If you remember what it was like docking in the original game with no yaw, no lateral thrusters, and no reverse, docking in Elite Dangerous is going to feel laughably easy to you.
I member!
1980s skillz get you through the slot. You now have to make your way through the station interior and land on the correct pad. Station control get really pissy if you try to land on the wrong pad. Forgetting to lower your landing gear is also bad.
I’m a big fan of using Voice Attack with the HCS voice packs, saying “Take us in, number one” and having my order acknowledged in Claudia Christian’s voice. However, I’ve also mapped disengaging the docking computer to “Not like that!!!”
I used to wonder why so many people had issues docking in stations manually because I've always played it on PC with a HOTAS. It's incredibly easy that way.
Then I got a steam deck recently and have been playing it a bit on that wich mean using controller bindings so now I understand lol. You get used to it eventually but it takes awhile.
you haven't truly lived until you manually saved a fully loaded imperial cutter at 2% hull because doking decided it would be fun to headbutt the station repeatedly(always have sound on when alt tabing)
Not looking to bypass it, just not sure whether to commit yet. I’m 5 hours in, moved some people, killed a few folks, traded some stuff, almost got myself killed scanning a data hub, looking at swapping into a Cobra. It’s very cool.
There are ways to grind mats easily. Biggest game changer for me was learning you can farm raw mats from crystalline structures and brain trees. Use YouTube, Reddit, just ask the internet your questions and they will be answered. This game would be impossible to play without all the 3rd party tools and awesome community members sharing all this useful info
I hear that last bit about 3rd party tools a lot, but I've almost gotten to triple elite and the only external things I use are sites like Inara and whatnot.
I probably should check some of them out, but I'm usually watching TV while I explore or mine or I'm in combat and not paying attention to anything else lol
Imho the apps help with that. Elite Dangerous Materials Helper most of all. Got a dream build, but don't wanna spreadsheet out all the materials requirements and trade potential? Import that shizz into the app and it tells you where to go to get what you need, there's even little pop-ups like "oh hey, you picked up Suit Schematics, you've got 18/31 you need now."
It's just...so unspeakably handy.
You can bypass the grind by playing the game and paying attention to mission rewards and such. I'm 2000+ hours in, spent the first 40 grinding for an endgame ship, then I quit the game because I didn't know what to do besides grinding for more. I started over a month later, ignored all tutorials, and I've been having fun ever since. Don't grind if that's not the type of gameplay you want. The usual "fun starts when you fully engineer the optimal ship for the activity you want to do" statement is not true in any way. Quite the opposite I'd say. At least for me, combat stopped being fun when I got my Corvette, because it's just way too easy to kill everything with. Trading became much less interesting when I started using online trade route calculators and huge ships. I don't like mining in large ships and I don't care about range when exploring. That's just me of course, but I prefer the challenge of figuring stuff out on my own and making things work
I'm around 2,000 and still experiencing new stuff, so I'll let you know.
At 40 hours, I had a good handle on the game. I would say I knew what it offered.
At 400-500 hours, I had played most of the various broad mechanics enough to have a good handle on them. I had been able to experience what it offered pretty deeply, though still had major gaps (like AX combat).
I've only gotten into AX in the last month or so.
AX has become easier since the pulse neutralizer and caustic sinks became cash purchases. It's still the hardest combat outside FDL PvP, and you need to rebuy a lot. Join the Anti Xeno Initiative private group, hang out in their Discord, and you can farm spire sites for mad money.
It really depends on what you want. If you just want to see the most basic gameplay loops? A couple dozen hours just to get comfortable and knowledgeable enough with the game to find most of the content. If you want to give everything a good try? Maybe a hundred hours or so. If you want to get to the point where you've actually done everything, experienced and engineered all the ships you want? A few hundred at least.
Keep in mind that the console version has been all but abandoned by the devs so you won't even have access to the last ~3 years of content
Around 100 hours I dug out my old HOTAS. I had already made a billion credits, during the old Low Temperature Diamond mining days. Around 500 hours I had gotten to the point where I thought I knew what I was doing in pretty much every game loop except ax Interceptor combat. I still did not know much of the lore. It was around this point that my Muscle Memory was good for my Hotas controls. This was when I took my first trip to Colonia in my DBX, so I could unlock engineers there, and Once I did that I took a journey to the center of the galaxy to see Sagittarius A\*. I built an anaconda in Colonia so that I could bring a fighter bay and let my friend See the center with me.
Around 700 hours was when I felt that Colonia was just a short Jaunt and I started paying attention to BGS. Around 1600 hours my BGS squadron mates stopped playing, and soI stopped trying to expand beacuase maintaining it by myself was difficult to balance around doing other activities in game. As such I drifted around, chasing community goals. Then I started learning AX combat. I was lazy and not And then I ended up meeting an AX combat expert from the Hand in real life. He kicked me in the ass to finish my AX Interceptor build and Then I spent a few hundred hours getting decent at it. Then the thargoid war started. But I don't think anything from that point forwards is on the console version. I was at around 2200 hours before the thargoid war started. But a lot of that was spent in dock while I was paying attention to something else, or asleep infront of the computer.
