Oolite Bulletins

Hi there,
As an old Electron Elite player, I was very happy to find Oolite yesterday. I seem to have picked up a virus of some sort about half-way through the Galaxy as I started getting a "cooing" floating head which resembles a Gremlin/Orville bouncing around my screen (!)

Any ideas how I can get rid of this annoyance? I have only loaded one OXP (The Long Way Around - Mission) and the time I loaded that did not correlate with the virus bouncing around the screen (although this was after I loaded the OXP, just not immediately after). I have since removed and deleted the OXP from my Mac and the problem remains.

Any help is really appreciated ! Thanks -

Sounds like you have a trumble. If you search around on this forum you will find no end of discussion on the beasties.

You are mistaken. This is not a virus. It is a creature. It is called a Trumble. Did you by any chance run into a shady feline offering a cute pet?

Anyway, new players periodically ask this question, so I suggest you look into older threads about how to deal with this. Trumbles are not related to the Long Way mission, BTW.

Right on commander,
Oscar

Hi pllonsdale, welcome to the forums! What you have there is a trumble. Quite possibly you bought it as a pet. It's also possible that you didn't know you were buying it – sometimes the mission screen can pop up and if you're not paying attention or just in a hurry to get to the market or wherever you can "agree" to buy the thing without actually being consciously aware of it ...

However, they are susceptible to heat. Get yourself some thermal shielding and take a trip to the corona of the nearest star. You'll need to keep your ship on the edge of overheating until the little bugger eventually perishes. Don't take on any cargo, especially not food, or chances are it'll a) eat it and b) breed!

Hi chaps, that's great - I must have collected it up from a cargo scoop pick-up as the other options do not fit with my flying so far. I should have known there was something sci-fi related to this (tribble), I think I am going to enjoy wasting the mid-years of my life on this program as I did my youth on the original Elite. Again, thanks again! Enjoy

Enjoy

It is the motto (or should be) of this forum (and all who play here). Enjoy indeed.

As a BBC user, I was suprised when I first saw a trumble. But these were cannon on the C64 and Spectrum versions of Elite, so are included in the core version of Oolite.

LittleBear wrote:

As a BBC user, I was suprised when I first saw a trumble. But these were cannon on the C64 and Spectrum versions of Elite, so are included in the core version of Oolite.

Or indeed canon - although I agree, fired from the aforementioned was often a desire before the bbq'ing technique was discovered by accident and shared amongst the school-yard players for those of us with C64s or speccys

Perhaps you had run into this motley crew (snigger) - http://www.alioth.net/Fiction/oolitestory.pdf

Trumble free, I continue my personal quest. Thank-you for your comments and help