4Game

I know it looks like Stargoids #2 and #3 have overshot their destination and are now on a straight line for Sol at ludicrous speeds. I know it looks like Stargoid #3 will reach Sol in around 17 hours and #2 will reach there in 10 hours, but don't panic – they will only get just over half way there before maintenance and Frontier will come and save us by moving them back to the Ammonia worlds in HIP 8887 and HIP 20567 where they were supposed to stop.

The reason this is happening is that the Anomalies follow the course of HyperbolicOrbiters through each system, and these HOs list their previous system and next system to calculate the correct trajectory through the current system. But, Frontier didn't allow HyperbolicOrbiters to NOT specify a previous or next system, so for the system that they are stopping in the next system is specified as Sol… because Sol is at coordinates 0,0,0 in game so it's the closest thing they have to NULL (not entirely sure why they didn't use SystemID 0 instead of coords 0,0,0).

This same thing also happened in the systems the Anomalies spawned in – their start system was set to Sol, however Frontier had handled that case by only enabling visibility of the Stargoid flare + FSS audio once they passed the midpoint onto the second system (this was still observable by finding the HO in the previous system in the first few hours of an Anomaly appearing and noting it was coming from the exact direction of Sol).

The only reason we didn't see this happen for Anomaly #1 was that Frontier coincided it to reach the midpoint into the maelstrom system a few seconds before update 14 downtime. For some reason though, they set Anomaly #2 and #3's to enter the final system a few seconds before midnight UTC instead of 7AM for maintenance… so now we get to see their NULL in action.