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Space flight sim Elite: Dangerous has been officially available on PC for about 19 months (and on Xbox One for about nine), but players have still explored only a vanishingly small fraction of the game’s 400,000,000 suns. Frontier Developments has repeatedly said that there are plenty of strange things out in the galaxy that no one has yet found—though one of those mysteries might soon be coming to a head.
Strange objects called “unknown artifacts” have been showing up in the game for months, all appearing as a rough sphere a bit more than 100 light years in diameter surrounding a particular star system: Merope. The artifacts would transmit strange messages to ships that got close enough to scan them. Sleuthy players eventually decoded the signals, revealing them to be encoded wireframe images of the players’ ships. The unknown artifacts also seemed to cause problems when collected by players—shutting down systems and even disabling entire space stations if sold on those stations’ black markets.
Call of the wild
Now, a second class of unknown objects, called “unknown probes,” have recently been spotted. These appear to point at a particular planet in the Merope system, Merope 5C. Further, the probes exhibit some remarkable behavior when players scan them with system discovery scanners:
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Source: Ars Technica – Elite: Dangerous players inch closer to solving game’s big mystery