Endless Sky

About the game

Endless Sky drops you into a crowded corner of the galaxy in the 31st century with a pilot's licence, a mortgage and just enough credits to buy a small used starship. What you do next is up to you. You can haul cargo and passengers between dozens of human worlds, take bounty contracts on pirates, escort convoys, mine asteroids, or simply point your ship at the edge of the map and see what is out there.

Every planet and station has its own economy. Commodity prices change from system to system, so buying food cheaply in one place and selling it where it is scarce is the oldest way to make a living. The job board offers deliveries, passenger runs and bounties, and the spaceport is where you bump into people with more unusual offers. As your bank balance grows you trade up to bigger hulls, fill them with better engines, shields, weapons and cargo bays in the outfitter, and hire escorts that fly and fight at your side.

Behind the trading and dogfights there is a long story. Tensions between the Republic, the Free Worlds and the Syndicate are close to breaking point when you start, and the major campaign that follows can pull you into a civil war. Further out, the map opens onto alien species with their own histories, languages and ships: the Hai, the Korath, the Wanderers, the Remnant and others that are better discovered than described. Many of them are reached only through long chains of missions, so there is always another rumour to follow.

The game was created by Michael Zahniser, first released in 2015, and has been developed ever since by a large volunteer community that writes the missions, draws the ships and keeps balancing the whole galaxy. It is inspired by the Escape Velocity series, but everything in it is original.

Playing it here

This is Endless Sky 0.11.3, compiled for the browser from the official source code. Click Play to start: the download is about 94 MB, so the first start takes a while; after that your browser keeps a copy and later starts are much faster. Loading the galaxy takes a few more seconds once the download finishes.

On the main menu, choose New Pilot. The first scenario, "Endless Sky", is the classic start: you grow up on New Boston, sign a mortgage with the bank and pick your first ship. The other scenarios in the list are alternative openings, and some stay hidden until you unlock them. Type your pilot's name, follow the conversation, buy a ship in the shipyard (the Shuttle is the cheapest, the Star Barge carries more cargo, the Sparrow is a light fighter), leave the shipyard and click Depart.

Your pilots and saves stay in this browser. The game saves automatically every time you take off from a planet, and loading puts you back on the planet you last left. You can also keep extra snapshots from Manage Pilots on the main menu. Preferences are written when you close the preferences screen and with every save. Clearing this site's data in your browser deletes your pilots.

A few things are different from the desktop version. There is no music (sound effects work normally), and plugins cannot be installed. To fill the whole screen, move the mouse to the top edge of the game and click Full screen. A phone or tablet will not work well: the game expects a keyboard and a mouse, and a screen of at least 1024 by 768 pixels is the most comfortable. Some of the original game's pictures are left out of this build, as explained below, so many planets (New Boston, where you start, among them) show no picture when you land.

Images left out of this build

We only publish files whose licence clearly allows it, and when in doubt we leave a file out. The game's copyright file gives the author and licence of every picture; following it, 137 of them are not in this build:

• 37 photos under the Unsplash License (uploaded to unsplash.com after June 2017; that licence is not a free licence): land/ beach18, canyon16, clouds11, clouds14, clouds15, desert19, fog15, forest13, forest14, forest15, hills13, lava15, mountain33, mountain38, mountain41, mountain45, peripheria, sky14, snow26 to snow30, snow33, snow36 to snow39, station53 to station57, water28 and water30 to water32.
• 90 pictures credited to morgueFile, a photo site whose licence is not a public domain dedication, without the photographer's name: land/ aera, badlands3, badlands4, beach1, canyon2 to canyon6, city0, city1, city3, city5, desert3 to desert7, dune0, dune2 to dune5, fields0, fields4, fields8, fog3, fog5, fog7, forest0, gliese, hills1, hills3, hills4, humo, igna, lava3, lava4, lava8, lava9, loc0 to loc2, mars0 to mars3, methuselah, mountain2, mountain26, occupas, redias, sea0, sea2, sea4, sea6, sea9, sky1, sky6, snow8, snow9, station0, treser, turra, valley0 to valley9, vulpa, water1, water2, water5, water6, water7 and water9; and scene/ greenwater, lobby, midgard, new boston, rulei, seascape, station4b firing, tempest and trefoil.
• 10 screenshots of scenes built from purchased third-party assets (from the Unity Asset Store): land/ sivael0 to sivael9.

The lines of the game data that pointed to these pictures were removed too: 155 planet landscapes, 5 pictures that accompany conversations, and the thumbnails of 3 starting scenarios, including the classic one. The game plays the same; there is just no picture in those places. Photos that the copyright file dates from Unsplash before June 2017 or Pixabay before 2019 stay in, because both sites published everything under CC0 (public domain) at the time.

Controls

Every key can be changed in Preferences > Controls. Browser shortcuts such as Ctrl+W or Cmd+Q still belong to the browser, so use the in-game menu to quit.

Tips for your first hours

Pay attention to the mortgage. A daily payment comes out of your account whether you earn money or not. The bank screen on any planet shows what you owe, and you can pay it off early once you have spare credits.

Start with simple jobs. Cargo and passenger missions on the job board are safe money. Accept several that go in the same direction, check that they fit in your hold and bunks, and watch the deadlines.

Buy a map. Many outfitters sell maps of the nearby systems. A map shows where the planets and trade routes are before you fly there, which saves a lot of wasted jumps.

Watch your fuel. Each hyperspace jump uses fuel, and you refuel when you land at an inhabited world. If you run dry in an empty system, you can ask a passing ship for help (T to hail it), but it will cost you.

Avoid fights you cannot win. Early ships are fragile. The map can show which government holds each system, and the ones held by pirates are best avoided until you can afford shields and weapons. If a fight goes badly, land or jump away.

Upgrade step by step. In the outfitter, ships have limited outfit and engine space. Better shield generators, more cargo space and a bigger reactor usually matter more at first than heavy weapons.

Talk to people. Spaceport encounters and hails from other ships often start missions and story lines that the job board never offers.

Credits and licence

Endless Sky was created by Michael Zahniser and is developed by a large community of contributors, named in the game's credits. It is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. Its ships, planets and other images are mostly under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licences, with photographs and sounds under CC BY, CC0 or in the public domain; the game's copyright file, reproduced in full with the licence, names the author and licence of every file. The browser build is based in part on Thomas Ballinger's endless-web port. The licence texts and the complete source code of this build, with our patch and build scripts, are linked from this page. The hosted copy of the game's source is the official 0.11.3 release without the 137 image files listed above, so it does not redistribute them; it builds exactly the game served here. Official site: endless-sky.github.io.