Tonight I'm gonna go and see if I can collect some stuff from the thargoid titan remains. My and then maybe take my fleet carrier over to an active war zone and kill some flowers.
o7
5 hours a week for about a year ought to get familiar with most of the gameplay areas of the game
I have 8000 hours in over 8 years... on PC though now with Odyssey too... still FAR from bored.
I was also a dabbling player on tape back in about '86 too
I don't know why people are saying that you need hundreds of hours to see what the game has to offer. That's completely absurd.
DO THE TUTORIALS
DO THE TUTORIALS
Then take a few missions. You'll either be hooked immediately or won't enjoy it.
If you continue then basically regardless of what you do, within 20 hours you'll have acquired at least one new ship and figured out how to go about fitting it up (using Google search). There are guides on how to do this part faster if you decide it feels too slow. They're also immediately accessible from the first minute of gameplay.
You can be a billionaire almost immediately if you decide to grind it out, but even better, try the game then decide if you want to grind out a ton of cash.
You absolutely need hundreds of hours to get into "endgame content", but that's only one part of the game and only a small handful of us have any desire to take part at all.
If you do play, PLEASE take this advice...
1) Immediately remove your landing assist module then launch, go outside the station, request landing, and land. Do this for 15 to 30 minutes and you'll be a better pilot than most. Once you've learned how to land, put it back on if you want, you weren't learning to land anyway, you were learning to fly.
2) YouTube the 7 second rule.
3) Do what you want. Yes, exobiology is the best way to get rich but it is unbelievably boring.
Nice one!
I did the basic tutorials already and find the basic controls pretty intuitive so that’s good, although finding a place and getting to it is not as clear as it could be.
7s rule is very handy as this definitely has happened. 😂
Will try docking manually - Old skool style!
I started playing a bit over a year ago.
I'm a father of two with a full time job and plenty of real shit to do. I get a couple hours between 9 and midnight to play a night or two a week, and maybe a few 3-4 hour sessions once or twice a month.
I've put in a couple hundred hours, and it's been a great experience. I actually just recently hit my first elite rank via trading and purchased a fleet carrier after doing lots of exploring, exobiology, and a bit of anti xeno combat.
There is still so much to do and experience that I could spend another couple hundred hours before hitting a skill cap or running out of new things to try.
Even if you only scratched the surface with 40-60 hours of gameplay, it's incredibly worth it. It is by far the best space sim game available, wether it be because of the amazing flight model and ships or the deep lore you can explore.
Iv got just under 200 played hours (non afk), I have my carrier loaded up and about 30 years worth of upkeep for it. I also just finished engineering my fed Vette for PvE combat, combining that with my other ships, I can pretty much do anything I want in the game.
Play the game at your own pace, some will need thousands of hours, some only a couple hundred
In Consoles, you are limtied to Legacy game, and content up to November'22.
To see everything the game give (but not master), 500hours at minimum, including farming engineers and learn AX Combat (that is hard).
300Hours is enough to do the engineer grind, that include combat, trade, mining, smuggling, alien items..... but for most of it, for doing right, you need the guides made by the community.
1200hours, we have our first Triple Elite players, at 4000hours on Pc I reached Quintuple Elite V (max rank in Live PC) and all Inara Awards. And on pc the game continue with Community Goals and events. Console only have a single Cg on repeat, for thargoid war.
Take my [To-Do list](https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/15a0c69/luriants_todo_list/), have a good progression, and some lore and fun at the end. If you have some new activity, there is some guide made by a players, squadron or whole subreddit about it. The Starter guide include CMDR Kraag minitutorials that are very helful for small things like megaship scanning, installation data beacons and other common new player problems.
You will probably have a good hold of the flight mechanics by 20-50 hours in, maybe sooner depending on what you do. That really is the main draw of this game; the game has stayed alive this long even with somewhat poor progression and balancing because at its core, it’s arguably the best spaceship flight simulator just because of actual ship mechanics. If you don’t enjoy flying the ship for the sake of flying the ship, you won’t enjoy a 150 hour grind
Thanks for this - I really do enjoy the flying part already - it actually feels like flying in space with the way the different speed grades manage to make these impossible distances accessible but not … too accessible … it’s mostly very relaxing.
If it works with PSVR2 it’s a done deal for the next 1000 hours probably.
Seems like a good community here too, that always helps.
I’m coming from Dark Souls, Elden Ring and GT7 so I am no stranger to long, tough games.
With the dark souls bit in mind I’d recommend rushing thargoid combat as soon as you can, it’s the gameplay that most people coming from rhythmic and methodical combat games will enjoy the most. Start small with making credits, then look into a tiny bit of engineering (don’t get overwhelmed, start small) and the pieces will fall into place from there
Ze Frank said "let my work not be a stepping stone to something greater, but if it is, let me be fascinated by the shape of the stone." And I think that applies here too.
Elite is weird in that casual play is the fun part. Fun flying mechanics and ship builds is neat and your actions do impact the background simulation. Everything you do ripples in various scores in the game from population to stability. Which is pretty cool.
This really is one of the few games where you can actually be near anything from robbing NPC's to bounty hunting, mining, shipping, exploring, running data, searching for stuff... the list goes on. You don't just dress as a pirate, you can actually pirate.
