This morning for no obvious reason, I remembered the Fuel Rats.
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This morning for no obvious reason, I remembered the Fuel Rats.
Elite:Dangerous is an MMO space sim game, with a big galaxy in which you fly a spaceship doing stuff. Spaceships need fuel, which you buy at stations, or if you have a fuel scoop you can skim the surface of certain stars to get usable fuel.
Space is big though, and it's quite possible to run yourself low on fuel in a way that you can no longer warp to any inhabited system to refuel. At which point you're screwed.
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Or at least you would be, in the game as designed. But one item spaceships can have is "fuel limpets", effectively small missiles that can transfer fuel to another ship.
So, shortly after the game launched, a group of players formed the Fuel Rats, an emergency refueling service.
Ran yourself out of gas? Don't panic, head to the Fuel Rats website and hit the distress button.
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You get dropped into an honest to god IRC channel, with the current on-call dispatcher. They collect your location, make sure you have enough oxygen reserves and how to conserve resources.
Meanwhile, responders hanging out in the channel have been plotting a course to your location, and reporting ETA and jump counts back to the dispatcher. The distpatcher assigns (usually) a primary and backup responder, and they start heading your way.
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Eventually one of them drops out of warp near you. Even in an MMO, it's a very odd feeling having another player ship drop out of cruise, and slowly pull up to your windshield.
They say hi, did I find the right place, you need fuel right? They transfer a bunch of fuel, give you pointers to the nearest systems with fuel services, and make sure you're in good shape to get yourself to safety.
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The thing I find remarkable about this, is that the Fuel Rats aren't a game feature. There are no rewards for being a fuel rat (in fact, it's policy to refuse payment if the recuee offers), except the intrinsic reward of helping people have a nice time.
Despite this, the fuel rats were one of the first "guilds" formed, if you want to call them that, and have been going strong for years. According to their stats, they have rescued 157 thousand stranded players, with a 96% success rate.
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I find it reassuring that in a game that is in some ways a libertarian power fantasy (you and your spaceship, go anywhere do whatever you want), and a PvP universe, one of the first things people did was create a volunteer ambulance service.
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And despite not being "formally" a part of the game, the fuel rats have become ingrained in Elite's lore and playerbase. It's known, pervasively, that the fuel rats exist, and that if you put out a distress signal, they _will_ come help you, come what may.
Occasionally, griefers put out false flags and attack the fuel rats that come to them. With no explicit coordination, this immediately became the most reviled form of piracy, in a game where piracy is broadly considered okay.
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If you attack a fuel rat on the job, you can expect vigilante players to make you pay for it. You'll get bounties taken out, much better skilled and equipped players will hound you and blow you out of the sky, and generally pay back the fuel rats' losses tenfold.
You don't fuck with the fuel rats, either by choice, or because the entire galaxy has their back and will run you out of town if you mess about with the emergency service.
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But the fuel rats don't retaliate. Oh, that sucks, not a real rescue, clear it off the active board and return to standby. They'll respond to the next call just as eagerly.
They also go way above and beyond. There are famous cases where they rescued explorers "outside the bubble", who were hundreds or thousands of light years away from inhabited space. Reaching them requires hours of real-time play, careful planning, and a very well outfitted ship.
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@danderson does sound (from your description) that it relies on faster-than-light out-of-band communications.
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When those calls came in, several people, who again I remind you get no rewards for this, signed up for an hours long trek out into deep space to rescue the stranded explorer. Due to the distance they usually dispatch more responders, just in case one of them miscalculates and ends up in distress themselves (e.g. warping to a star type that you can't refuel from, with not enough fuel to reach another star - that's how things go wrong for deep space explorers).
I dunno, I find that pretty neat.
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@danderson that's a lovely story, thanks for sharing. I backed the Elite Kickstarter, because 8bit computing as a child, but I never did own a PC that could play it. Alas, the console port got nuked. Perhaps I'll get to it one day, bit it's nice to know this sort of collective exists.
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@danderson (and in fact it sounds like it's faster-than-warp as well)
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aburka 🫣replied to Dave Anderson last edited by [email protected]
@danderson are many players full time rats? If so how do they support themselves and buy fuel to give out, is it like a collective? Or do they have wealthy patrons? Or are the rats more like independently wealthy players taking on-call shifts when they aren't out pillaging noobs or prospecting for space gold or whatever you do to make a living normally?
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@aburka I believe many fuel rats do the thing as a primary reason to play the game, yes. Rats provide their own fuel, once you're past the very early stage of playing the cost of fuel is effectively zero so it's not much of a hardship, the trouble is just being in a location where you can buy/scoop the stuff.
So, more like experienced players (== fairly wealthy, owning fast ships that are ideal for ratting) donating their time and resources to give a leg up to others.
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@aburka At least back in the day, very new players were common clients of the fuel rats, because if you're newer to the game your jump range and fuel capacity is lower, and you've not yet internalized the reflex to manage fuel properly. And so, new players run themselves out of fuel fairly frequently. I used to think of the fuel rat volunteers as people who experienced that back in the day, and are giving other players the leg up they got themselves from the fuel rats back in the day.
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@vathpela Elite isn't really a hard sci-fi world (e.g. ships have "arcade" flight mechanics not true orbital mechanics), so I don't know that it comes up much. But yes, the world of Elite features FTL travel, and I think canonically also FTL communication. I mean empirically obviously since there's the fuel rats IRC and discord channel, but I think in-game there's also some amount of canon FTL comms.
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Brought to you by the memory of learning about the fuel rats when I first started playing Elite:Dangerous, and then many game hours later having to call on their services when I learned that fuel scoops don't work on some kinds of stars, and was just dead in the water in an empty star system between two inhabited worlds.
And yeah, my experience was just like in the brochure. I honestly wonder if real life emergency responders pick up fuel rat dispatch shifts in their spare time, because wow.
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The details are fuzzy, but I remember I was still a mid-level player with a ship whose main asset was affordability and opportunities to amass enough money to get the really nice ships.
I was rescued by an Anaconda, the third most expensive ship in the game according to the wiki. The insurance payment on it alone was more than my entire game net worth at the time. In naval terms, it's like a 300ft superyacht coming to the rescue of a rusty fishing trawler.
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I remember it because seeing the Anaconda slowly pull up to a stop outside my windshield and fire fuel limpets (a) looked incredible in VR out the panoramic cockpit of my rubbish little freighter and (b) this was a player who clearly had the resources to do whatever they felt like in this game, nothing was off limits. And they chose to spend their evening hanging out at the IRC equivalent of the fire house with other like-minded people, running some gas cans to people in need.
That's just neat!
