Bug had Elite: Dangerous AI making devastating new weapons

A quirky bug has made the non-player character AI in {Elite: Dangerous} create all-new and "devastating" weapons by merging stats and abilities, which they then used to hunt players in the sci-fi sandbox.

Developer Frontier has had to kill the recently implemented Engineers weaponry, community manager Zac Antonaci explained in a forum post. Although these events conjure up thoughts of an in-game judgement day, the studio insists that they don't think that "the AI became sentient in a Skynet-style uprising".

The bug was introduced via the recent 2.1 Engineers update, which improved the AI and gave it access to one of the game's new features: crafting. The result obviously didn't go as planned, and the AI was quickly crafting weapons that the designers had never thought of and didn't intended.

As a result players were confronted by weapons such as "a rail gun with the fire rate of a pulse laser," Antonaci wrote. "These appear to have been compounded by the additional stats and abilities of the engineers weaponry."

The update rectifying the issue is heading to PC first, and will follow on Xbox One thereafter.