Elite Dangerous: Over 600,000 star systems charted since launch

In the latest official newsletter for open-ended PC space game Elite: Dangerous, Frontier Developments has revealed a small but mind-boggling fact.

According to its latest figures, 615,475 star systems have been charted by players since the game’s launch last month. That’s an impressive 17,585 systems per day, 732 per hour or 12 per minute.

However, once you start to consider the sheer size of Elite: Dangerous‘ universe, it becomes a little less impressive. You see, Elite: Dangerous boasts a staggering 400 billion exporable systems - meaning that, to date, just 0.00015% of the game’s total playable area has been explored. Doesn’t sound so impressive now, does it?

Frontier says that if players continue charting the galaxy at the present rate, it will take 150,895 years before everything has been detailed. In other words, it’s almost impossible that players will have discovered everything in our lifetime. Still, Frontier is trying to keep people’s spirits up: “With new players joining every day, we might just get the galaxy mapped before the turn of the hundred and seventieth century,” the studio says. Cheeky.

In case you haven’t heard of it for some reason, Elite: Dangerous is the latest installment in the long-running series, which originally started out back in 1984 on the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron, before being ported to practically every system known to man over the next 3 decades. Originally developed by David Braben and Ian Bell, a dispute between the pair led to Braben taking full control over the series, leading to sequels Frontier: Elite II in 1993, and Frontier: First Encounters in 1995.

Elite: Dangerous was successfully funded on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter back in 2012, after being in development for a number of years. We’re currently working on our review of the game, which we hope to have with you soon.

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Dale Morgan

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When Dale isn't crying over his keyboard about his never-ending workload, he's playing games - lots of them. Dale has a particular love for RPGs, Roguelikes and Metroidvanias.