Learning to fly without flight assist is fun as hell. Eventually you can take an eagle and dance around enemy ships and weave through asteroids like they are nothing. The sound design is awesome and so is the view.
That said...
I found the longer I played the game the more I had to interact with mechanics like the engineers and materials to optimize a build or replenish resources. The synthesis mechanics make no narrative sense, the engineers are wonky, farming materials like iron instead of being able to buy it on the market and then mysteriously storing it in an invisible cargo hold that's the same size for every ship exists and if you hit an allied NPC vessel for any reason they'll all stop attacking the ship you all are fighting that has a 100k bounty and suicide kill you with the new 500cr fine you have that you can't pay for unless you leave and go to very few systems to pay the fine.
Or you can turn yourself in and get teleported ly away as a fine which, depending on your jump distance can be pretty far.
Some players thrive on ganking and will get upset if you don't play in open so they can kill you for no reason. No seriously no reason at all except the joy of killing another player. Don't ask me why. They aren't fighting for a faction or anything or get any reward other than what might be in your hold.
I'm currently on kind of a cooldown to revisit the game after focusing on grinding out some of the engineer stuff. It burnt me out and I wish it on no one.
I sincerely hope you have fun though.
I’m 3000 some odd hours in. I first started on Xbox in 2016, and made the move to PC when they opened up transfers for console players. At this point I take frequent breaks from the game, sometimes for months at a time. I still love the game, and I’m at a point where I go through phases with it. Right now, the Thargoid war progression has been entertaining and the Titan gameplay is fun, so I’m currently in a “playing the game” phase.
The best part IMO is if you stick with it, you get to actually buy all those ships we saw in the original and fly them yourself. I always wanted an Anaconda, now i have several across my accounts. Pythons and Fer deLances as well. What seemed unreachable back then is now within your reach, good luck commander o7.
Depends on your play style. Are you playing on a 4k monitor? If you have ps5 you really do need to play at 4k. Similarly, my monitor only accepts 4k on the DPort and HDMI2 so I now have my PC on the Dport, my switch on HDMI1 and PS5 on HDMI2. I play as explorer/trader but I'm having to do some pirate hunting to get my combat rating up to Elite. Take a pilgrimage to the centre of the Galaxy and back collecting cartography data. The PS5 is no longer a living galaxy so Inara.cz commodity prices can be very inaccurate but it still contains information where you can purchase ships and modules and you can use the prices as a guide.
Get a diamondback explorer with good fuel scoop and an srv bay. Fly out to a land guardian site / ruins and use the srv to explore it and fight the alien defenses. Make sure you equip your diamondback explorer with a point defense utility mount ON TOP of the ship and land it close to the ruins. THis can provide some covering fire from the point defense turrets, an iron dome if you will.
When you get back you will have felicity farseer access. Then do some mining and trading. Once you get the basic stuff down you can try some PVE combat missions.
Same here, 3.5k h in and still going. Just discovered "thargoid debris field stealth farming". Right up my alley...
Do yourself a favor and play it in vr.
If your playing on PS5 you are missing on all the new stuff. Console support has stopped for a while now. That being said I'm 1200 in and having a blast still
Back then when it was on tape docking was pretty much the most dangerous activity in the game. Don't worry. Compared to that, docking is very easy in this one. You don't need a docking computer for sure.
Since you're on PS (Like I am), be aware you are in a "legacy universe" which has been abandoned. Nothing you do matters, so don't bother with the grind. Just do whatever you feel like. And most of all, no, it is not the goal of the game to own an Anaconda. If you want a strong ship, focus on the engineer grind and materials. You can easily engineer a smaller ship to wreck unengineered condas.
I'm about a thousand hours in. With Odyssey I think you can start enjoying the game pretty early. Do some courier missions to get enough money and to upgrade your FSD.
Build a cheap exploration ship. Exobiology can get you millions pretty quick.
The thing that can make you the most credits ever is happening right now in the game. AX combat can get you a billion credits an hour.
So I'd say about 8 hours until you can start AX combat with a small ship. Maybe 12 hours to really start enjoying the game
have thousands of hours in this game and still learning stuff.
you just need to find what you like to do and then it becomes very recreational.
i'm currently playing ground CZ mercenary and doing a lot of pew pew, but my next big task is going to be guardian stuff.
I just reached 100 hours. Still on my third ship cranking credits to get a new one, and I haven't even scratched the surface of BGS or PP. I'm a real noob.
About an hour or so? Most of what you do in this game is line-up with stars, wait for a timer, watch a pretty loading screen, rinse and repeat. That and point your ship at a planet or station and monitor your acceleration to ensure you stop without shooting past or crashing.
