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.
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.
On linux, you’re talking about the STOP and CONTinue signals. You can send these by process name instead of pid, with
pkill. Try this:Have you verified that the game servers give you credit for whatever you do immediately after continuing?
That should work, brilliant, thanks! I think I was using STOP and CONT previously (but with the PID kill) - but yeah, looks like pkill would solve the PID problem. I think I prevously bound CTRL+ALT+P to pause it, and CTRL+ALT+R to resume, though I could use anything that’s not going to clash with anything else. I just used the shortcut tab from keyboard settings in Linux Mint.
And yes, I think so regarding credit etc - as far as I was aware, it all worked exactly as it should - I was doing this repeatedly for a few tens of hours of gameplay, and definitely completed missions, upped my rankings etc. It was probably 6 months ago when I was last in an Elite Dangerous phase, but I wouldn’t expect it to have changed anything since - I only ever played solo though. I imagine you can’t pause any of the “actually online” stuff - but otherwise it probably just treats you as having logged off/lost connection - with the exception of NPC combat etc pausing and waiting for you.
I might re-test it again this week. I’ve not played for a while, and posts like the one here make me want to get into it again :)
I hope you’ll let us know how it goes!
Curiosity got the better of me (and I have a spare half hour), so just tested now. It does still work, and using “pkill” instead of “kill” also works perfectly (though I’ve not tested extensively) - thankyou so much for this, it’s genuinely made it so much easier to set up.
So in the Linux Mint Keyboard settings, under shortcuts, I’ve added “pkill -STOP EliteDangerous” and “pkill -CONT EliteDangerous”, with the shortcuts CTRL+ALT+P and CTRL+ALT+R.
That pretty much means in-game I can pause with CTRL+ALT+P, at will - for example, phone call, doorbell, cat/wife/child etc - though to be aware of possible glitches.
I tested it launching from a station (the “4:59 to leave” timer pauses), flying outside near some other ships (npc ships freeze and wait for you), charging the friendship drive (it waits for you), flying at a very high speed towards the next station (stations, planets etc have moved when you unpause) then landing at a new station (the “postbox” or “mail slot” of the station continues rotating as you are paused, so careful when you unpause). I took some passengers on transport. I imagine the mission timer continues, but I had about 3 hours left to do the mission, and only paused for a few minutes, so didn’t really notice. They were delivered happily, got paid, reputation went up etc. I’d paused about 6 times, for a minute or two each time, probably about 10 minutes paused in total.
I don’t think I’d overuse it - but knowing you are able to pause and put it down for five minutes is very useful - you can, as mentioned elsewhere, fully log out if you know you’re away for hours. I’m not sure the longest I’ve ever left it paused and it still worked - I’m fairly sure I’d left it an hour or two, mid NPC-combat, but I’m not 100% certain on that. I will try and test it in the next few days i.e. go and start a scrap with a pirate, pause it, go out for a few hours, see what happens. At worst, it kills you and boots you from the game, I guess. I’d test it with a cheaper ship and not when you’re carrying £millions of exploration data back to a base :)
[edit] Not sure if it’s a one-off, but I left it paused for a bit longer (about 15 minutes) and after I restarted, it gave me a server error and sent me back to the main menu - though I guess that’s no worse than if I’d logged out to “pause” the game. It’s possible they’ve slightly patched the “feature” since I last played (almost exactly a year ago).
Thanks for this. I’ll have to look into it next time I have the urge to play.