How to use it
Three steps to finding out what something does.
1 Ask, in the words you already have.
Say "what can you do about engineering" or "how does the checklist work".
D47 answers from the help pages, which are the same as the site.
2 Or press HELP on any card.
Press HELP on a settings card.
The help page opens at that exact row, not at the top of the page. F1 does what HELP does, and F1 again closes help.
3 Ask to be walked through a feature.
Say "walk me through engineers", then "next" after each step.
D47 says the page title, the number of steps and step one, then each step as you ask for it.
! The one that stops people.
Ask the language model about Elite itself, such as what a Guardian beacon does.
You get an answer about the game; Help covers only D47.
Why it works this way
How to ask what something does, and where the answer comes from.
1 Two ways to ask, and both mean “this page”.
2 It sits on top, and “back” puts it away.
3 The pictures are here. The detail is on the site.
And a page nobody has illustrated yet still has its mark: pressing it, or saying so, brings you here instead — one level broader than you asked for, rather than nothing at all.
The details
What Directive 47 can actually do, answered from its own list of capabilities rather than from the model’s memory.
Ask for it, out loud
“what can you do” “what are your capabilities” “tell me about the voice capabilities”
Said or typed by you, this walks a spoken map one level at a time — a small question, then another, down to one feature. It never needs a model or a network, because it is projected from the same registry that decides what Directive 47 can actually do:
6 areas: Flying, Trading and goals, Ship and engineering, Talking and voices, Seeing what
happened, and Settings and safety. Which one?
Answer with an ordinal (“the second one”), the area’s own name, or enough of it to be unambiguous, and it goes one level deeper — more areas, or a feature, whichever the map holds there:
Operate the landing gear, lights, cargo scoop, hardpoints and the frame shift drive. Say 'put the
gear down' or 'retract hardpoints'. It has a page on the panel called Flight and navigation.
Say something the drill was not expecting and it drops the question and answers normally, rather than insisting on an answer to a menu you have stopped answering.
“How do I …”
“how do I plot a course” “how can I get my ship engineered” “how would I turn off silent running”
This lands on the one feature the words point to, from the same spoken map — never on the model — matching a leaf by the content words a goal shares with its name, its sentence and the phrases that reach its capability:
Put a system name on your clipboard, and try to plot a course to it. Say 'plot a course to
Shinrarta Dezhra' or 'copy that system name'. It has a page on the panel called Navigation.
Where two or three leaves fit equally well, it asks which, the same way a near miss does:
Two ways: Journal, or Commander's log. Which one?
Where nothing fits, a configured model answers instead; without one, this falls back to the top level of the spoken map rather than saying it has no way to work it out.
“Walk me through …”
“walk me through engineers” “show me how the checklist works” “how do I use bookmarks”
The name is a help page’s title. D47 says the title, the number of steps and the first step, then waits. These move it, and are taken before anything else hears them:
- “next” or “skip” — the next step; after the last one the walkthrough ends.
- “again” — the same step.
- “back” — the step before. The panel stays where it is.
- “what should I see” — what that step should do.
- “stop” or “cancel” — ends it and stops speaking mid-step. The panel’s cancel button and the shut-up hotkey stop the voice too, and leave the walkthrough where it is.
Engineers. 4 steps. Step 1. Open Engineers on the Asset Mgmt tab and read the directory.
Anything else you say goes to D47 as usual, and “next” afterwards carries on from the same step. A name that matches no page goes to D47 as an ordinary question. Starting another walkthrough replaces the one running, and ten minutes without one of these phrases ends it. Nothing is recorded: no step is marked done and nothing is saved.
Asked by the model
The model itself is never handed the drill — a Commander answering “the second one” a minute later is not something a tool call can tell apart from a fresh question, so the drill is reachable only by the router and the panel. What the model gets instead is the plain projection below, with an optional area name:
I have 9 capabilities, in these areas:
Flying — Everything about handling the ship in the moment.
Trading and goals — Finding what to do next, and what a place is worth.