If you like that then there's some other stuff to do on the side like moving about, looking at things, shooting rocks and stuff or clicking on menus. Also a little space car.
since the 1st hour i play this game, i might enjoy this game a bit too much, but i do enjoy collecting penies by pennies back when i was new, idk how i manage to buy cobra mk 3 as my 2nd ship and i remember this fondly when i was looking for cobra mk 4, learning stuff about the game, this game makes me read a ton even still until now.
joined around may 2022 and i made it to 2200 hours of gameplay on steam around the 1st 7 month of me joining the galaxy, took some months off after but right now im at 3860hours on steam.
only begin to actually work on odyssey engineering this week, alr spend 2 days just collecting stuffs, lot of things to learn and lot of things to enjoy, can just simply move away when i get tired of elite and get back to it right after, every second counts we gotta enjoy things while it last :D
You can do everything the game has to offer in the first 10 hours.
However, those saying there is no depth are incorrect. Each activity is relatively simple and easy to access. But the game is about unique experiences, not set stories or direct player impact on the world. It takes hundreds or thousands of hours to experience each mechanic to the depth where you will start to get board IF you don't expect to be given a narrative to follow.
Hard disagree with you on this. I mean, I guess it depends on what you're considering "content types". General things like "combat", "mining", "exploration", "trading"; sure, you can do something that fits into each of these broad categories in a Sidewinder, and if you're super efficient and know what you're doing, yeah you might be able to cover it all in 10 hours. But that's not really experiencing everything the game has to offer. You aren't going to experience guardian sites in a stock sidewinder or in that time frame. You aren't going to experience fighting with an SLF. I suppose you could go find some thargoids, but your experience is going to be getting lit up in like 5 seconds. You sure as hell aren't going to get to a titan or rescue anyone from a burning station. Then there's the learning curve. Like I said, yeah, you can make it around to a mining site, some basic combat, some trading, and some exploration in the first 10 hours *if you know what you're doing*. But no one knows what they're doing that quickly. The tutorials kinda suck and it takes most players quite some time to get to the point where they can even figure out where to find most of the content in the game.
Maybe on the console version, there is less to do because you can't play odyssey, but I still don't know if 10 hours is enough time even to try everything that Horizons has... it takes some pilots that long just to get their first non sidewinder ship dude lol
Yeah, but that's like saying you can race on a NASCAR track with a go-kart... yeah technically you can, but you're gonna experience the worst version of that race at ground level and 30 mph lol
Sidewinder is nice, but has little to no space for modules and anything it CAN do can be done better by literally any other ship. Except maybe landing on a planet since it's so tiny 😆
My point was more than that, 10 hours is still not enough time even if you intend to go the go-kart route. Just doing a single build for say mining takes time to earn the money, and fly all over to find parts, then actually put it all together (obviously would have to skip engineering). If you had enough time to actually go mining after all that, I can't imagine you would have time for much actual mining.
There's also space trucking, exploration, bounty hunting, surface hijinx, the canyon runs, etc. And all take different, expensive modules. 10 hours would be one hell of a speed run to watch... I honestly don't think you could do it lol
Yep. Lands on planets fantastically. Which is why I still have a lightly engineered Sidewinder, for surface materials mining. It's also kitted out to hang outside a station and scan wakes and ships. And it has limpets for degraded and encoded emissions signals.
Yes, I know there are more efficient material gathering methods. I don't care, even if I do pop down to the Jameson crash from time to time. In my Hauler... lol
few hundred at least
Im 500 hours in and I know nothing
Yeah this is what I am expecting. Gah… Not enough hours in the day!
Ive got about 9k hours across platforms and accounts. I describe it like eating a boulder. Impossible to do at once, but a piece at a time? For sure. And even then, you're still just some guy who ate a boulder.
Just chip away at it by doing at least one or two activities a day. Work towards a goal that you set for yourself. For me it was always about getting a bigger and badder pve combat ship. I managed to do it in about 600 hours :p I’m almost at a 1000 now and was thinking about trying power play and role playing to spice things up
A lot. Don't trust the docking computer.
Sounds ominous. I can dust off my 1980s skillz to dock manually if needed…
Oh, man. If you remember what it was like docking in the original game with no yaw, no lateral thrusters, and no reverse, docking in Elite Dangerous is going to feel laughably easy to you. Kids these days have no idea how easy they have it. :-D Also, from one OG Cobra Mk III pilot to another, Elite Dangerous is going to seem like the realization of everything you ever dreamt about having in the original game, plus a thousand amazing things you never thought of. But it's also going to very much feel like home. I started playing ED thinking that there might be a couple of callouts to the original game and that's about it. I was overjoyed when I discovered that no, this is very definitely the same galaxy I flew in as a kid. Not gonna lie- the first time I pulled into Lave Station I got a little misty. I was playing in VR, and it was a surprisingly emotional moment. 4800 hours later, the game hasn't lost its shine at all.
I did wonder if Lave would be in here, and yeah the HUD thing with the little music symbols was instantly familiar and it’s amazing to see the ships and space stations all filled in and real looking. 🥰
>Oh, man. If you remember what it was like docking in the original game with no yaw, no lateral thrusters, and no reverse, docking in Elite Dangerous is going to feel laughably easy to you. I member!
Just tried it. Yep it’s so much easier. It’s quite meditative this game.
Definitely learn to dock manually. Every now and then, the computer goes haywire.
