Endless Sky

Endless Sky is a free and open-source 2D space trading and combat game heavily inspired by the classic Escape Velocity series. It drops you into a massive galaxy with a small ship, a modest bank account, and almost no obligation to follow a particular career path. From there, what happens is largely up to you.

Your first ship can take you in several completely different directions. You can become a merchant, transporting goods between worlds and gradually building a profitable trade network. You can haul passengers, mine asteroids, escort convoys, take jobs for various factions, hunt pirates, or simply fly around looking for trouble. Eventually, the little ship you started with can become part of an increasingly powerful fleet.

The ship customization is one of the game's biggest pleasures. Hundreds of different outfits can be installed on your ships, including weapons, engines, shields, generators, cooling systems, scanners, and other equipment. Every upgrade comes with tradeoffs. More weapons require more power. Better engines may leave less room for cargo. A heavily armed warship can dominate a fight but become painfully expensive to operate.

That makes buying a new ship feel meaningful. You aren't simply unlocking the next item on a progression ladder—you are deciding what you actually want your fleet to do.

The galaxy itself is where Endless Sky really starts to open up. Human space contains hundreds of systems, populated by different factions with their own territories, economies, conflicts, and storylines. The further you explore, the stranger things become, including encounters with alien civilizations whose technology and motivations are very different from humanity's.

There is a substantial narrative campaign involving political conflict and rebellion, but the game deliberately leaves room for exploration outside of it. You can spend hours ignoring the main storyline while building your fortune, improving your fleet, or searching for places that aren't immediately obvious.

And then there is the modding community. Endless Sky was designed to make adding content unusually accessible, and the official project maintains a large collection of community plugins. These can add ships, factions, missions, weapons, storylines, mechanics, and entire new regions to the game.

That ecosystem has helped the game grow enormously. By its tenth anniversary in 2025, the project had reached 498 star systems, 277 ships, 439 planets, and 1,891 missions, alongside contributions from hundreds of people.