An extraction point is just that, an extraction point. It's the connection between a cosmic/ethereal/astral space and prime space.

You're not a n00b, and you can easily be a ship captain. If you haven't already, ask an established aethership captain if you can come along on the next trip they take to see how it works. Elryn/Shorlen/Anarias/Saran/Ialie in Serenwilde, Shamarah in Celest, Richter as a rogue, and I'm sure there are many, many more in the other cities and communes if you look for them.

On the main aetherspace page have a look at the detailed prime image (the first one). You'll see it is comprised of blocky squares of different colours and different characters ( X, ^, ~, ?, - or a space ). This is pretty close to what aetherspace actually looks like, although it's scaled down a little in size so you have a hope of seeing some of the features. An aethership moves like a king chess piece from each of those little squares to the next, in any cardinal direction. The different colours and characters determine how quickly your ship can take each of those step movements, essentially representing a different type of 'terrain' that is either easy to move through or hard. Special characters include 'X' which signifies a wall you can't move onto, and '?' characters being docks that you can stop and connect your ship at.

You will only see about 6 characters away from where your ship is in the game, representing your view range, so these maps are intended to get an overall picture of aetherspace geography. The graphical versions only show those very general shapes and features without the details of every single character.

Hope that helps, but feel free to ask in game if you have any questions!

Ahem.

Necro.

I'm curious whether anyone can get in touch with Elryn? The website is down and I would very much be interested in upkeeping all of the aether maps. I believe he coded some kind of bot to help him map aetherspace, so if I could get my hands on it I could add all the new places! Any info would be great.

I've tried and tried and tried, but no luck. (One of his cartels had one of my designs done for Beauty that I wanted, but after a few months of failing to track him down by any means, I just redid the design in one of my own cartels.)

On that note, I'd really like some sort of ingame compass for aetherspace that's longer-range than the one that's already there. Something like GRID SEEK . Naturally, it'd only work for things that stay still, so no seeking gnome ships, dragons, beasties, etc.

Ummm.... Flashpoints?

I think that something like speedwalking for aetherspace is what was meant. and Flashpoints can only be used by Commanders