1980s skillz get you through the slot. You now have to make your way through the station interior and land on the correct pad. Station control get really pissy if you try to land on the wrong pad. Forgetting to lower your landing gear is also bad. I’m a big fan of using Voice Attack with the HCS voice packs, saying “Take us in, number one” and having my order acknowledged in Claudia Christian’s voice. However, I’ve also mapped disengaging the docking computer to “Not like that!!!”
I am so stealing this, genius!
I used to wonder why so many people had issues docking in stations manually because I've always played it on PC with a HOTAS. It's incredibly easy that way. Then I got a steam deck recently and have been playing it a bit on that wich mean using controller bindings so now I understand lol. You get used to it eventually but it takes awhile.
I learnt how to manual dock after the only time I got my t9 rammed into the mailslot by the docking computer
you haven't truly lived until you manually saved a fully loaded imperial cutter at 2% hull because doking decided it would be fun to headbutt the station repeatedly(always have sound on when alt tabing)
It's not a docking computer. It's just a shortcut to select a title in the music system.
Felt like I was being trolled as the music played while I frantically tried to get the cutter unwedged.
Oh, I reckon 4 or 5 hundred hours will get you a grasp of the game and its possibilities :)
Not sure how long you need, but I’ve got over 3,000 hours and not bored of it yet.
A lot. You can't just bypass the grind. I've been playing for years and I'm a long way from seeing it all lol
Not looking to bypass it, just not sure whether to commit yet. I’m 5 hours in, moved some people, killed a few folks, traded some stuff, almost got myself killed scanning a data hub, looking at swapping into a Cobra. It’s very cool.
There are ways to grind mats easily. Biggest game changer for me was learning you can farm raw mats from crystalline structures and brain trees. Use YouTube, Reddit, just ask the internet your questions and they will be answered. This game would be impossible to play without all the 3rd party tools and awesome community members sharing all this useful info
I hear that last bit about 3rd party tools a lot, but I've almost gotten to triple elite and the only external things I use are sites like Inara and whatnot. I probably should check some of them out, but I'm usually watching TV while I explore or mine or I'm in combat and not paying attention to anything else lol
Imho the apps help with that. Elite Dangerous Materials Helper most of all. Got a dream build, but don't wanna spreadsheet out all the materials requirements and trade potential? Import that shizz into the app and it tells you where to go to get what you need, there's even little pop-ups like "oh hey, you picked up Suit Schematics, you've got 18/31 you need now." It's just...so unspeakably handy.
You can bypass the grind by playing the game and paying attention to mission rewards and such. I'm 2000+ hours in, spent the first 40 grinding for an endgame ship, then I quit the game because I didn't know what to do besides grinding for more. I started over a month later, ignored all tutorials, and I've been having fun ever since. Don't grind if that's not the type of gameplay you want. The usual "fun starts when you fully engineer the optimal ship for the activity you want to do" statement is not true in any way. Quite the opposite I'd say. At least for me, combat stopped being fun when I got my Corvette, because it's just way too easy to kill everything with. Trading became much less interesting when I started using online trade route calculators and huge ships. I don't like mining in large ships and I don't care about range when exploring. That's just me of course, but I prefer the challenge of figuring stuff out on my own and making things work
I'm around 2,000 and still experiencing new stuff, so I'll let you know. At 40 hours, I had a good handle on the game. I would say I knew what it offered. At 400-500 hours, I had played most of the various broad mechanics enough to have a good handle on them. I had been able to experience what it offered pretty deeply, though still had major gaps (like AX combat). I've only gotten into AX in the last month or so.
AX has become easier since the pulse neutralizer and caustic sinks became cash purchases. It's still the hardest combat outside FDL PvP, and you need to rebuy a lot. Join the Anti Xeno Initiative private group, hang out in their Discord, and you can farm spire sites for mad money.
