Planetary Landing
Planetary Landings is the act of landing on a planet with a ship. It was added with the Elite Dangerous: Horizons expansion on December 15, 2015.
Players are able to land on four types of airless planets - rocky, metal, ice and rocky/metal - which make up 61% of the planet types in Elite Dangerous' Milky Way. These planets vary in size and composition, therefore having different gravity forces affecting the flight and landing dynamics.
Some celestial body types, including water worlds and bodies with significant amount of lava covering their surface, cannot be landed on even when they have no atmosphere. The reason for this is likely due to there being no current game mechanic to deal with water, lava, and other large bodies of liquid substances. Earth's moon, Luna, cannot be landed on despite a lack of atmosphere; it is not known why. All yellow-coloured volcanic moons (similar to and including Jupiter's moon Io) will list 0.00 atmospheres, and cannot be landed on. The reason for this is unknown, though it could be due to the large amounts of volcanic activity on these moons, requiring implementation of their own game mechanics. Some bodies are permit locked for unknown reasons and therefore cannot be landed on. An example of this is Neptune's moon Triton, which could be landed on until it was unexpectedly permit locked.
The landings are graphically seamless with a small pause for instance loading, and the planets can be explored in low-level flight or by using a Surface Reconnaissance Vehicle.[1] Once on the surface, players can discover constructed, as well as natural, points of interest, which can be military bases, research establishments, hideouts, starports, mining complexes, crashed ships and debris to investigate. The nature of the encounter varies depending on where the player is: the planet type and composition, and the local topography affected by geology.[2]
Landing on atmospheric planets with cities and lifeforms will be added with future updates. Check the Atmospheric Landings page for more information.
Landing
There aren't any transitions between supercruise and planetary orbit. When you go into orbit there's an altitude meter and G meter. When you drop out of supercruise over the surface of a planet, the game does peer-to-peer (P2P) matchmaking and instance creation. So dropping out of supercruise can cause a slowdown. The slowdown or load time was reduced after some updates.
It's possible to seamlessly travel from the surface of a planet into space and the rest of a solar system. However, this takes several hours without supercruise (Frameshift Drive).
Planetary Landings Guide
Basically you have to point your ship at the station at an angle as to avoid the red numbers and then fly towards it until you can ask for permission to land.
This is a comprehensive guide by GrowCastler.[3]
You may have seen other guides on how to do planetary landings. They’ll tell you to stress about all those annoying numbers and letters on your HUD, and say stuff like “proceed smoothly from orbit to glide” or whatever. They are all wrong and you should not listen to them.
There are only two steps to successful and heroic planetary landings: (1) establish dominance, (2) boost.
I’ve done at least 12½ landings and survived some, so if you follow these easy steps you can rest assured it’ll all be fine:
- So what you want to do first off is to establish dominance over the planet. Get yourself a nice long run up. I suggest a few mkm out, directly above your chosen impact site destination.
- Then it’s full speed ahead, straight down. Don’t worry about all the alarms and flashing red lights – they’re just there to tell you how heroic you’re being but you already knew that so duh (remember Jameson did the same thing and they gave him a memorial)
- Soon you’ll see a kinda ladder thing on your screen. I haven’t figured out how to turn this off yet, so just ignore it. Now you’ll also see the planet zooming up towards you. This is a good thing because we’re gonna land on it so the closer the better
- There might be some booms and bangs and alarms around now – ignore those too, you’ll be fine probably. Then your ship will tell you it’s trying to do some stuff and then 0.013 secs later it’ll abort the lot and start doing alarms again. That’s all good – it means you’ve nearly landed
- Then there’ll be another big boom and then you’ll be sad because your ship will slow down. But it’s ok because we’re nearly there now, and remember we’ve still got boost! So now keep pointing straight down and spam boost like crazy
- If you’re landing on a station this is when they’ll start hassling you over coms. But just keep boosting at them – it’s the universal gesture of dominance and they know it. Tell them you’re gonna land, do one final boost, and there you are! If you miss, or forgot to deploy your landing gear in all the excitement, don’t worry you can usually sometimes try again. Just boost up and down till you’ve cracked it.
- If you’re landing on rocks or whatever it’s even easier: (a) keep boosting, and then (b) go straight down until you hit some land, which means you’ve landed. If you’re having problems, stop whining and just boost around a bit (please note: this is the expert method for winning at pretty much everything in Elite Dangerous)
This guide will make all your planetary landings exciting and heroic and will hardly ever result in a fiery death
o7 Commanders!