An Elite Dangerous player discovered a way to write new stories into the margins of the 12-year-old space sandbox, and now thousands are testing it

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How the nearly 9,000 players on the Distant Worlds 3 expedition are contributing to the birth of something new.

A woman standing behind a sci-fi bar.
A bartender on board the DSEV Odysseus, personal flagship of Commander Karnath. All of the official Distant Worlds fleet carriers leading the expedition are also locations used for quests inside MetaElite. (Image credit: Frontier Developments)

Elite Dangerous, the massively multiplayer spacefaring game, is known for its many ambitious storylines. The team at Frontier Developments has thrown quite a lot at players in the 12 years since its release: cryptic puzzles about a precursor race, entirely new and disruptive modes of transportation, and even a galaxy-spanning war against a swarm of alien motherships.

But players may soon gain access to something truly extraordinary: a fan-made tool for creating in-game narratives of their very own. It's called MetaElite, and PC Gamer recently spoke with its creator.

A child of Raxxla

By day, Commander Othon von Salza makes his living as an artist and a computer scientist. Professionally, he's both a programmer and a researcher with a background in academic and industrial work. But by night he's a member of the Children of Raxxla, one of Elite's oldest and most influential roleplaying groups. You might have heard about their exploits working alongside author Drew Wagar, who wrote some of the game's novelizations and heavily impacted the early storyline.

As part of its recruitment efforts, the Children of Raxxla needed an educational tool—something that they could use to inform new members of their rich in-game history. For a long while that involved reading through a bunch of wikis. Eventually, Othon von Salza concocted a tool that uses data generated by playing Elite Dangerous itself to trigger lore drops in-game, something that's only possible because of an unusual user-accessible feature built right into Elite.

"Elite Dangerous is really unique in the sense that every action you do in the game is being logged in a file," Othon explained via Discord chat. These logs, known as the Player Journal, are a resource formally shared by Frontier with the community since 2016. Today, the Player Journal forms the backbone for many third-party tools, like the popular database Inara. While most of those tools ask players to share their log files asynchronously, Othon's tool was able to read them in real time.

The MetaElite interface. (Image credit: Frontier Developments/MetaElite)

"Since this file is written while you are playing, in a way I can listen to your actions in-game and each of these actions can have a certain result." New members of the Children of Raxxla could fly to a given star system and just by showing up the tool, called MetaElite, would reveal another narrative bread crumb for them to follow.

The system worked well, and for a long while the Children of Raxxla kept their clever toy to themselves. Othon drifted from the project, and from Elite Dangerous, for a number of years. But eventually another well-known in-game group came calling.

Distant Worlds

MetaElite

(Image credit: Distant Worlds)

Distant Worlds is a series of in-game expeditions in Elite Dangerous that have been going on regularly since 2016. This year a fleet of nearly 9,000 players have signed on for a four-month journey across Elite's realistic recreation of the Milky Way. While the nominal goal of each Distant Worlds expedition is to retrace the first high-risk journey to the other side of the galaxy, this time around it's more of a high-concept pleasure cruise touring the galaxy's most beautiful locations.

There are plenty of ways to kill time traveling from point A to point B, including hanging out in a well-trafficked Discord server, listening to live DJs on a pirate radio station, and contributing to an elaborate weekly newsletter. But organizers came to Othon for something a little more ambitious.

MetaElite exists as a separate window that Commanders can alt-tab into. With a dual monitor setup, it’s visually unified with the in-game interface of the cockpit and overlaid onto the player helmet display. (Image credit: Frontier Developments/MetaElite)

"Since jump distances are much bigger, [Distant World organizers knew that] the expedition itself wouldn't be as difficult as before," Othon said. "So they wanted to find something which could augment, for the people that were interested, the expedition from a narrative point of view ... Today, it has helped MetaElite evolve into a real campaign manager."

So far more than 3,000 members of the fleet have opted into testing MetaElite. The tool overlays objectives and text for them to follow directly onto their in-game heads-up display, and then displays additional user-generated content in a second window. While other Distant Worlds organizers are busy creating that narrative content, Othon busies himself by tinkering with the tool itself, which he compares to a web browser. While the narrative beats come fast and furious, he's off engineering triggers that allow those new pieces of fiction to unlock. The results are fascinating.

One recent event, dubbed The Lost Carrier, asked expedition members to search for a missing fleet carrier, a player-owned vessel hidden in-game weeks ahead of time. First players had to visit thousands of star systems just to find the ship, then unload a massive stockpile of biological waste to help repair it. The questline ended with players whisking some non-existent nanites—a narrative MacGuffin invented for this adventure alone—to a distant star for disposal.

A spaceship sits on a barren planet near the wreckage of another ship.

Commander Mobius1Ace was among the lucky Commanders to help kick off the MetaElite-driven quest for the lost fleet carrier. (Image credit: Frontier Developments)

Suddenly he has a crew of dozens of collaborators willing to do things like take expensive starships, fill them with virtual guano, and park them secretly in the middle of nowhere.

The experience has been informative for Othon, who is embedded with the fleet on its journey. Suddenly he has a crew of dozens of collaborators willing to do things like take expensive starships, fill them with virtual guano, and park them secretly in the middle of nowhere. Add to that the thousands of players who are helping him expand and strengthen MetaElite. All that testing has given him reliable access to many more in-game triggers than ever before—including rarely used functions like ship reboots and self-destruct sequences. He can even track interactions with non-player characters.

"You can actually go talk to a bartender ... and that bartender will respond [in MetaElite]," Othon continued, "and then tell you a piece of gossip that we heard about the Distant Worlds expedition ... It's the same things that Frontier is using, essentially, to progress the in-game missions. I am using it too, but from an external point of view."

Quest content streams in along the top and sides of the in-game interface, and gets updated in real time on the second screen. (Image credit: Frontier Developments/MetaElite)

Othon hopes that the MetaElite tool can soon be made widely available to other communities and even individual commanders in Elite Dangerous. That way players could create their own bespoke adventures in distant corners of the galaxy—including narratives that feed back into the game's sophisticated economic and political background simulation. For now, though, he's focused on making the Distant Worlds 3 experience as rich and as detailed as he possibly can.

"We would very much like to get people into gameplay that they haven't tested before," Othon said. "So I think we will have exobiology things, I think we will have science-related things—many many things that will make people touch on the various [gameplay elements] that Elite has to offer."

If you're interested in joining along, there's never been a better time to hop into Elite Dangerous. For help catching up with the Distant Worlds 3 fleet, check out the official website.

Charlie Hall
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