HARMLESS

A browser tribute to Elite (1984).

Harmless is the combat rating every commander starts at. The ladder ends, for almost nobody, at E L I T E.

Eight galaxies. 2,048 worlds, every one of them generated by the same arithmetic Braben and Bell used on a 32K BBC Micro. You start docked at Lave with a Cobra Mk III, a hundred credits and a rating of Harmless. What happens next is entirely your problem.

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Approaching a Coriolis space station in a wireframe Cobra Mk III
Docking. The station rotates, the port rotates with it, and you have to arrive the same way up. It is still the hardest thing in the game.

The original galaxy, byte for byte

The 1984 galaxy was never stored — it was calculated, from a three-word seed run through the same shift-and-add on every boot. That algorithm is reproduced here byte for byte, which is why Lave is still system 7, still Rich Agricultural, still a Dictatorship at tech level 5, and why Diso still has 4.1 billion Black Furry Felines on it.

The market model is the original's too: seventeen commodities whose prices slide with the local economy, so agricultural worlds sell food cheaply and industrial worlds pay for it. Every planet description is generated by the original's recursive "goat soup" grammar.

A procedurally generated planet rendered with shaders
Planets from the 1984 seeds, drawn with modern shaders.
The short range chart showing nearby star systems and jump range
The short range chart, with your fuel range and who lives there.

The pirates learned to fly

The ships that hunt you are not running a script. Their flying is a neural network trained by neuroevolution self-play — thousands of generations of pirates and traders shooting at each other in a headless simulator, with the survivors breeding.

They learned deflection shooting, energy management, and when to break off, none of which anybody wrote down. Organised gangs fly a separate policy again, trained to coordinate rather than to swarm — you will not meet one until your reputation makes you worth the trouble.

Watch the trained AI fight →

Three AI-controlled pirates converging on a trader in the combat viewer
Three trained pirates converging on a trader that fights back, in the combat viewer.

Never played Elite?

Nobody will give you a mission. That is the point, and it is also why the original shipped with a manual and a novella in the box. So does this one.

Flight Training Manual

How to trade, jump, dock and stay alive — with a first run worked out against the game's own market model.

The Long Way Out

An original novella, plus papers from the eight galaxies: GalCop advisories, obituaries, and a dead pilot's log.

What's in it

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