It’s happening: Aliens are shooting up human space stations in Elite Dangerous [Updated]

Enlarge / Time to blow this taco stand. (credit: Brandon Readman)

Thargoids. If you're a regular Elite Dangerous player, you know the name—they're the enigmatic insectoid Big Bad Guys of the Elite universe that series co-creator David Braben has been teasing us with for a few years now. As far back as early 2015, Braben has been answering our repeated questions of "Where are the Thargoids?!" with the same quiet refrain: "They are coming."

Folks, they're here. And they do not like us.

We don’t go to the Pleiades

2014's Elite Dangerous has its share of mysteries, and biggest among them are the Thargoids, who appear to focus their activities around the Pleiades Cluster. First encountered in 1984's Elite in their massively powerful and difficult-to-kill octagonal spacecraft, the series' lore says that humans were only able to defeat the technologically superior aliens via a biological weapon called the mycoid virus. But then, after a century of silence, the Thargoids crept back onto the stage. Almost a year ago, reports began to surface from players who had been ripped out of hyperspace by unknown enormous spacecraft that appeared impervious to all conventional attacks. A few months ago players learned that the unknown craft were indeed the Thargoids we'd been anticipating for so long and that the game's 2.4 update would focus on their return from wherever they'd gone.