My previous post was a list of things that I thought would make the multiplayer/co-op experience significantly better (naturally, I expect to see none of it implemented). This post will be a list of co-op features that are already available and may not be widely known especially for newer players. The physical multicrew features are mostly useful for your friends that lack long distance mobility or aren't as comfortable flying.
Ship/SRV based co-op features:
- Bounties/Bonds are rewarded in full to everyone who tagged a defeated enemy.
- Wing members share FSS and DSS information. This means you can each scan half a system and get the "system scan complete" message. Your passengers can also use FSS and DSS, but the progress annoyingly isn't shared in real time… or possibly at all. Likely a bug that needs fixing.
- Laser Mining: As long as one player launches a prospector limpet into a rock, each player generates their own set of fragments and has their own prospector progress readout, effectively multiplying the yield from a single rock by the number of players.
- Surface material gathering: You can carry passengers to distant planets and have them collect materials in an SRV for themselves. Materials can be knocked loose while on foot.
- Guardian sites can be done with multi-crew. Your friends (and maybe you as well) use the srvs, or fly the ship overhead to provide air support, huge amounts of light, obelisk location spotting, etc. You can use the ship's Data Link Scanner to get your own blueprint at the end, then just restart the pillars for your friends.
- CZs can support 12 players pretty cleanly considering the P2P networking. Progress bugs aside, the zones generally aren't a laggy mess until you get 20+ players dog piling into a single instance.
- Back in Horizons you could use "target wingmate's target" to select the next system in your wingmate's route. This lets you very quickly travel through the galaxy as a group because you don't have to wait for a high wake to start charging your own FSD. Annoyingly, this appears to be broken in Odyssey. I made bug report.
Odyssey… most of this I discovered since the last post:
- All Odyssey ground missions are shareable and everyone gets a copy of the reward options. It's a little awkward because you can each only share one at a time, but it works pretty smoothly. Since each player usually gets their own unique mission offerings, this gives a greater chance for missions with useful material rewards to spawn.
- You can drop Assets and Goods from your backpack for your team to pick up, effectively enabling material trades. (Must be done on a planet)
- Each player can download their own copy of data from a data port. No need to argue over who gets the manufacturing instructions or opinion polls. I have not checked whether uploading to a data port would allow data trades.
- You can clone access levels from your team. Guards can only stop one of you at a time, so you can just reclaim your access level after you go around the corner.
- You can distract guards to allow your team to steal things easier. Not a feature so much as an amusing shortcut.
- Ground CZs have powerful automated defenses. These can be disabled with a Maverick suit (unfortunately this is temporary). Bombing runs become much safer with a few turrets down.
- Exobiology is fully functional for a team. Or more specifically, nothing breaks by having your friends around if they want a quiet night.
I make this post as borderline praise for FDev because they did in fact implement a mind boggling number of systems into this game and a bunch of them actually work out rather well for co-op play.
While there are many more activities you can do with your team, the ones in the list are mainly examples where you aren't directly competing with your team for the rewards. For example, you can go deep core mining as a wing, but the yield for each rock does not change based on the number of players present.