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Top-level
 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. 76 comments
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.  @danderson that's wonderful. Thank you for sharing this - I kind of needed it right now @danderson  @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. @SymTrkl @danderson Haha I'd forgotten about the friendship drive. I never _really_ got into E:D, but a lot about it was so lovely. Some special kind of serenity in just flying alone far away. @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   @danderson Maybe it's because anyone who isn't rased into an antisocial asshole generally doesn't mean harm to their fellow human beings, but instead has basic compassion. 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. |
Gregory's Server
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.