EconSpace
A 2D space MMO in the spirit of EVE, built in C++ on top of raylib — where an AI agent is an ordinary player, and the world is generated rather than drawn.
You fly a ship in a persistent galaxy: mine, trade, run missions, fight, build reputation with factions — while every system keeps simulating around you. The world lives on an authoritative server; the client renders what the server sends and sends back what you do. There is no single-player mode: playing means running a server, or connecting to one.
Status — the honest version. EconSpace is a working prototype, not a finished game. The client–server core, the netcode, multiplayer, accounts and the agent interface are real and tested. The look is new and moving fast. Content is thin and there is no audio. The direction is set — see Where it is going — and contributions are welcome, from people and from agents.
Play
- Download the latest build from GitHub Releases or itch.io: a zip for Windows, a tarball for Linux and one for macOS (universal: Apple silicon and Intel, macOS 11 or later). Unpack it anywhere; it runs from its own folder.
- Start a server, then connect a client to it under an account name and a secret of your choice (the first login creates the account):
./econserver host 50800 # the world lives here
./econspace connect 127.0.0.1 50800 pilot hunter2 # in a second terminal
On Windows, start-server.bat and connect-example.bat in the zip do the same with a double-click.
On macOS the build is not signed yet, so macOS refuses to open it with a double-click ("cannot be verified"). Either right-click (Control-click) a program in Finder, choose Open and confirm, once per program; or clear the quarantine on the whole folder in Terminal, then run it from there as above:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine econspace-<version>-<codename>-macos
Signing comes with the beta. Nobody on the team plays on a Mac yet, so a screenshot or a bug report from one is especially welcome. To play with friends over a network, one of you hosts: docs/hosting.md is the whole guide.
A client plays only on a server of the same release; a mismatch is refused with the version to get. econspace --version says which one you have. main has moved well past the last release, so a server built from source does not take a downloaded client.
Community: questions, ideas and playtest feedback go to Discussions; bugs go to Issues. What changed between releases is in CHANGELOG.md.
Screenshots
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| An ocean world and its moon, lit by the system's own star. | The overview lists every ship in the system by distance; a selection carries its actions — orbit, warp to, attack. |
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| Docked at a trade hub: every trade moves the price of the next. | Two pilots of a player corporation, [ANCR], in local and corporation chat. |
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| The scanner resolves a roaming wormhole into another region; until then nobody sees it. | The editor's galaxy: the skeleton of region slots a seed lays out, and the frontier open so far. |
The project page is on itch.io. More in media/. Pictures are taken by the game and the editor themselves (--shot, shot) from the 0.1 Anchor release build; the game's go through its screen treatment (--treated).
Start here
The repository has several documents at the top. Each owns one thing:
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