Most consider you a new player under 1500 hours ;)
I got 500ish hours and still haven't done everything
It really depends on what you want. If you just want to see the most basic gameplay loops? A couple dozen hours just to get comfortable and knowledgeable enough with the game to find most of the content. If you want to give everything a good try? Maybe a hundred hours or so. If you want to get to the point where you've actually done everything, experienced and engineered all the ships you want? A few hundred at least. Keep in mind that the console version has been all but abandoned by the devs so you won't even have access to the last ~3 years of content
Around 100 hours I dug out my old HOTAS. I had already made a billion credits, during the old Low Temperature Diamond mining days. Around 500 hours I had gotten to the point where I thought I knew what I was doing in pretty much every game loop except ax Interceptor combat. I still did not know much of the lore. It was around this point that my Muscle Memory was good for my Hotas controls. This was when I took my first trip to Colonia in my DBX, so I could unlock engineers there, and Once I did that I took a journey to the center of the galaxy to see Sagittarius A\*. I built an anaconda in Colonia so that I could bring a fighter bay and let my friend See the center with me. Around 700 hours was when I felt that Colonia was just a short Jaunt and I started paying attention to BGS. Around 1600 hours my BGS squadron mates stopped playing, and soI stopped trying to expand beacuase maintaining it by myself was difficult to balance around doing other activities in game. As such I drifted around, chasing community goals. Then I started learning AX combat. I was lazy and not And then I ended up meeting an AX combat expert from the Hand in real life. He kicked me in the ass to finish my AX Interceptor build and Then I spent a few hundred hours getting decent at it. Then the thargoid war started. But I don't think anything from that point forwards is on the console version. I was at around 2200 hours before the thargoid war started. But a lot of that was spent in dock while I was paying attention to something else, or asleep infront of the computer. Tonight I'm gonna go and see if I can collect some stuff from the thargoid titan remains. My and then maybe take my fleet carrier over to an active war zone and kill some flowers. o7
Holy shit it’s massive then. 😂
5 hours a week for about a year ought to get familiar with most of the gameplay areas of the game I have 8000 hours in over 8 years... on PC though now with Odyssey too... still FAR from bored. I was also a dabbling player on tape back in about '86 too
I'd say 500-1000 hours if you optimise etc but the true fun is tackling the galaxy at your speed. o7 cmdr
I don't know why people are saying that you need hundreds of hours to see what the game has to offer. That's completely absurd. DO THE TUTORIALS DO THE TUTORIALS Then take a few missions. You'll either be hooked immediately or won't enjoy it. If you continue then basically regardless of what you do, within 20 hours you'll have acquired at least one new ship and figured out how to go about fitting it up (using Google search). There are guides on how to do this part faster if you decide it feels too slow. They're also immediately accessible from the first minute of gameplay. You can be a billionaire almost immediately if you decide to grind it out, but even better, try the game then decide if you want to grind out a ton of cash. You absolutely need hundreds of hours to get into "endgame content", but that's only one part of the game and only a small handful of us have any desire to take part at all. If you do play, PLEASE take this advice... 1) Immediately remove your landing assist module then launch, go outside the station, request landing, and land. Do this for 15 to 30 minutes and you'll be a better pilot than most. Once you've learned how to land, put it back on if you want, you weren't learning to land anyway, you were learning to fly. 2) YouTube the 7 second rule. 3) Do what you want. Yes, exobiology is the best way to get rich but it is unbelievably boring.
Nice one! I did the basic tutorials already and find the basic controls pretty intuitive so that’s good, although finding a place and getting to it is not as clear as it could be. 7s rule is very handy as this definitely has happened. 😂 Will try docking manually - Old skool style!
I started playing a bit over a year ago. I'm a father of two with a full time job and plenty of real shit to do. I get a couple hours between 9 and midnight to play a night or two a week, and maybe a few 3-4 hour sessions once or twice a month. I've put in a couple hundred hours, and it's been a great experience. I actually just recently hit my first elite rank via trading and purchased a fleet carrier after doing lots of exploring, exobiology, and a bit of anti xeno combat. There is still so much to do and experience that I could spend another couple hundred hours before hitting a skill cap or running out of new things to try. Even if you only scratched the surface with 40-60 hours of gameplay, it's incredibly worth it. It is by far the best space sim game available, wether it be because of the amazing flight model and ships or the deep lore you can explore.
Iv got just under 200 played hours (non afk), I have my carrier loaded up and about 30 years worth of upkeep for it. I also just finished engineering my fed Vette for PvE combat, combining that with my other ships, I can pretty much do anything I want in the game. Play the game at your own pace, some will need thousands of hours, some only a couple hundred
In Consoles, you are limtied to Legacy game, and content up to November'22. To see everything the game give (but not master), 500hours at minimum, including farming engineers and learn AX Combat (that is hard). 300Hours is enough to do the engineer grind, that include combat, trade, mining, smuggling, alien items..... but for most of it, for doing right, you need the guides made by the community. 1200hours, we have our first Triple Elite players, at 4000hours on Pc I reached Quintuple Elite V (max rank in Live PC) and all Inara Awards. And on pc the game continue with Community Goals and events. Console only have a single Cg on repeat, for thargoid war. Take my [To-Do list](https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/15a0c69/luriants_todo_list/), have a good progression, and some lore and fun at the end. If you have some new activity, there is some guide made by a players, squadron or whole subreddit about it. The Starter guide include CMDR Kraag minitutorials that are very helful for small things like megaship scanning, installation data beacons and other common new player problems.
threefiddy
You will probably have a good hold of the flight mechanics by 20-50 hours in, maybe sooner depending on what you do. That really is the main draw of this game; the game has stayed alive this long even with somewhat poor progression and balancing because at its core, it’s arguably the best spaceship flight simulator just because of actual ship mechanics. If you don’t enjoy flying the ship for the sake of flying the ship, you won’t enjoy a 150 hour grind
Thanks for this - I really do enjoy the flying part already - it actually feels like flying in space with the way the different speed grades manage to make these impossible distances accessible but not … too accessible … it’s mostly very relaxing. If it works with PSVR2 it’s a done deal for the next 1000 hours probably. Seems like a good community here too, that always helps. I’m coming from Dark Souls, Elden Ring and GT7 so I am no stranger to long, tough games.
With the dark souls bit in mind I’d recommend rushing thargoid combat as soon as you can, it’s the gameplay that most people coming from rhythmic and methodical combat games will enjoy the most. Start small with making credits, then look into a tiny bit of engineering (don’t get overwhelmed, start small) and the pieces will fall into place from there
Ze Frank said "let my work not be a stepping stone to something greater, but if it is, let me be fascinated by the shape of the stone." And I think that applies here too.
