Progression

Three ratchets, no experience bar, and the reasoning for why a simulation should progress through equipment and knowledge rather than statistics.

The three ratchets

flowchart TB
    C["<b>1 · Capability</b><br/>modules and hulls<br/><i>lives on the ship — can be lost</i>"]
    K["<b>2 · Knowledge</b><br/>the Almanac<br/><i>lives on the player — never lost</i>"]
    S["<b>3 · Standing</b><br/>discovery credit<br/><i>lives in the universe — permanent, online</i>"]

    C -->|"lets you reach"| FAR["further"]
    FAR -->|"which yields"| DATA["survey data"]
    DATA -->|"unlocks"| C
    DATA -->|"writes"| K
    DATA -->|"earns"| S

    style C fill:#0369a1,stroke:#0c4a6e,color:#fff
    style K fill:#065f46,stroke:#064e3b,color:#fff
    style S fill:#5b21b6,stroke:#3b0764,color:#fff

Only the first is a power curve. The other two are records, and they are what the long-term player is actually playing for.

Why there is no level

A level is a number about you, and pillar 4 says there is no screen in a cockpit where a number about you belongs. That is the pillar argument. There are two better ones.

A simulation's difficulty should come from the situation, not from a multiplier. If a level-30 pilot lands more gently than a level-1 pilot, the landing is not a simulation. Every skill in this game is a real skill the player has, exercised through equipment whose behavior is transparent. A player who comes back after a year is exactly as good as they were.

Statistics fight the physics that already exists. The engine computes real thrust, real mass, real drag. Layering a +12% handling stat on top of that means two systems now decide how the ship moves, and one of them is lying. Elite Dangerous, Kerbal Space Program and DCS all progress through equipment and knowledge for the same reason.

What is given up: the reliable dopamine of a filling bar, and the ability to gate content by level. Both are real losses and both are acceptable, because the non-commercial posture means no retention metric needs defending.

Ratchet 1 — Capability

Modules and hulls, unlocked with survey data and fitted at any station.

The shape of the curve — deliberately front-loaded, then long and flat:

The curve is steep early and long at the top. The jump from 7.5 ly to 18 ly arrives quickly, because Elite's real problem is not its top end — it is the hours spent at the bottom, where every route is forced and nothing is a decision. After that the curve keeps climbing, slowly, all the way to 58 ly.

🎮 Designer's Note, revised in v0.2: v0.1 argued for a flat 2.2× curve on the grounds that with no retention metric to defend, the first ship should be nearly as good as the last. That reasoning was about fairness, and it missed what actually matters. A large range spread changes the character of the game, not merely its speed: at 8 ly you thread a dense web and every leg is forced; at 55 ly you leap between chosen anchors and the sparse outer regions become reachable for the first time. Wanting a faster ship is a legitimate, well-earned desire, not a retention hook — and designing it out made the game smaller. What survives from the old argument is the shape: steep at the bottom, so the cage phase is short, which is the part Elite gets wrong.

Loss

Ships are lost. A destroyed ship costs the hull and everything fitted, and the player restarts in a Bessel at the last station — but capability unlocks are permanent. Losing a ship costs the time to refit, not the progress.

Resolved: nothing beyond unbanked data. You restart at the last station in a Bessel; unlocks are permanent, so refitting is minutes of clicking. The data loss is already a heavy punishment, and a second cost would punish one mistake twice and turn death into an errand.

Ratchet 2 — Knowledge

The Almanac. Every body personally scanned, stamped with when and under which catalog version.

It is never lost, it works offline, it is not a power curve, and it is the thing most likely to still matter to a player after two hundred hours. It is also the only progression that survives everything: a destroyed ship, a wiped save restored from compact references and dynamic state, a catalog revision that retires a world you found.

Milestones exist but are not rewards. 1,000 bodies. Every planet in Sol. A body of every class. 10,000 light-years traveled. A confirmed exoplanet ground-truthed. They are recorded, they are displayed, and they unlock nothing — because the moment they unlock something they become a checklist, and a checklist is a different game.

Ratchet 3 — Standing

Discovery credit: your handle attached to bodies you found first, permanently, in the shared universe. Online only; see modes.

There is no rank, no title, no ladder position and no leaderboard on the front page. There is a number — how many bodies carry your name — and there are the bodies themselves, which anyone arriving will see.

Resolved: personal statistics, no ranking. Bodies surveyed, light-years traveled, firsts, worlds walked on — displayed for you, compared against nobody. A galaxy-wide ranking would reward volume over curiosity and push players toward efficient scan-and-move rather than the slow ground-truth surveys this design values most. Per-body attribution stays the social layer; it is social without being competitive.

The RPG layer

The brief asks for secondary RPG elements. What that means here, precisely:

What exists: equipment with real tradeoffs, a personal record that persists, directed optional goals (commissions), faction standing with the research institutions that issue them, and a progression of access rather than power.

What does not exist: attributes, skill trees, classes, dialogue trees, quests, experience points, or levels of any kind.

The distinction is that this game's RPG layer is about who you have become in the record rather than what numbers you have accumulated. A player who has ground-truthed four hundred worlds is a different player from one who has ground-truthed four, and every bit of that difference is legible in the Almanac and in their fitted ship — with not one stat between them.

Kept, minimal. Standing accrues per institution and unlocks that institution's higher-value commissions and its module lines. Three rules keep it from becoming a meter with no fiction behind it: institutions have permanent specialties (one wants exoplanet confirmations, one geology, one extreme environments), so who you serve follows what you enjoy surveying; standing never decays; and nothing is exclusively gated behind it — standing changes what is offered first, never what is reachable at all.

Player archetypes

Three timelines, for pacing the curve. All three assume the MVP scope.

"The wall" is not a failure. When capability flattens, the game becomes purely about the map and the record — which is precisely what Elite's long-term explorers describe as the point at which the game got good. The design should make that transition explicit and celebrated rather than something the player discovers by running out of upgrades.

Related

• exploration — the faucet feeding all three ratchets
• ships — what capability actually buys
• modes — where standing exists and where it does not
• loops — the ratchet in motion