January Update

The January Update is a standalone update for Elite Dangerous that was released on January 14, 2020. After the September Update, it was the third of a series of updates released throughout 2019 and 2020 designed to provide quality of life improvements and a more welcoming beginning experience for new players. The January Update was followed by the Fleet Carriers Update.

A beta for the January Update was open to PC players between November 27, 2019 and December 2, 2019 for testing purposes.

Features

In contrast with the preceding April and September Updates, the January Update did not add any substantial new content and instead prioritized resolving significant bugs and stability issues that had been reported by players. Major issues that were addressed in the update include:

• Commodity delivery numbers to repairing stations are not being counted correctly, with some deliveries not being recognized by the game
• High resolution screenshots create tiling artifacts in bright objects
• Galaxy Map will not select systems that the player uses the search function for
• Keyboard stops working within the game
• Female NPC crew members in Ship-Launched Fighters have no audio or comms text
• When using the Full Spectrum System Scanner, there may be a long delay before any geological and biological sites on planets and moons are identified by the scanner's readout
  • As this process is tied to body generation and cannot be circumvented, a second scanner readout is added that instantly indicates if a body is "Unlikely, Likely, or Very Likely" to have geological or biological sites; these three ratings are probabilities based on a dataset of thousands of bodies and not 100% guarantees that sites are present or not present on a specific body, which can only be confirmed by either waiting for the FSS scan to complete or travelling directly to the body
• Conflict Zones not generating content
• Under certain conditions, the hearts of a Thargoid Interceptor may become invulnerable
• Instance splitting when fighting a Thargoid Interceptor in a Wing
• After destroying at least one of a Thargoid Interceptor's hearts while in a Wing, the Interceptor may subsequently behave as if another of its hearts has been destroyed, causing it to deploy its shield and lightning attack, despite no additional heart being destroyed at the time

Notable quality of life improvements in the update include:

• NPC crew members can now be rescued via the insurance screen if they were onboard the player's ship at the time it was destroyed, with rebuy costs determined by the NPC's combat rank:
  • Harmless - 20,000
  • Mostly Harmless - 40,000
  • Novice - 70,000
  • Competent - 120,000
  • Expert - 200,000
  • Master - 325,000
  • Dangerous - 650,000
  • Deadly - 1,250,000
  • Elite - 2,250,000
• Five new Background Simulation faction states: Drought, Infrastructure Failure, Natural Disaster, Public Holiday, and Terrorist Attack
• Supply and demand volumes are added to markets for Alexandrite, Benitoite, Grandidierite, Low Temperature Diamonds, Monazite, Musgravite, Painite, Rhodplumsite, Serendibite, and Void Opals; markets will continue to offer high prices for these mined commodities, but as demand is met at a specific market the price it offers will decrease proportionately, and markets with certain economies will now favor some mined commodities over others
• The Dolphin's heat dissipation rate and maximum heat capacity are increased, making the ship more difficult to overheat, but the rate at which it takes damage after it begins overheating is also increased
• Balance improvements for ARX rewards from gameplay, particularly for exploration-related activities
• The 15 systems in the Witch Head Nebula colonised as part of The Enclave Interstellar Initiative are renamed
• When using the Discovery Scanner to scan a system, any discovered asteroid belt clusters are now condensed into as few notifications as possible
• A Help section with links to Frontier Developments' Issue Tracker and Customer Service websites is added to the main menu and the pause menu