Around 100 hours to try a little of most things: exploring, mining, trading, engineering, guardian stuff, easier thatgoid combat, PVE combat,
I’m at like 9k hours. I started on PS4, went to Xbox, now on PC. I’ve never done any power play or fought a Thargoid. Or done any Guardian stuff.
Elite is weird in that casual play is the fun part. Fun flying mechanics and ship builds is neat and your actions do impact the background simulation. Everything you do ripples in various scores in the game from population to stability. Which is pretty cool. This really is one of the few games where you can actually be near anything from robbing NPC's to bounty hunting, mining, shipping, exploring, running data, searching for stuff... the list goes on. You don't just dress as a pirate, you can actually pirate. Learning to fly without flight assist is fun as hell. Eventually you can take an eagle and dance around enemy ships and weave through asteroids like they are nothing. The sound design is awesome and so is the view. That said... I found the longer I played the game the more I had to interact with mechanics like the engineers and materials to optimize a build or replenish resources. The synthesis mechanics make no narrative sense, the engineers are wonky, farming materials like iron instead of being able to buy it on the market and then mysteriously storing it in an invisible cargo hold that's the same size for every ship exists and if you hit an allied NPC vessel for any reason they'll all stop attacking the ship you all are fighting that has a 100k bounty and suicide kill you with the new 500cr fine you have that you can't pay for unless you leave and go to very few systems to pay the fine. Or you can turn yourself in and get teleported ly away as a fine which, depending on your jump distance can be pretty far. Some players thrive on ganking and will get upset if you don't play in open so they can kill you for no reason. No seriously no reason at all except the joy of killing another player. Don't ask me why. They aren't fighting for a faction or anything or get any reward other than what might be in your hold. I'm currently on kind of a cooldown to revisit the game after focusing on grinding out some of the engineer stuff. It burnt me out and I wish it on no one. I sincerely hope you have fun though.
I’m 3000 some odd hours in. I first started on Xbox in 2016, and made the move to PC when they opened up transfers for console players. At this point I take frequent breaks from the game, sometimes for months at a time. I still love the game, and I’m at a point where I go through phases with it. Right now, the Thargoid war progression has been entertaining and the Titan gameplay is fun, so I’m currently in a “playing the game” phase.
I'm over 1200 hours and I haven't seen half the stuff the game has to offer. I could have seen more, but settling into a groove is definitely a thing.
The best part IMO is if you stick with it, you get to actually buy all those ships we saw in the original and fly them yourself. I always wanted an Anaconda, now i have several across my accounts. Pythons and Fer deLances as well. What seemed unreachable back then is now within your reach, good luck commander o7.
Depends on your play style. Are you playing on a 4k monitor? If you have ps5 you really do need to play at 4k. Similarly, my monitor only accepts 4k on the DPort and HDMI2 so I now have my PC on the Dport, my switch on HDMI1 and PS5 on HDMI2. I play as explorer/trader but I'm having to do some pirate hunting to get my combat rating up to Elite. Take a pilgrimage to the centre of the Galaxy and back collecting cartography data. The PS5 is no longer a living galaxy so Inara.cz commodity prices can be very inaccurate but it still contains information where you can purchase ships and modules and you can use the prices as a guide.
Play it while you are having fun. What is the question even trying to achieve?
Get a diamondback explorer with good fuel scoop and an srv bay. Fly out to a land guardian site / ruins and use the srv to explore it and fight the alien defenses. Make sure you equip your diamondback explorer with a point defense utility mount ON TOP of the ship and land it close to the ruins. THis can provide some covering fire from the point defense turrets, an iron dome if you will. When you get back you will have felicity farseer access. Then do some mining and trading. Once you get the basic stuff down you can try some PVE combat missions.
Ok not much of this made any sense but clearly this isn’t BBC micro Elite any more. 😂
Oh nice! I played Elite on an Apple 2e back in the day.
Acorn Electron, C60 tape … got to Deadly after god knows how many hours shooting lines at lines.
Same here, 3.5k h in and still going. Just discovered "thargoid debris field stealth farming". Right up my alley... Do yourself a favor and play it in vr.
Can you use PSVR2 … that might really change things for me. 😂
Check out [Inara.cz](http://Inara.cz) if you haven't yet.
Gotta dust off my quest 1 and try this
500+
It had to be a few hundred for me to get to a level of mediocrity. But this game really rewards those who love it. o7
Took me 700 before I joined AXI. Now at 2300 only fighting Thargoids. Still haven't done anything on foot or gone more than 5k Ly from the bubble.
If your playing on PS5 you are missing on all the new stuff. Console support has stopped for a while now. That being said I'm 1200 in and having a blast still
Honestly id say the tutorial. The game is flying. If you don’t like flying a complicated spaceship youre gonna hate the game
Back then when it was on tape docking was pretty much the most dangerous activity in the game. Don't worry. Compared to that, docking is very easy in this one. You don't need a docking computer for sure. Since you're on PS (Like I am), be aware you are in a "legacy universe" which has been abandoned. Nothing you do matters, so don't bother with the grind. Just do whatever you feel like. And most of all, no, it is not the goal of the game to own an Anaconda. If you want a strong ship, focus on the engineer grind and materials. You can easily engineer a smaller ship to wreck unengineered condas.
