Galaxy

The Elite: Dangerous galaxy is based on the real Milky Way and planets will rotate and orbit their stars, thus constantly changing a system's landscape and adding lot of depth. The galaxy is scientifically accurate and includes around a 100 billion star systems (around 400 billion stars considering most systems contain multiple stars). The Elite Universe is modeled on current galactic charts. Planets and moons will rotate and orbit in 1:1 scale real-time, therefore constantly changing a system's environment.

Elite Dangerous features an immersive, evolving galaxy with dynamic society, economy and stories, allowing pilots to join each other and together change the story of the Milky Way.

The vast, scientifically accurate 1:1 scale of the seamless Milky Way galaxy is created using a mix of procedural generation and artist direction.

• Around 400 billion star systems according to current scientific theories of star system formation with planets and moons that orbit and rotate.
• Cosmic phenomena like black holes, supernovas, active binary stars etc.
• Specially handcrafted overrides for 160,000 known stars in the night sky and planetary objects that we know and love. For example, our solar system with Earth, Moon and Mars, other systems with recently discovered planets, etc.

Our Galaxy

Elite Dangerous players are the first people to experience interstellar travel. The sky is not a painted backdrop, you can travel to each and every star you see. The constellations change with parallax as you explore the galaxy, and the night sky viewed from Earth is, of course, accurate.

We achieved this by starting with as much information as we could gather about the 160,000 known star systems from our galaxy.

We know the temperature, size and metallicity (the periodic elements that make up the star's composition) of those stars. And we also know the mass distribution of the Milky Way.

Our unique Stellar Forge system takes that information, rolls time backwards toward the Big Bang, and simulates from there the composition of hundreds of thousands of celestial bodies using the first principles that astrophysicists believe govern our universe. It uses the nebula hypothesis to simulate the composition and orbit of all the undiscovered stars, exoplanets, moons and black holes in our Milky Way galaxy.

We end up with a huge amount of technical information about each star and its planets, moons and asteroid fields, such as temperature, chemical composition and orbit.

This delivers both an incredibly accurate and beautiful cosmic ballet, with all the motions of the celestial bodies correct, and is also the foundation for the different economies of each system in-game.

Planets

For Planetary Landings we've extended the simulation still further. We take into account the factors that govern the formation of planets, from the basic chemical composition, size, neighbouring moons and tectonic activity.

We simulate the compression of tectonic plates, so we can see where they'd move together and move apart. That creates where ridges are formed, mountains, or canyons and trenches.

We simulate impact craters, volcanism and ageing. The minerals and elements making up the planet determine its appearance and colors.

You can seamlessly approach and land anywhere on a 1:1 scale planet and experience every square meter of terrain first-hand, either flying your ship close to the mountains and in the canyons, or landing and driving your SRV.

And again the simulation feeds directly into gameplay, with resources to be collected and synthesized, huge surface starports to trade in, shipwrecks to explore and fortified settlements to be defeated.  

Population

The galaxy's total NPC system population is aproximately 6,632,313,733,791 NPCs on January 12, 3303. Executive Producer Michael Brookes confirmed the total number.

The number is based on eddb.io data, so it depends on when a system was last updated. The number was derived from downloaded the data from eddb.io. Here are the bash commands that jasch used.

Code:

#!/bin/env bash
wget https://eddb.io/archive/v5/systems_populated.jsonl
cat systems_populated.jsonl | sed "s/.*\"population\"\://g;s/\,\".*//g" > popnum
awk '{ sum += $1 } END { print sum }' popnums

Credits: Olivia Vespera - original idea, got jasch to calc the number eddb.io - providing the data community - filling eddb with data

Online

The online galaxy of Elite: Dangerous is a shared universe maintained by a central server. All of the meta data for the galaxy is shared between players. This includes the galaxy itself as well as transient information like economies. The aim here is that a player's actions will influence the development of the galaxy, without necessarily having to play multiplayer.

The other important aspect for the developers is that they can seed the galaxy with events, often these events will be triggered by player actions. With a living breathing galaxy players can discover new and interesting things long after they have started playing.

The game features a shared persistent galaxy server, where macro effects and events such as economy, society and war status etc. are recorded.

The are no multi-player lobbies.

The server transparently creates free roaming sessions (instances) when meeting other players and NPCs within that galaxy based on a perception bubble around you, that is defined by your scanner/visual range. That means that those instances are not a fixed location in space as in most other MMOs, but they dynamically move around.

The effects of those instances are then stored on the central galaxy server and shared by everybody.

Because the game features very high speed twitch combat and very detailed damage models, this is the most reliable way to do it, also keep in mind there can be many sessions within a star system and those sessions can dynamically move around, also because this game uses a 1:1 scale Milky Way galaxy, sessions will typically be spread out much farther away (although most of the action will be within the core systems) and it wouldn't be immersion breaking as opposed to a space game in a smaller area.