About 470 light years away, deep in the Lyra constellation, is an exoplanet a little larger than Earth. Kepler 438 b is a Goldilocks planet; it’s not too big, too small, too hot, too cold, or too anything to stop life from existing there. It’s just right.
It’s the most Earth-like planet we’ve found in the universe.
Its discovery was announced by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics on Tuesday. By Thursday Frontier had added it to Elite. You could fly out there right now if you lliked.
Elite Dangerous’ universe has been constructed to resemble our own as closely as possible. Every star astronomers have discovered and logged has been included in Elite Dangerous, and you can fly to them all. As new planets and stars are discovered Frontier will keep on adding them into the game.
You can see Commander Nutter do a fly-by of the planet in this video:
The team also added Kepler 442b. But, unfortunately for the popularity-craving exoplanet, 442 b doesn’t share the same Earth-like qualities as 438 b.
Frontier added the exoplanets into the 1.04 update that went live yesterday.
Frontier’s also changed how matchmaking works: if you’re playing publicly you then other players will be loaded into your server if they’re in the same system as you. This was already meant to be the case but problems with detecting other players in your region of space meant that Elite’s solar systems often felt quite empty – a criticism Steve made in his Elite review.
Here are the other fixes introduced in the update:
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If a station somehow loses it’s parent then move it to another body so players at that station can load
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Prevent inconsistencies between client and server in which parts of a sector are and are not occupied
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Some fixes to meta-data that were being disguised by an issue with inconsistent generation
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When deciding if we should go hostile to a faction we just shot, consider whether the target has a local bounty rather than a bounty with their own faction. Prevent people being attacked by the police after attack nearby wanted targets
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Fix only the first consequence being applied to the universe state when completing a mission
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Set killer before we do ship death – fixes problem with players not getting bounties or reputation when they kill other players by breaking critical modules
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Reduce likelihood of server disconnects from stellar forge server queries
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Fix mouse control if galaxy map opened with key binding when in outfitting
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Updated exoplanets Kepler 438 b and 442 b
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Add produced by and consumbed by information to all trade goods (except rares)
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Telemetry added to try and figure out why some machines are failing to load resource files
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Remove the terraforming data for Pareco system causing an assert
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Fix packet loss statistics
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Use the correct absolute magnitude in bolometric luminosity calculations
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Various text fixes
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Reputation fixes for delivery and massacre missions
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Fix influence issues in assassination, massacre and delivery missions
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Fix altruism slave mission influence