Elite Dangerous pilot completes record-breaking 85,000 light year voyage without a fuel scoop

Elite pilot kabbooooom makes it to the edge of the galaxy — (Image credit: Frontier Developments)

Without a fuel scoop to fill your tanks from Elite Dangerous' billions of stellar bodies, voyages tend not to make it very far. Despite this, one canny pilot made it all the way across the galaxy without one, travelling over 84,000 light years without sucking up star fuel.

An assumed must-have for any explorer, a fuel scoop lets you skin the surface of certain stars to top up your tank, letting you wander far from civilised space indefinitely. But this week, Commander Kabbooooom posted on Reddit announcing his arrival at Ishum's Reach—the farthest known point from Sol—without equipping a single fuel scoop. That's 65.6K light years as the galactic crow flies, though Kabbooooom reckons the actual route maps to about 84,341.57 light years (including one accidental detour).

The post outlines how he prepped his Anaconda, the Tiamat's Wrath, for the trip. But even with every spare nook and cranny filled with fuel tanks, the pilot could still only manage a "mere" 10K light years per tank, up to 20K with economical planning and dense stars.

Elite Dangerous ship refuels on a bigger ship, with the entire milky way in the background — (Image credit: Frontier Developments)

But Kabbooooom wasn't alone in making this journey. In a detailed logbook of the trip, the pilot explains how he kept track of various fleet carriers making their way out to the far reaches of the galaxy and back. He'd occasionally wait for weeks at a time before a carrier jumped into a system, letting him fill up the tank before setting off on the next leg.

Despite some dangerously close calls and a ship teetering at 0% hull integrity, Kabbooooom did eventually make it to Ishum's Reach. But that's not the end of his journey. From here, he hopes to point directly into the void and cruise as far as he can go, firmly establishing a record for the farthest distance travelled from Sol without a fuel scoop.

"By my calculations, I can travel approximately 90 light years beyond Ishum's Reach in supercruise, about 16 days of continuous travel (this will likely take me a few months, with leaving the game on while I do other things every now and then)," Kabbooooom writes. "And I should still have enough fuel left to jump back in one piece."

20 years ago, Nat played Jet Set Radio Future for the first time, and she's not stopped thinking about games since. Joining PC Gamer in 2020, she comes from three years of freelance reporting at Rock Paper Shotgun, Waypoint, VG247 and more. Embedded in the European indie scene and a part-time game developer herself, Nat is always looking for a new curiosity to scream about—whether it's the next best indie darling, or simply someone modding a Scotmid into Black Mesa. She also unofficially appears in Apex Legends under the pseudonym Horizon.