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Elite:Dangerous

Gaming — Elite:Dangerous

Flying dangerously since 10-May-2015.

Running two instances of E:D

I decided to purchase a second Elite:Dangerous account, in order to play two different characters. This is mainly to do with the desire to, whilst also doing team play with my faction, be free to go on exploration excursions, without having to exhaustingly travel back and forth over great distances to fill both roles. I also wanted the ability to run both accounts at the same time.

There are many methods for doing this, most of which didn’t work at all on my system, so this is the method I picked, on account that it did work, and was fairly simple. It uses the RUNAS command in a command line window (CMD), and can easily be implemented in a batch file so that you won’t have to enter it every time.

  1. Create a new Windows user account.
  2. Log into the new Windows user account for the first time setup.
  3. Log back out, and into your main Windows user account again.
  4. Go to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Elite Dangerous".
  5. Make a copy of EDLaunch.exe in the same folder and name it according to preference (e.g. “EDLaunch2.exe”).
  6. Now you can start your second instance with the following command line: RUNAS /USER:USERNAME "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Elite Dangerous\EDLaunch2.exe" (where USERNAME is the username of the other Windows user account, and EDLaunch2.exe is the name of the copy of EDLaunch.exe. Enter the account password when prompted.
  7. Once your game has started, close the launcher window before starting another instance.

Control Suggestions

These are modifications I’ve made to my controls, in case anyone else should find them helpful.

Frame Shift Drive

Having the “J” key bound both to activating Supercruise and Hyperspace Jump was driving me nuts.

Controls → Flight Miscellaneous

SUPERCRUISE = [J]
HYPERSPACE JUMP = [L Ctrl]+[J]

Throttle Shortcuts

Making it easier to, say, set 75% thrust when reaching 7s to your destination or target, so you don’t overshoot. Also 50% is good for interdictions. The layout is directly tied to the existing thrust keys, with only the “Ctrl” needed extra.

Controls → Flight Throttle

SET SPEED TO 0% = [X]
SET SPEED TO 25% = [L Ctrl]+[X]
SET SPEED TO 50% = [L Ctrl]+[S]
SET SPEED TO 75% = [L Ctrl]+[W]

Tutorials

Various Links