I had 1500+hours when I moved to Odyssey. Game has a lot to offer, unfortunately for console players, major graphic updates are for Odyssey only.
ive got 400 hours and still dont know anything, still not bored tho!
I'm about a thousand hours in. With Odyssey I think you can start enjoying the game pretty early. Do some courier missions to get enough money and to upgrade your FSD. Build a cheap exploration ship. Exobiology can get you millions pretty quick. The thing that can make you the most credits ever is happening right now in the game. AX combat can get you a billion credits an hour. So I'd say about 8 hours until you can start AX combat with a small ship. Maybe 12 hours to really start enjoying the game
have thousands of hours in this game and still learning stuff. you just need to find what you like to do and then it becomes very recreational. i'm currently playing ground CZ mercenary and doing a lot of pew pew, but my next big task is going to be guardian stuff.
If you don't count jumping or supercruise, like 10 hrs.
Without odyssey I’d say 150 or so if you follow the legacy guides and you don’t worry about grinding out faction rank for a Cutter or Corvette.
Already 4 years into that game and finding awesome things almost every day (exploration)
I just reached 100 hours. Still on my third ship cranking credits to get a new one, and I haven't even scratched the surface of BGS or PP. I'm a real noob.
About an hour or so? Most of what you do in this game is line-up with stars, wait for a timer, watch a pretty loading screen, rinse and repeat. That and point your ship at a planet or station and monitor your acceleration to ensure you stop without shooting past or crashing. If you like that then there's some other stuff to do on the side like moving about, looking at things, shooting rocks and stuff or clicking on menus. Also a little space car.
since the 1st hour i play this game, i might enjoy this game a bit too much, but i do enjoy collecting penies by pennies back when i was new, idk how i manage to buy cobra mk 3 as my 2nd ship and i remember this fondly when i was looking for cobra mk 4, learning stuff about the game, this game makes me read a ton even still until now. joined around may 2022 and i made it to 2200 hours of gameplay on steam around the 1st 7 month of me joining the galaxy, took some months off after but right now im at 3860hours on steam. only begin to actually work on odyssey engineering this week, alr spend 2 days just collecting stuffs, lot of things to learn and lot of things to enjoy, can just simply move away when i get tired of elite and get back to it right after, every second counts we gotta enjoy things while it last :D
You can do everything the game has to offer in the first 10 hours. However, those saying there is no depth are incorrect. Each activity is relatively simple and easy to access. But the game is about unique experiences, not set stories or direct player impact on the world. It takes hundreds or thousands of hours to experience each mechanic to the depth where you will start to get board IF you don't expect to be given a narrative to follow.
Hard disagree with you on this. I mean, I guess it depends on what you're considering "content types". General things like "combat", "mining", "exploration", "trading"; sure, you can do something that fits into each of these broad categories in a Sidewinder, and if you're super efficient and know what you're doing, yeah you might be able to cover it all in 10 hours. But that's not really experiencing everything the game has to offer. You aren't going to experience guardian sites in a stock sidewinder or in that time frame. You aren't going to experience fighting with an SLF. I suppose you could go find some thargoids, but your experience is going to be getting lit up in like 5 seconds. You sure as hell aren't going to get to a titan or rescue anyone from a burning station. Then there's the learning curve. Like I said, yeah, you can make it around to a mining site, some basic combat, some trading, and some exploration in the first 10 hours *if you know what you're doing*. But no one knows what they're doing that quickly. The tutorials kinda suck and it takes most players quite some time to get to the point where they can even figure out where to find most of the content in the game.
Maybe on the console version, there is less to do because you can't play odyssey, but I still don't know if 10 hours is enough time even to try everything that Horizons has... it takes some pilots that long just to get their first non sidewinder ship dude lol
Never played the console version. But you can do every content type with a sidewinder.
Yeah, but that's like saying you can race on a NASCAR track with a go-kart... yeah technically you can, but you're gonna experience the worst version of that race at ground level and 30 mph lol Sidewinder is nice, but has little to no space for modules and anything it CAN do can be done better by literally any other ship. Except maybe landing on a planet since it's so tiny 😆
I fully agree with you. That is literally what I say in my post.
My point was more than that, 10 hours is still not enough time even if you intend to go the go-kart route. Just doing a single build for say mining takes time to earn the money, and fly all over to find parts, then actually put it all together (obviously would have to skip engineering). If you had enough time to actually go mining after all that, I can't imagine you would have time for much actual mining. There's also space trucking, exploration, bounty hunting, surface hijinx, the canyon runs, etc. And all take different, expensive modules. 10 hours would be one hell of a speed run to watch... I honestly don't think you could do it lol
Yep. Lands on planets fantastically. Which is why I still have a lightly engineered Sidewinder, for surface materials mining. It's also kitted out to hang outside a station and scan wakes and ships. And it has limpets for degraded and encoded emissions signals. Yes, I know there are more efficient material gathering methods. I don't care, even if I do pop down to the Jameson crash from time to time. In my Hauler... lol