Steam says I hadn't played Elite since May 22. That's about right. It seems i play for a few months each spring, then by the time summer is here I burn out and shelve it for the rest of the year.

Last night I literally dusted off the Cougar and jumped through the hoops to get set up. Getting the stick set back up, Track IR, headset and all. Launching Elite I found I had to do all the account linking again, which didn't go smoothly, and I was troubled to see messages such as "must be done when running Elite for the first time" when it does the shader and planet generation thing. I expected to find my account wiped or something, which would have been the end of it for me!

But it was still there.

I then had trouble restoring my custom bindings .And EDMC needed to be relinked to Frontier account. But after nearly an hour of setting up I found myself back in Poison Whiskey (Krait II with a snazzy paint job I had bought just before shutting down last year). I saw I had mounted an Interdictor, so must have been running some assassinations. I was docked at Miller Terminal in Exioce, which is the best bounty system close to my home system of Dvorsi.

I took the Krait out of the station just to get comfortable again, and flew around scanning wakes for a bit. Then landed, refueled and fixed the integrity, then took off for some bounty hunting in the local RES's. It all came back in short order and I managed to add one percentage point to my combat rank. Last spring I set a goal of combat elite, which would mean triple elite, but I failed miserably since it's just so slow.

Jumping out I checked Inara, and Bo's stuff. Got a Mamba eh? How you like it? I also saw you are 63% Deadly, so very nearly triple elite yourself. I could be wrong, but Wingy is the only one here who I know has hit it (apologies to any others who have). For me, goals are essential in Elite. Without a goal I just lose interest. So I am setting reaching Deadly as my goal. I am at 93% Dangerous, so this should be easy if I play more than a couple of weeks.

I looked at Neph's PG and it's up to 30 pilots! Cool.

I looked at my stats and two things jumped out at me. One is, I have never lost a dime to minions. And two, my lifetime fines total 11,000 credits (in 928 hours). I am one law-abiding space monkey. I've lost five ships, but that I knew. Bank account is 1.2 billion, thanks to core mining. I looked at the credits graph on Inara, and it looks like a sheer cliff face reflecting the two or three days where i clocked 750 million mining.

After that windfall I sold half my fleet, and I am down to seven ships (Krait II, Courier, AspX, DBX, Orca, Python, FDL). One on hand I would like trying out a new ship or two. On the other I have zero desire to engineer another ship from scratch.

Deadly here we come! smile



No, now go away or I shall taunt you a second time!