There I was, cruising around massive pieces of shattered titan carapace, my attention divided between scanners and the view through my canopy. I had my heart set on a couple of new, pre-engineered SCO frame shift drives, each of which requires one of those rare treasures known as titan drive components. I had one already, and if there was another floating out here in the wreckage, I was determined to find it.
Preoccupied as I was, I neglected to check my immediate surroundings before applying a hard downward thrust to get around an obstacle, and smacked my ship right into another titan chunk. The impact knocked my shields offline, and damaged the hull as well. Not severely, though, and no enemies had shown up yet. I figured I would be fine continuing my scavenger hunt for the moment. I went back to my search, picking up whatever useful materials I found along the way.
Then, just as I had slowed to a crawl with my cargo hatch open to scoop up some thargoid bits, I noticed another ship getting a little too close for comfort. I hadn't seen any threats or demands on the comms, so I didn't expect a pirate, but it sure looked like it was moving deliberately in my direction. And then, another blip on the scanner. It was a single limpet, zipping along on a direct path to my ship.
I suddenly remembered that this was exactly what an incoming hatch breaker looks like just before it steals your precious cargo. Damn it. My first and only drive component took hours to find, so I didn't want to risk losing it in battle. Maybe I could outrun this thing. As I shut the cargo hatch and reached for my boost button, I noticed an identifying signature on that incoming blip:
Repair Limpet
What?? Was it possible that the would-be thief had hit the wrong limpet button? Surely my scanners wouldn't be wrong about what kind it was. Curiosity got the better of me, so (with my thumb still over the boost button) I checked the nearby contacts. The approaching ship was a Type-9 Heavy. Not quite the typical pirate wagon.
Identification: Rescue Ship
WHAT??
As I sat there in disbelief, the repair limpet diligently sealed up the cracks in my ship, and then... poof ...expired, its job complete. Hull integrity: 100%. The Lakon hulk that brought the little fix-it bot slowly turned toward a new heading, and peacefully lumbered away.
I must have laughed out loud for fifteen or twenty seconds. I have been playing this game for years. I knew it was risky to linger in the flotsam of a dead titan, where nobody ever shows up but pirates, AX teams, and thargoid interceptors. The last thing I would have expected was exactly the encounter I had: a kindly NPC mobile repair service.
Elite Dangerous dev team, I salute you. That was great.
This story makes me want to pick up elite again. I wish there was a way to pause the game. I have to leave the computer very often so the only thing I can do in the game is long range exploration and I did a lot of that and it was fun but I’m done with it now.
Thanks for the story.
I also gave up on it due to a lack of pause. I'm sure I'll have another go at it in the future, at some point when I've "definitely got an actual day off", but it does ruin the ability to just pick up and play for a little while, and most of the time I've only got a little while.
Oddly, I did find it was completely technically possible to pause with a bit of prep. All the local star system/ enemies etc are all local to your machine - if you manually set up a system shortcut to run a command to pause/suspend the whole program (i.e. in system monitor/ task manager), it pauses fine, even mid-combat (with NPCs). You can leave it an hour, come back and unpause, and carry on. I've only tried this on Linux, but no reason it wouldn't work on Windows.
The main issue I found was that my keyboard shortcut could only point to pausing the program ID number (which changed every launch), so I had to re-setup the shortcut every time I played.
Frustrating though - if pausing is technically possible in single player, then it means it always could have been pauseable, and they just chose to deliberately stop it in-game. I'm sure there's some edge cases with fast-moving planets that would smack into you whilst paused, but it never happened to me, and I must have played 100 hours of it.
[edit] I think it was one shortcut for "kill -TSTP 123456" (where 123456 is the id number) to pause and one shortcut for "kill -CONT 123456" to resume.
Thanks for this. I’ll have to look into it next time I have the urge to play.