A fan built a tool for writing your own stories inside Elite Dangerous, and thousands of players are already testing it

Elite Dangerous is one of the few live-service games that's still going strong after twelve years, and its community keeps finding ways to surprise everyone. That's exactly what happened with MetaElite – a fan-built tool that started as an internal project for a single roleplaying group and has since grown into a full-blown narrative campaign manager, now being tested by thousands of players.

The creator behind MetaElite is Commander Othon von Salza, an artist and programmer who is also a member of one of the game's oldest roleplaying organizations – the "Children of Raxxla". The group needed a way to get new recruits up to speed on their rich in-game history. Wading through wikis was slow and tedious, so von Salza turned to a little-known but officially documented feature of Elite Dangerous: the Player Journal.

Frontier opened up these logs to third-party developers back in 2016, and they already underpin a number of tools – the popular database Inara being one example. But MetaElite takes things further by reading the journal in real time and responding to player actions mid-session.

As von Salza explained:

"Elite Dangerous is really unique in the sense that every action you do in the game is being logged in a file. Since this file is written while you are playing, in a way I can listen to your actions in-game and each of these actions can have a certain result."

New Children of Raxxla members would simply fly to a designated star system, and MetaElite would automatically feed them the next piece of lore.

For years the tool stayed strictly internal. But this year the organizers of Distant Worlds 3 came knocking – a massive expedition with nearly 9,000 players embarking on a four-month journey across Elite's realistic recreation of the Milky Way. They wanted to layer a narrative onto the route, and MetaElite turned out to be exactly the right tool for the job.

More than 3,000 expedition members have already opted into testing. The tool overlays objectives and text directly onto the cockpit HUD, while additional content plays out on a second screen.

One recent quest – dubbed The Lost Carrier – had players scouring thousands of star systems to find a ship hidden in-game weeks in advance, then hauling biological waste to repair it, and finally delivering fictional nanites to a distant star. The entire storyline was invented by the community.

MetaElite can even track conversations with NPCs – a bartender at a space station can slip a player a rumor about what's happening with the expedition. It all runs on the same underlying mechanics Frontier uses for its own in-game missions, just from the outside looking in. Down the line, von Salza plans to open the tool up to the broader community, so that any player can craft their own adventures anywhere in the galaxy.