SWTOR: A holocron discovered

Holocron nostalgia

I was leveling a bit with my jedi knight Haradwen today, and found some old pictures of her on my computer. Remember these holocrons that give you a permanent stats boost? Every planet is supposed to have at least one or two of them. I'm never going to find them all, nor am I going to try hard: I don't like grinding or spoiling their location by looking them up on some wiki. If you are the same, I suggest you don't read any further. I do however love to explore and discover them myself. This happened to me while I was on Ord Mantell for a class quest.

Ord Mantell is the place where baby smugglers and troopers grow up, so the creatures roaming it were several levels below me and didn't pose much of a threat. At a certain point my mission tracker was a bit off and sent me the wrong way. I didn't really trust it, but decided to follow the directions anyway because I was curious where I would end up. It was not much later that I  saw a huge mountain with a strange red light glowing on top of it. The tracker was sending me back again, but I decided to run around the island, killing the strong enemies and trying to keep away from a huge monster that was parading in front of it (a world boss?). I kept trying to climb the steep rocks and finally found a place where I could. And then, finally on top, I found it: there was a holocron! 

Now I'm usually not into touching strange glowy objects, but my game character apparently thought differently, and luckily in games it's a good thing. +1 Aim! (Not that I think Aim actually does something for a jedi knight, but ah well...)

The holocron contained information about the history of space travel. If you discover what it has to do with aiming, I'll give you a cookie:

For centuries, safe and reliable travel through hyperspace had been the biggest obstacle to galactic exploration. Finally, Corellian scientists managed to perfect hyperdrive technology on par with that of the ancient Rakata, allowing travel between the Core Worlds in mere days. Joined by trade and renewed communication channels, the Core Worlds signed an accord and united as the first Galactic Republic. The newborn Republic began exploration of hyperspace routes in earnest, supported by daring Duros scouts and eventually established the Perlemian Trade Route. This route connected Coruscant to many worlds, including Ossus, where the Jedi Order's enclave had been established centuries before (...). 

New SWTOR UI

On another note, I watched the video the developers released on their upcoming UI element customization system, and it's looking good! I always found the UI in SWTOR very annoying: changing your skill bars is very confusing (only extensive trial and error will teach you), you have to do it all over again for each character, and you are only allowed to have two windows open at a time, without being able to drag them around (one window would always block your message box). I would describe the total as poorly designed. It was about time, but it looks like they now made a plan to fix it, and they made work of it too! All aspects I just moaned about seem to have been taken care of. You can check the official video (with background story from an interface dev who reads aloud from a screen behind you, creating the eerie illusion that he's looking through you) at:

http://www.swtor.com/news/news-article/20120404

Now we only have to wait until we actually get update 1.2, whenever that will be.

Below an unofficial vid showing all UI options. I sort of get a headache from looking at all those colours, but hopefully it will make more sense in-game.