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Top-level
 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. 35 comments
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 thereβs also a club of people who will retrieve playersβ 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. Youβd think people would be hesitant to trust strangers with this. /1 @danderson But theyβre 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 itβs customary to give priests and RRU people a decent amount of in-game money it is not required and nobody minds if you donβt. /2 @danderson There are also class-affiliated organizations that give starter kits to newbie players who join their class. Itβs 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. Itβs a fantastic example of community in MMOβs π«Άπ»  @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 My son was rescued by a fuel rat once and I felt so blessed and grateful that he got to witness the absolute best of humanity @danderson I have never played Elite, and I am ready to launch myself across space with a crowbar. "Oh, shite, it's that mad g jumper from planet Saskatoon !" "Dude, I told you don't fuck with the fuel rats!" @danderson Thank you for this trip down Memory Lane. 8 years ago, when I was still playing, I ran out of gas in my brand new Anaconda, gravely misjudging how costly the jumps the Anaconda could pull would be. I had played forever to scrounge up enough ingame funds to buy this ship, and I was so proud - and now it was about to blow up from ...running out of fuel (my cartoonist mind loves this fact though π€£). -> -> I heard of the Fuel Rats before, and thought it was a neat way to play - though I never quite understood the problem, being a Bubble Skipper on smaller ships. I will never forget how I clicked the Distress button, talked to the dispatcher - while time was slowly running out. When I was contacted through radio in-game, I hardly believed it. Then all of a sudden, three or four ships pulled up to mine, and friendly rats filled her up enough to get home. Helped me plot a safe course. -> -> I was impressed and amazed. Drew this as a little thank-you gift back then (hanging out with them for a while showed there was some Snickers running gag. It's a rat thing...): @danderson Beautiful write-up! I should play E:D again some time :D @danderson Ah yes, the fuel rats, even despite everything they're still resilliently helping people, kinda makes me want to play this game again  @danderson there is a similar group in EVE Online. Three is no fuel to worry about in EVE but if you go into a wormhole without a probe scanner and probes you probably won't find your way home. But the group EVE-Scout leaves emergency cargo containers with probes, and scanners so you can return.  @danderson Thank you for sharing :neocat_thumbsup: I have nothing to do with Elite:Dangerous and I don't think I ever will, but I enjoyed reading about this :neocat_happy: @danderson @RavenWorks There's also the Hull Seals, who do much the same thing but for emergency repairs. I expect there's some overlap between the two groups. ^.==.^ @Tombfyre @danderson @RavenWorks Both groups have what seem to be fairly strict certification programs (all of the docs for this are online) and the Hull Seals at least have a fast track program to go from one group to the other, and they seem to collaborate in some situations. https://hullseals.space/knowledge/books/standard-operating-procedures   @danderson thank you for this thread, which is utterly delightful. Your love of it shines through your writing.  @danderson @sequentialsnep @danderson that's the only mechanism the game actually expects you to use in that situation. But, they have put in the tools for this kinda gameplay  |
Gregory's Server
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.