Ask about an area by name for the detail.
Asked for an area, it lists what is in it — the phrases that actually work, your words rather than internal names, because a list you cannot say out loud is a list you cannot use:
Speech: Speak replies aloud, mark each loop state with its own cue, and stop on command.
Try: "stop"; "be quiet"; "shut up"
Callouts: Speak up about danger, fuel, route progress and arrivals without waiting to be asked.
Try: "what are you watching for"; "stop calling things out"; "start calling things out"
Ask for an area that does not exist and it names the real ones instead of refusing. If you asked for the wrong area you want the right one, and this is the moment Directive 47 knows both:
I have no area called "Navigation". I have: Flying, Trading and goals, Ship and engineering,
Talking and voices, Seeing what happened, Settings and safety.
What to actually say
Asked what can be done, the model reads it here rather than guessing. Asked what to say for a goal — “how do I choose the next system in the neutron jump route” — it calls a second tool, which answers from the same phrase book the router itself matches against, grouping two phrases that reach the same thing:
Plot the next stop on a stored route plan — the Neutron Plotter's waypoints, a Road to Riches
loop's stops, or a trade run's stops — through the galaxy map. Skips a stop whose system is the
one the Commander is already in. Say 'plot next neutron jump', 'plot the next neutron jump', or
'next neutron jump'. Reaches the hyperspace jump. Say 'jump to the next system'. Reaches the next
system in the route. Say 'next system', 'target the next system', or 'target the next system in
route'.
Where nothing in the phrase book matches, it says so plainly rather than claiming the goal cannot be reached at all — the phrase book not matching is not the same fact as D47 not being able to do it.
Why it will not make things up
The model is never asked what Directive 47 can do. Ask a model to describe its own abilities and it produces a fluent, confident, partly invented list — and you have no way to tell which half is which until you ask for something that turns out not to exist.
So the answer is built from the actual list of registered capabilities. It cannot name one that does not exist, because it is assembled from the ones that do.
The order it reads them in
Within a group, whichever you have used most comes first, so the things you actually reach for rise to the top of the list. Groups themselves stay in a fixed order — a spoken list whose headings move between askings is harder to follow than one that does not.
Reaching for something counts even when it fails, since a capability you keep trying is worth hearing about early on the days it is not working.
The count covers the current session only. It starts fresh each time Directive 47 does, rather than claiming a usage history it does not have.
The tool surface, for contributors
get_capabilities
Projects the registry: the top-level areas of the spoken map, the capabilities under one of them, and their declared example phrasings. The optional area name expands one of them.
{"type":"object","properties":{"group":{"type":"string","description":"Optional group name to expand, such as Voice. Omit for the overview."}},"required":[],"additionalProperties":false}
The keyword router only routes to a tool with no required parameters, because it deliberately does not extract argument values from free text — a router that guesses at arguments is one that calls the right tool with the wrong ones. The router originally refused any tool with parameters at all, which made “what can you do” match nothing: the one capability whose entire purpose is being answerable without the model was unreachable without it, purely for offering a refinement it does not need. The rule is now “no required parameters”, and the router invokes with empty arguments.
find_phrase
Finds the phrase-book entries whose words reach the goal — the model-free router’s own vocabulary, matched the same way the spoken “how do I” answer above matches a goal, but per phrase rather than per leaf. Two phrases that reach the same thing are said together.
{"type":"object","properties":{"goal":{"type":"string","description":"What the Commander wants to do, in a few plain words."}},"required":["goal"],"additionalProperties":false}
drill_capabilities
No parameters. Opens the top level of the spoken map as a standing offer, read against whatever the Commander says next.
{"type":"object","properties":{},"required":[],"additionalProperties":false}
Protected: reachable from the router and the panel, refused to the model. A model call answering “what can you do” opens no offer of its own — nothing distinguishes its next tool call from a Commander’s next sentence, so a model-opened offer would be captured by whatever the model asked for after it, not by the Commander.