
Endless Sky is a 2D space trading and combat game inspired by the classic Escape Velocity series. Work your way up from a relatively wimpy shuttle, cargo ship, or fighter, to a highly upgraded and customized flagship or to a massive fleet of warships or freighters.
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About

Endless Sky is a 2D space trading and combat game inspired by the classic Escape Velocity series. Work your way up from a relatively wimpy shuttle, cargo ship, or fighter, to a highly upgraded and customized flagship. Grow your fleet while exploring an expansive galaxy with hundreds of systems. Earn money by carrying passengers or cargo, escorting convoys, bounty hunting, mining asteroids, or plundering and capturing enemy ships.

Enter the 31st century and choose from one of multiple starting locations and backgrounds where you set out on your own journey as the captain of a new ship. Take sides in a civil war, or ignore the story line and just enjoy exploring the galaxy at your own pace. The main story line alone takes about 8-16 hours to play through, with over a hundred hours worth of story content spread across the galaxy in the form of other story lines both big and small.

The game's content can be added to using the plugin system, which allows anyone with a text editor and a paint program to create new ships, weapons, missions, and more to the game. All of the game's content is built using the same system, so anything you see in the vanilla game can be done in a plugin. The capabilities of plugins are fully documented on our GitHub wiki.

Endless Sky is free, open source, and cross platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux). The game has been developed for over 10 years as a labor of love from hundreds of volunteer contributors. Updates occur regularly with three major updates every year. Over time, the game will continue to expand as contributors add new missions, story lines, alien species, places to explore, sound effects, artwork, gameplay mechanics, quality-of-life improvements, and more.
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Languages: English
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Reviews
Themes across 46 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
Reviews
Ambrosia Software may be dead, but the spirit they captured in their Escape Velocity games lives on in this Free and Open Source tribute to their games like EV Nova. You don't even need to dodge captain hector =) Thank you folks for making a such a nostalgic experience!
like the old school escape velocity game. easy to quickly leave and jump back in. can play for 10 minutes or 2 hours.
Super nerdy game, and it's actually solid. Honestly can't REALLY say anything bad about this game because it's free and open source software. [b] But... [/b] Simply learning how to play can be very frustrating and unintuitive. The UI bombards you with information and rarely explains it. Pacing seems incredibly non-existent. Most times during battles, so much happens so quickly; I either lose instantly or win instantly, but I typically can't react to it. Pirate attacks either never happen or happen so frequently that it's a constant battle. Would be possibly be nicer if guns did less damage and pirates were consistently weaker- a set of exclusive pirate ships, perhaps. Enemies either melt your fleet instantly or die too quickly. If there's a difficulty curve, I have not encountered it yet. Fleet controls are clunky, and the AI prioritizes things in a very weird way. Would be nice to have a dedicate "orders" menu (instead of arbitrary keybinds) to tell them to do stuff like patrol for enemies. Fleet accidentally picks up "illegal" cargo, and I get constant fines without even realizing what happened. Would be nice to tell them to ignore illegal cargo and outfits. Early game is super punishing since the lower tier ships are both extremely weak and expensive. Again, no difficulty curve, so it's up to chance whether or not you will be instantly melted in any engagement. Capturing ships is super overpowered. Fleets grow exponentially with no ramifications; you can amass an army by just existing in a pirate sector and occasionally hiring more boarders. Other than that, it's very much worth a try. Once again, giving a recommend since it's free and open source. [b]This is a volunteer project, and it's super cool to see.[/b]
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Concurrent players on Steam, sampled daily since tracking started.
Hours played at review time, across 46 reviews with recorded playtime.
positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up
Quick review: This game answers the question, "What if Escape Velocity was remade but was open source instead of a commercial product?" Still a work in progress as different quest lines are being reworked/added and there are new versions to come, but if you're looking to jump from sector to sector doing the mine/trade/fight loops and upgrading your fleet with things you acquire through those loops, this is a great way to get that Escape Velocity or Space Rangers (minus ground combat) feel. Lots of different ships and parts to fiddle with and debate the effectiveness of. Boarding and looting is way too strong and makes it easy to break the game compared to playing 'normally', but you can just not do that. Worth checking out if you have any interest in EV, Freelancer, Elite, Space Rangers, you know who you are.
For those that love this Genre, which is basically Escape Velocity: Nova, this is truly a great game. I would certainly pay for a product of this quality and content. I haven't played the most recent expansions, and I still have 100+ hours in just 2-3 games. I look forward to seeing where it can go from here, and the community support is amazing. Did we mention its free? How is one of the best games on Steam free? Get it and start playing it right now.
Great game playing it with my 7 yr old son, he loves the adventure of it all. The maths and hand eye coordination is good as is the great reading practice
Impossible control scheme cooked up by basement dwellers who never played another video game in their lives.
God, this is so addictive. It's surprisingly broad, as a universe, with lots of other ships flying around to make it feel very lived in.
This is that game. There are many like it but this is the one. Still updating BTW.
Sandbox game, long and interesting main story a lot things to discover and acquire
Momentum
Pace estimated from the game's recent review growth (our daily snapshots) at its own sales-per-review ratio — a momentum signal, not booked sales.
Engagement
DAU/MAU are modeled from peak concurrent players (≈×8 and ×28) — Steam publishes no active-user counts, so treat these as rough estimates, not reported figures.
Audience
Estimated from the language of this game's reviews — a proxy for where players are, not official Steam demographics.