 This morning for no obvious reason, I remembered the Fuel Rats. Elite:Dangerous is an MMO space sim game, with a big galaxy in which you fly a spaceship doing stuff. Spaceships need fuel, which you buy at stations, or if you have a fuel scoop you can skim the surface of certain stars to get usable fuel. Space is big though, and it's quite possible to run yourself low on fuel in a way that you can no longer warp to any inhabited system to refuel. At which point you're screwed. 123 comments
Or at least you would be, in the game as designed. But one item spaceships can have is "fuel limpets", effectively small missiles that can transfer fuel to another ship. So, shortly after the game launched, a group of players formed the Fuel Rats, an emergency refueling service. Ran yourself out of gas? Don't panic, head to the Fuel Rats website and hit the distress button.  @danderson@hachyderm.io they even have an irc channel! Also be weary not to attack a fuel rat while they're in service otherwise you're in for a bad time You get dropped into an honest to god IRC channel, with the current on-call dispatcher. They collect your location, make sure you have enough oxygen reserves and how to conserve resources. Meanwhile, responders hanging out in the channel have been plotting a course to your location, and reporting ETA and jump counts back to the dispatcher. The distpatcher assigns (usually) a primary and backup responder, and they start heading your way. Eventually one of them drops out of warp near you. Even in an MMO, it's a very odd feeling having another player ship drop out of cruise, and slowly pull up to your windshield. They say hi, did I find the right place, you need fuel right? They transfer a bunch of fuel, give you pointers to the nearest systems with fuel services, and make sure you're in good shape to get yourself to safety. The thing I find remarkable about this, is that the Fuel Rats aren't a game feature. There are no rewards for being a fuel rat (in fact, it's policy to refuse payment if the recuee offers), except the intrinsic reward of helping people have a nice time. Despite this, the fuel rats were one of the first "guilds" formed, if you want to call them that, and have been going strong for years. According to their stats, they have rescued 157 thousand stranded players, with a 96% success rate. I find it reassuring that in a game that is in some ways a libertarian power fantasy (you and your spaceship, go anywhere do whatever you want), and a PvP universe, one of the first things people did was create a volunteer ambulance service. And despite not being "formally" a part of the game, the fuel rats have become ingrained in Elite's lore and playerbase. It's known, pervasively, that the fuel rats exist, and that if you put out a distress signal, they _will_ come help you, come what may. Occasionally, griefers put out false flags and attack the fuel rats that come to them. With no explicit coordination, this immediately became the most reviled form of piracy, in a game where piracy is broadly considered okay. If you attack a fuel rat on the job, you can expect vigilante players to make you pay for it. You'll get bounties taken out, much better skilled and equipped players will hound you and blow you out of the sky, and generally pay back the fuel rats' losses tenfold. You don't fuck with the fuel rats, either by choice, or because the entire galaxy has their back and will run you out of town if you mess about with the emergency service.  @danderson From the sound of it, if the Fuel Rats put out a distress call themselves, the belligerent sides in active combat zones call a temporary armistice to assist them. @mos_8502 When I last played, there weren't really events of that kind of shape (if we want to get into criticisms of the game we could, it's not perfect by any means, but I don't want to harsh the mellow), but if there were and the game had mechanisms to express it, I'm quite sure the fuel rats would get in-game status comparable to the Red Cross under the Geneva conventions: ship with fuel rat livery in a disputed region? Let them pass unharmed, or else. But the fuel rats don't retaliate. Oh, that sucks, not a real rescue, clear it off the active board and return to standby. They'll respond to the next call just as eagerly. They also go way above and beyond. There are famous cases where they rescued explorers "outside the bubble", who were hundreds or thousands of light years away from inhabited space. Reaching them requires hours of real-time play, careful planning, and a very well outfitted ship. When those calls came in, several people, who again I remind you get no rewards for this, signed up for an hours long trek out into deep space to rescue the stranded explorer. Due to the distance they usually dispatch more responders, just in case one of them miscalculates and ends up in distress themselves (e.g. warping to a star type that you can't refuel from, with not enough fuel to reach another star - that's how things go wrong for deep space explorers). I dunno, I find that pretty neat.  @danderson are many players full time rats? If so how do they support themselves and buy fuel to give out, is it like a collective? Or do they have wealthy patrons? Or are the rats more like independently wealthy players taking on-call shifts when they aren't out pillaging noobs or prospecting for space gold or whatever you do to make a living normally? @aburka I believe many fuel rats do the thing as a primary reason to play the game, yes. Rats provide their own fuel, once you're past the very early stage of playing the cost of fuel is effectively zero so it's not much of a hardship, the trouble is just being in a location where you can buy/scoop the stuff. So, more like experienced players (== fairly wealthy, owning fast ships that are ideal for ratting) donating their time and resources to give a leg up to others. @aburka At least back in the day, very new players were common clients of the fuel rats, because if you're newer to the game your jump range and fuel capacity is lower, and you've not yet internalized the reflex to manage fuel properly. And so, new players run themselves out of fuel fairly frequently. I used to think of the fuel rat volunteers as people who experienced that back in the day, and are giving other players the leg up they got themselves from the fuel rats back in the day. @danderson I have to say, I bounced off Elite Dangerous when I tried it. If I got to do this kind of thing, I think I'd probably give it another go. Though it sounds like you'd need to already have played for quite a while first to have the resources and know-how. If there was on-the-job training I think I'd sign right up. It sounds like fun! @danderson I had never heard about this and this is delightful. Thank you for sharing! 💖 @danderson Also I *love* that they have a public Grafana instance 😂 https://grafana.fuelrats.com/d/H-iTUTPmz/public-statistics?refresh=1h&orgname=2&orgId=2 Brought to you by the memory of learning about the fuel rats when I first started playing Elite:Dangerous, and then many game hours later having to call on their services when I learned that fuel scoops don't work on some kinds of stars, and was just dead in the water in an empty star system between two inhabited worlds. And yeah, my experience was just like in the brochure. I honestly wonder if real life emergency responders pick up fuel rat dispatch shifts in their spare time, because wow. The details are fuzzy, but I remember I was still a mid-level player with a ship whose main asset was affordability and opportunities to amass enough money to get the really nice ships. I was rescued by an Anaconda, the third most expensive ship in the game according to the wiki. The insurance payment on it alone was more than my entire game net worth at the time. In naval terms, it's like a 300ft superyacht coming to the rescue of a rusty fishing trawler. I remember it because seeing the Anaconda slowly pull up to a stop outside my windshield and fire fuel limpets (a) looked incredible in VR out the panoramic cockpit of my rubbish little freighter and (b) this was a player who clearly had the resources to do whatever they felt like in this game, nothing was off limits. And they chose to spend their evening hanging out at the IRC equivalent of the fire house with other like-minded people, running some gas cans to people in need. That's just neat!  @danderson It's interesting to see what sort of things humans put their effort into when survival/comfort isn't dependent on it. Sometimes I think about how if money was removed from everyone's equation, being a waiter at a greasy spoon diner would be a really fun job!  @danderson As a whole I have a very positive opinion of the Elite Dangerous players community, but indeed the Fuel Rats may be the most wholesome emergent gameplay this game has seen.  @danderson wow, I really like the whole idea of this. In fact, I almost want to play it just to get involved. That sounds amazingly cathartic. I keep thinking of the fact that in Fallout 4 one of the most fun things to do is build these incredibly cool, survivable settlements (which the NPCs never take advantage of, but still, one can dream) @danderson I do believe the Fuel Rats now have carriers to help with extreme long haul rescue, and people bring them fuel donations whenever they are parked back in the bubble. Gods love the Fuel Rats.  @danderson The Anaconda was a great ship for deep space in Elite II Frontier as I recall.  @danderson I play in a text-based MUD where we have something similar. Priests who can perform a resurrection ritual will come to the aid of dead players but there’s also a club of people who will retrieve players’ corpses (and their stuff) from dangerous locations. If you want someone to rescue your corpse you have to permit them to take stuff off your corpse. You’d think people would be hesitant to trust strangers with this. /1 @danderson But they’re not, you just call up someone from the Rescue & Resurrect Unit and you know they will go into tricky situations for you and give you all your stuff back. While it’s customary to give priests and RRU people a decent amount of in-game money it is not required and nobody minds if you don’t. /2 @danderson There are also class-affiliated organizations that give starter kits to newbie players who join their class. It’s just a thing people do. /end @danderson In the Voron community, there's the "Rescue Ravens" (they wanted to call them Rescue Rats in reference to Fuel Rats but they concluded it might be too confusing) who are there to get your open source 3D printer back up and running by any means necessary in basically the same fashion, except that we're talking about something that's IRL.  @danderson thanks for the storytelling! No Man's Sky had something a bit similar to this, back when you couldn't just travel to anywhere in the galaxy with portals. and the practice remained for a while longer, because there's a particular galaxy (Odyalutai, galaxy 256) that you can only get to by joining the session of another player already there. but the Elite thing is way cooler and more in-fiction and socially emergent.  @danderson I have had to use their services before and was both incredibly impressed and incredibly thankful to them. It’s a fantastic example of community in MMO’s 🫶🏻  @danderson I love this whole story. Makes me want to invest a lot of time that I don't have and probably money that I can't afford into becoming a Fuel Rat.   @SymTrkl hah, TIL the fuel rat procedures have changed since I last looked at them. I love the landing gear hack to disable risky close-quarters functions! Also, of course, lol, due 2 cat. Love it. @danderson the Fuel rats are the best guild of any MMO in existence, no one can change my mind on that. o7 @danderson It's even gotten to the point where there are in-game billboards for them! I think Elite Dangerous is a neat case study in a lot of ways - in many respects the game itself is an MVP that's basically unplayable (or at least un-fun) trash without third party add-ons. So the devs embrace it - it logs various things to JSON files in the game dir and any tool can read this. As long as it's not automation, all's fair, and the players have done some really neat stuff.  @danderson does sound (from your description) that it relies on faster-than-light out-of-band communications. @vathpela Elite isn't really a hard sci-fi world (e.g. ships have "arcade" flight mechanics not true orbital mechanics), so I don't know that it comes up much. But yes, the world of Elite features FTL travel, and I think canonically also FTL communication. I mean empirically obviously since there's the fuel rats IRC and discord channel, but I think in-game there's also some amount of canon FTL comms. @vathpela@better.boston @danderson@hachyderm.io which is canonically a thing! "multiplayer" involves you projecting yourself into the seat of somebody else's ship to control it. @danderson Fuel Rats, and Hull Seals, are some of the most awesome individuals you'll ever run into in a game. Hands down, no competition. o7  there are no rewards for being a fuel ratI don't entirely agree: rats can (and should) scan systems they visit on the way to their distress call to get exploration data; that exploration data can be sold at other systems for money. effectively: the game is paying the rats, not the players.  @danderson that's a lovely story, thanks for sharing. I backed the Elite Kickstarter, because 8bit computing as a child, but I never did own a PC that could play it. Alas, the console port got nuked. Perhaps I'll get to it one day, bit it's nice to know this sort of collective exists. @danderson (disclaimer, haven't read thread yet) I love the Fuel Rats, they saved me a couple times, and then gave me a lecture to make sure I didn't make that mistake again, lol @khionu I got the spiel when I got rescued as well 😂 I appreciated it at the time, even though it was all stuff I knew. Even following a script, the intent was clearly making sure you can get to safety and know how to stay safe, and it gave me warm fuzzies that people choose to do this for no reward, and spent time workshopping what might help and educate people :)  @danderson Thank you for that beautiful story! Reminds me of https://hcfluffy.de/ which was a faction on a competitive Minecraft server who just handed out free food. They also ran a bank for a while so solo players could keep their valuables safe. @danderson I love those folks. Real life emergency dispatch skills were taught to internet folks. The amazing part of the fuel rats was how every fuel rat held hostage would do their best to self destruct (or get shot at long range by another fuel rat) because they recognize this kind of pacifistix sacrifice is the only way to avoid engaging with pirates, because they understood that giving trolls any engagement at all would endanger the mission.  @danderson I love these kinds of stories. Thanks for sharing. This is amazing. I wish there were more stories like this. @danderson I love the fuel rats. I haven't ever needed their services but the fact that they exist in this game is like absolutely amazing.  @danderson In #Valheim there's a similar thing - a group of burly Vikings who will join your game world and help you recover your belongings and equipment if you die somewhere too distant and dangerous to recover them alone.  @danderson this story reminds me of a group I heard about in the early days of DayZ. in a server where the standard practice was to murder other players for their very limited supplies of food and medicine and weapons they would go into incredibly dangerous situations to rescue stranded and injured players, eventually getting helicopters and automatic weapons to do so, performing free extractions of injured players from crowds of zombies and whatnot @danderson I found the article I heard about them in: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/the-healing-touch-dr-wasteland-brings-hope-to-day-zs-grim-world/ @danderson Never thought I'd see one of my favorite games mentioned on Mastodon! The Fuel Rats are great people, they've helped me out in the past as well. @danderson ty for the reminder of the time I ran out of fuel about 35 metres above a landing pad I'm not into space sims but I'm grinning so hard. It's just proof that even in the grimdark libertarian future idiots like the Muskrat want, people will group together and help each other for no reason beyond being able to. @danderson You may like this account of the founding of the Fuel Rats: https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/2017/06/23/lavecon-2017/ @danderson Note also the existence of the Hull Seals! One of my proudest parenting moments was watching my son, aged 10, take an interest and then a very serious role in the leadership of this spontaneous in-game mutual aid organization. @danderson I love this. Humans organising together to do Good Things even where there's no systematic reward for doing them. @danderson I've never needed the Fuel Rats (so far, touch wood). But knowing they're there made my first tentative attempts at exploration a lot less scary, and now I think nothing of heading out deep into the black to find unexplored places. Thanks, Fuel Rats! o7 @danderson As a former Fuel Rat, I love to hear them get the recognition they deserve. Btw, you may have seen holo-ads for the Fuel Rats in-game. I was the one who submitted that advert in a contest. I couldn't believe it when I found out I won! @danderson I loved it but I haven't played for years since I lost my explorer Asp (no shields or weapons) to an interdiction coming back to the bubble with weeks worth of data... it was just too much work to grind it all back again. @danderson I had to be rescued by the Fuel Rats once in my early days. One of the games I've played a couple hundred hours in is Foxhole. A MMO wargame with month long wars between two factions. Regiments make up different functions of the game. Some do artillery, tank operations, boats, and so on. However the regiment I played was FMAT which just does logistics to ensure the average player has access to everything in the game. Tanks? No problem. Wanna do artillery for fun? Sure. Quite cool way to play the game. Quite wholesome. @danderson Let me add to the chorus of "thank you"s for this thread. Even if it's within essentially a game, it's still an example of a "look for the helpers" situation, of how folks may choose to act when they have the means, ability, and will to help. There's something assuring about such, and there's something assuring about the option of being such when we can, too. @danderson@hachyderm.io I haven't played that game in years now, dislike the way the devs handled the game, and some parts of the community. But remembering the Fuel Rats traveling into the dark to rescue people always makes me smile. @danderson This thread you made and the many beautiful responses had me crying over my food, in the best way possible, for several minutes. I love learning about community efforts like these so much, thank you (and everyone else) for sharing.  @danderson and they're a player faction that's been adopted so much by the devs that you can see Fuel Rat ad posters when docking at stations @danderson I still remember their motto. "We have fuel. You don't. Any questions?" I once considered signing up to be a fuel rat, but lost interest in the game. I do have a fuel tanker in the event one of my friends needs a tow, but it's literally only seen use once, to get someone without a fuel scoop from one system to another. I've thought about it again recently, but sadly I don't have the time to devote to something on that scale anymore. @danderson What a fun memory to surface ☺️ Being a Fuel Rat was the most fun thing I ever did in E:D and kept me in the game much longer than I would have otherwise. After classes were done for the day I would just pop up some Netflix, poke around aimlessly in Fuelum, and hang out in the IRC channel until it was time to roll out. The only thing I ever fired at a player ship was a limpet!  @danderson Valheim has a similar thing. If you accidentally wander into a biome you can't handle and get killed, and can't get your stuff back, there's a loot retrieval squad you can get in touch with. You give them your game details and they'll hop in and grab your stuff back for you. The game has random events and some of the late game ones are triggered when certain items are present in game, so they figured out what gear and items they can bring in for recovery without screwing up the game.  @danderson I was completely ignorant of all of this. Thank you for sharing it, it's beautiful. |
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@danderson@hachyderm.io Oh the fuel rats. https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Anaconda_Graveyard The Anaconda graveyard it's all coming back