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If I see that a location has a distress icon, but I visit other places first, does that change what the distress event will be, or will it ever go away?

I ask because I know there is an escort quest that seems to change if you do not head straight for the quest objective.

Edit: To put it more scientifically, as @murgatroid99 says below:

Does the probability distribution of distress beacon events depend on the time already spent in the system?

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  • I've never seen a distress icon disappear, but that's just my experience and not enough for an "answer". Concerning the "what the event will be": since you're not supposed to re-load a backed up savegame, there is no "different" event (no non-linear timeline tampering), so your question violates the roguelike principle :-P
    – Zommuter
    Commented Feb 17, 2013 at 1:41
  • Not necessarily - if the odds of certain events change to a more negative (or positive) event, then it could affect net rewards / danger.
    – walrus helmet
    Commented Feb 17, 2013 at 4:03
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    @Zommuter It doesn't necessarily violate the "roguelike principle", since his question could be equivalently stated as "Does the probability distribution of distress beacon events depend on the time already spent in the system?", which is a perfectly valid question.
    – murgatroid99
    Commented Feb 17, 2013 at 4:11
  • Just once, last night, I thought I saw two distress beacons turn into one, but it was late and I'm not entirely sure thats what happened.
    – Ender
    Commented Feb 17, 2013 at 14:26
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    the only time a distress beacon can disappear is when a rebel fleet takes it over
    – l I
    Commented Feb 17, 2013 at 17:15

1 Answer 1

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Well, the only people that can 100% reliably answer are the developers (or anyone who might have decompiled and reverse-engineered their code, I guess).

Having said that, my totally anecdotal evidence is that I have seen negative distress beacons very early and helpful distress beacons very late in my time in a sector. While it's an interesting (and logical) theory, I haven't observed any patterns leading me to believe it's implemented that way.

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  • I just played a game where one of my first jumps was to a distress call and it was completely helpful, so it seems to me like it's effectively random.
    – Adam Lear ♦
    Commented Apr 5, 2013 at 4:11

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