And that daring explorer just happens to be here alongside us, showing the way.Įvery week, Erimus has uploaded the next leg of our journey. It is a pilgrimage that retraces the steps of a daring explorer to a remote planet named Beagle Point, way out on the edge of the galaxy. In reality, Distant Worlds 2 is a re-creation of the Distant Suns expedition, a solo trip completed way back in 2015 by a player named Commander Erimus Kamzel. Image: Frontier Developments via Commander Vik!ngSail I’ve rocketed down narrow canyons with walls over 10 kilometers high, and flown between planets so close together that the gravitational force of each one in turn conspired to pull me from the sky. I’ve scaled icy mountains in a six-wheeled rover, some so high that one false move could have easily pushed me into orbit. I’ve refueled inside the wildly spinning gas jets of a neutron star. I’ve passed through a brightly colored nebula shaped like webs of rusty wire, skimmed along the edges of white dwarf stars hot enough to melt my nimble ship in an instant. I’ve been lucky enough to spend most of that time in virtual reality, via the Oculus Rift, and the experience has been extraordinary. Just about every other night, I’ve logged in on my PC, said hello to my new friends and comrades, and gotten about the business of moving from point A to point B. It’s a mobile feast of companionship, via Discord and in-game chat, for a game that can otherwise feel a bit lonely. We’re all here to soak in the majesty of these procedurally generated worlds, and to hang out together. Joining me on this journey is the single largest fleet in the history of Elite, now including nearly 14,000 other players. After weeks of preparation, I’ve spent the last four months making the risky journey out here to places where few players have gone before. The reason that I’m parked on this rock is because I’ve signed on to participate in Distant Worlds 2, a trip from one side of Elite’s Milky Way galaxy to the other. Frontier Developments via Commanders Corbin Moran and Finwen Once created, Luna’s Shadow was just left here for players to find.Įlite: Dangerous’ version of the Milky Way galaxy, with and without the regions assigned by the community at the Elite: Dangerous Star Map (EDSM). It was spit out by a mathematical rock tumbler called the Stellar Forge, a technology so uncanny that it has accurately predicted the location of real extrasolar planets. This entire system, including its bright white central star and its 10 other planets and moons, was procedurally generated. What’s strange is the fact that Luna’s Shadow wasn’t placed here on purpose by Elite’s creators, the U.K.-based studio Frontier Developments. Here, inside Elite’s virtual simulacrum of our Milky Way, that makes the lonely water world on the horizon a shadow Earth. But this particular patch of the void just happens to be a point in three-dimensional space exactly on the opposite side of the galaxy from our own moon. Luna’s Shadow is an unremarkable hunk of rock floating in the void. But unlike the vast majority of those other moons, this one has a name. This moon is just one of trillions like it in a spacefaring game called Elite: Dangerous, which puts players in the cockpit of a starship and sets them loose from a first-person perspective. Hanging in the sky on the other side of the canopy is a water world, its wispy white clouds revealing an endless sea. My starship is perched along the rim of a crater on an airless moon some 55,000 light-years from home.
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