Earth-like World

Earth in 3302

Outdoor world with a human-breathable atmosphere and indigenous life. The atmosphere is far from chemical equilibrium as a result.

— In-Game Description

An Earth-like World is a type of Terrestrial Planet that has an active water-based chemistry and indigenous carbon-water-based life. As the name indicates, the planet Earth in the Sol system is the standard by which all bodies of this type are compared. Naturally-occurring Earth-like Worlds are very rare, and they also occasionally support indigenous intelligent species at various stages of development. Universal Cartographics offers some of its highest payouts for discovery and mapping data of previously uncharted Earth-like Worlds.

Humans possess the technology necessary to terraform certain Terrestrial Planets, including Earth-like Worlds with native ecosystems that cannot sustain human crops and livestock or may be harmful to humans in some respect without protective equipment, and artificially induce human-acceptable conditions in a matter of decades. All terraformed Earth-like Worlds are located within the Core Systems. In the early days of interstellar colonisation, terraforming destroyed numerous alien species, such as the mudlarks of Capitol, as well as entire ecosystems, but in the 34th century, terraforming and colonisation of Earth-like Worlds are both heavily regulated by strict environmental protection laws.

Notable Earth-Like Worlds

System	Planet	Type	Notes
Sol	Earth	Natural	Birthplace of humanity, previous capital of the Federation
Sol	Mars	Terraformed	Current capital of the Federation
Tau Ceti	Taylor Colony	Terraformed	The first extrasolar Earth-like World terraformed and colonised by humanity
Achenar	Capitol	Terraformed	Capital of the Empire
Alioth	Turner's World	Terraformed	Capital of the Alliance
Lave	Planet Lave	Natural	Former capital of the Galactic Cooperative
Shinrarta Dezhra	Founders World	Terraformed	Headquarters of the Pilots Federation

Lowest ELW

Lowest Reachable Earth-like World in HD 21503

HD 21503 CDE 1 is the lowest reachable Earthlike-world in the databases at -3387.65625 Ly below the galactic plane, it beats the previous recordholder Oofaisp AA-A h2 A 1 at -3381.9375 by 5.71875 Ly. It was reached with the Caspian Explorer by Kezika on 2 Dec 2025. The systems is called HD 20611 which was 533.55 Ly from it's nearest visit-able star HD 16851. HD 21503 on EDSM.

Natural generation

Quite a few ELWs exist in the galaxy without any human intervention. Stellar Forge is able to generate ELWs given its physics simulations and a bit of algorithmic fudging: they mostly generate around main-sequence stars, but exceptions can occur and are prized discoveries among the community. ELWs are especially valuable to Universal Cartographics. CMDRs can use some features of Stellar Forge, such as boxel (subsector) nomenclature, to find stars with similar features and hopefully similar planets. There are also ELWs manually placed into the game, but left uninhabited. Trappist-1 has one such ELW.

ELWs are generated to have:

• An oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere with variable pressure (approximately 0.5–4.5 atm), but with the partial pressure of fixed at 0.21 atm, the same as Earth's
  • In real life, nitrogen has an anesthetic effect, even at air pressure. Humans living on a 4.5 atm ELW would be permanently intoxicated – not bad for a Tourist economy. On the other hand, low-pressure worlds can be a bit more productive.
  • As the description says, presence of any oxygen in the atmosphere is "far from chemical equilibrium", because oxygen must be continually generated to compensate for its tendency to react with things. This implies that every ELW has plenty of photosynthetic life.
• Gravity of 0.2–1.8 g
• Average temperature around 250–400 K. Water might exist in smaller patches at the extremes.

Gallery

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  Capitol in Achenar
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  Beluga Liner orbits Earth Like World
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  Lowest Reachable Earth-like World in HD 21503
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  Earth-like World Kyaraben
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  Earth in 3302
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  Aulin Enterprise Orbis Station