Like Starfleet engineers, Frontier has once again dipped into the Elite Dangerous maintenance shaft: so this

Elite's latest expansion launched a few weeks ago in a sorry state, riddled with bugs and problems, forcing Frontier boss David Braben to apologize "sincerely" for the state of the Odyssey at launch. Since then, the studio has been hard at work patching the expansion and last week released a massive 5GB update full of bug fixes.

And now Odyssey has received a second maintenance patch, this time a bit smaller at 3.5 GB. The game's patch notes list a number of fixes, including fixes to the AI of the planetary outpost, extensive balancing of the game's audio, and numerous changes to lighting, UI, cosmetics, and more.

A particularly painful problem that stopped explorers from plotting routes that included neutron stars (supercharging their ships from these stars allows them to jump much farther than normal range) has also been fixed. It was a nice fix before I decided to wrap up my 20K light-year journey across the galaxy, but thanks.

These updates are a step toward getting the Odyssey back into ship-shape. However, they do not fix the more fundamental problem that we have seen since the alpha version of the expansion, namely that many of the walking missions, activities, and FPS arenas are just plain lousy.

Landing on a planet and making your first footprint still feels phenomenal. Moving to the center of the galaxy and having a janky shootout under a different sky" Not so much.