Inspiration came to me one day in the form of a cheap offer on www.humblebundle.com. Elite Dangerous with Horizons was only $40 instead of the usual $60. I initially resisted as I already had three accounts, but after I linked the offer into one of the Discord channels and a certain someone had difficulties redeeming their purchase, I caved and bought a fourth account.
There were difficulties activating it as Humble gave steam keys, but my main Elite account is already linked to steam and my Humble account email is already used for both Steam and Frontier. I ended up creating accounts on steam and frontier using an aliased version of my email and eventually got the codes assigned and all linked correctly.
I'd been planning for a while to make some form of tutorial, either blog posts or videos and this brand new commander could serve as a good platform for that. What I didn't realise was that the "certain someone" above had somewhat similar ideas with their account and was starting the very next day.
Commander Ascorbius (Youtube) was about to begin a series of 10 one hour live streams to demonstrate that Open play was viable for newbies. The main twist on this was that he was streaming AND doing it with an IRONMAN condition - any character death that took him to the re-buy screen instead earned a complete wipe of the saved game and a revert to flying the basic Sidewinder. Hes a far braver man than I!
Since I am about 10 hours ahead due to time zones, I had a head start and played about 3 hours on my Sunday evening on the new account. At this stage I did not know the details of what Ascorbius was planning so all I did was play in open. I figured I'd get a small head start and could then more or less parallel his experiences without the danger of trying to stream anything. It was Tuesday evening for me before I caught his first recorded stream (Link to session 1) and realised that I was roughly 3 sessions in already by equivalent game play. I forget some of the details now but in my initial session I had concentrated mostly on missions. I had fairly generous RNG and had multiple well paid missions to the same stations frequently so had enough money to go from the sidewinder to a mostly c-rated Cobra MK III before stopping. Net worth was about 2.5 million in that time.
Due to real life getting in the way, my next play session was only after Ascorbius had recorded his 5th 1-hour stream, wherein he'd had to invoke the Ironman clause and wipe his saved game. This time I was somewhat more ready and had installed OBS software to capture my game play session. The result is 5 roughly half-hour segments of video "lets play" crossed with tutorial as I also reset my saved game and started anew.
Part 1 covers the basics and first mission.
Part 2 Part 3 and Part 4 have plenty of information as I complete more missions.
Part 5 has some combat out in a High Resource Extraction Site.
I had less generous RNG luck with the mission boards and was heavily distracted by recording everything so had a net worth under 2 mil by the end of these videos.
My next encounter with Ascorbius was during his 9th stream where I actually got to watch live. I believe he invoked Ironman again at the end of the 8th session so I again reset my save to follow along, this time "live". I was watching and occasionally commenting on his stream on one monitor while playing elite on my other. I thought I was recording as well but that wasn't the case unfortunately. In just under an hour of play, mostly involving combat in the High RES site, I earned 950,000 credits. Its a lot easier to do this when not streaming for sure!
I have since tinkered with my settings on OBS and I think any future recordings should have a lot better sound quality especially as I've now filtered out all the ambient sounds.
Enough for now,
CMDR Cryptography
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