A story is a name and a list of beats. Everything else on this form is optional, and the beats are the only part that does anything.

1 Three things are required. The rest is flavour.

REQUIRED a key — its short id a name — what you call it at least one beat OPTIONAL the opening line the five spine questions a title on each beat Save stays greyed out until all three are there, and says which one is missing.

2 A beat waits for one of five things. There is no sixth.

ARRIVE at a system DOCK at a station LAND on a body SCAN a body RANK reach one All five are things your journal already records, which is why they are the whole list. A story cannot wait for something Elite never writes down — so it is not offered.

3 The spine is for the core, not for you.

THE FIVE ANSWERS about · want · stake turn · what the end means every one of them optional THE CORE READS THEM so when you ask it about the story, the answer it improvises is in the same story you wrote Leave them blank and the beats still fire. You just get less around them. They are in the craft's order, which is why they read like questions rather than fields.

The details

The Write page on the Adventures tab, reached from Write an adventure — and the same form reached from Edit on a story you already have.

The three things Save waits for

  Why
A key The short id an adventure is stored and asked for under
A name What you and the ship’s AI call it
At least one beat A story with no beats can never advance, so it is not a story

The red lines under the form are not errors — they are the list of what is still missing, and they disappear as you fill each one in. Nothing is saved until you press Save, so leaving the page loses the draft.

Save keeps it. Save and begin keeps it and starts it immediately, which is the usual choice for something you wrote because you are about to go and fly it.

Beats, and the five triggers

A beat is something that happens, where, and the line said when it does. Adding one asks those three in turn.

The trigger is one of five, and the list is closed:

  • Arrive at a system
  • Dock at a station
  • Land on a body
  • Scan a body
  • Reach a rank

That is not a starting set. Those are the five things your own journal records unambiguously, and a story that waits for something Elite never writes down would be a story that never advances — so it is not offered rather than offered and broken.

Where is either here — with the ids of wherever you are standing, which is the quickest way to pin a beat to a real place — or a name you type, resolved through the galaxy search. For a rank beat it is the rank instead.

A scan beat also fires on going there. Elite writes a Scan the first time a body enters your discovered set and then, in the overwhelming majority of cases, never again — so a story that sent you to somewhere you had already scanned used to wait for an event the game had already spent, with no way past it. Arriving at the body counts as well, so pick the body you want the story to visit and do not worry about whether you have been there before.

Beats fire in order. Progress comes from your journal as you fly, not from anything you press.

The spine

Five optional questions, in the order a writer would answer them:

What is this about · What do you want in it · What is really at stake · Where does it turn · What does the end mean

They are not shown to you anywhere. They are given to the ship’s AI, so that when you ask it about the story mid-flight — or remark on something that just happened — what it improvises belongs to the story you wrote rather than to a story it is inventing as it goes.

Leave every one of them blank and the adventure works exactly the same. You simply get less around the beats.

The opening

Said once, when the adventure begins. Blank means it begins without ceremony.

Limits

An adventure has a maximum number of beats, and the editor says so rather than silently refusing the button. The cap exists because a story is read aloud between things you are doing, and one with forty beats in it is a chore rather than a story.