More than two years after its official release back in December 2014, spaceship simulator Elite: Dangerous continues to grow and add content. The latest update is called “The Commanders,” and it bumps the game’s version number to 2.3 (or 1.8, if you’re not running the “Horizons” expansion). There are plenty of new features in 2.3, including a vastly updated camera system for taking in-game images or movies; a “commander creator” feature for players to create and customize their avatars; and the ability to join friends on their ships and fly as a single crew.

But one feature will be showing up as a last-minute addition: the newly discovered TRAPPIST-1 star system , complete with its seven exoplanets, will become part of the game’s simulated galaxy.

NASA broke the news about the discovery only days before the 2.3 update was set to enter semi-open (pay wall) beta testing among the Elite: Dangerous player base. Between that announcement and some last-minute bugs, publisher and developer Frontier decided to slip the beta date from February 23 to February 27 to try to add bug fixes and the TRAPPIST-1 system to the game. The bad news is that the newly discovered exoplanets won’t make it into Monday’s beta release; the good news is that TRAPPIST-1 will be in the second beta release, which will come some days or weeks after the initial beta.

Maker of worlds

Ars had the opportunity to speak with Frontier CEO and Elite: Dangerous Director David Braben Friday morning about the 2.3 beta and the TRAPPIST-1 addition specifically. Braben was clearly excited about the chance to add in the real-life exosystem—as it turned out, all it required was some tweaking to a brown dwarf system that was already in almost exactly the right spot within the game’s simulated galaxy map.

“There is a brown dwarf very near to the position of TRAPPIST-1,” he explained. “It’s Core Sys Sector XU-P a5-0. As luck would have it, it’s 39 light years away and roughly the right position. However, it’s a brown dwarf, not an M8.”

Frontier Developments

Frontier Developments

Frontier Developments

Frontier Developments

Fortuitously, the system that was transformed into TRAPPIST-1 already had seven bodies orbiting its brown dwarf mass, too. Frontier was able to hand-tweak the system’s properties to more closely resemble the real-life TRAPPIST-1 system; once the system is live in the second round of 2.3 beta testing, players will be able to make the relatively short hop out to it and visit it quite easily. Braben explained the system will have a couple of earth-like worlds, and players will be able to land on at least a few of the bodies in the system.

And what about the lucky player who initially discovered the Core Sys Sector XU-P a5-0 system? Braben laughed and said that the player will get to keep his or her “Discovered by” tag—though Braben also mentioned that the system was more properly discovered by NASA.

Getting dolled up

As mentioned above, the beta release for 2.3 also brings three significant new features: multicrew, the commander creator, and a hugely updated camera system. These features were covered by Frontier in a pair of livestreams last week, but here’s a quick recap:

Multicrew allows you to invite other players onto your ship with you to assist with flying. Currently, the available roles are somewhat limited (guest crew can either fly fighters or take on a “gunner” role, which lets them control turreted weapons and some ship defensive systems), but the big bonus is that each guest crew member gets an additional power management “pip” that they can allocate to the host ship’s engines, systems, or weapons. Frontier estimates that a fully crewed big ship will have about as much combat staying power as a full wing.

The commander creator (or “Holo-Me,” as Frontier calls it), is exactly that—a tool that lets you create an avatar to represent yourself in-game. The demonstration on the livestream was impressive; the commander creator had a huge number of very good-looking presets, and the fine-tuning options to change your avatar’s looks were comprehensive and deep without being overwhelming. It seemed like creating a good-looking commander was relatively easy, and we’re excited to try it out.

The other tent-pole feature is the updated camera, which goes from being a sort-of-kind-of hidden option with limited functionality to a full-on photo and video suite complete with rich tools to compose shots and videos. In a big change from its previous stance, Frontier is also allowing ships to be controlled and piloted from the external camera view—though actually doing useful flying or combat with an external camera will be difficult, since the HUD and other control elements will not be visible. The updated functionality will almost certainly lead to a huge boom in the production of Elite: Dangerous fan movies. (Personally, the new camera system is going to make finishing my Elite: Dangerous Web comic a hell of a lot easier.)

There are lots of other things going on in 2.3, including the introduction of a new small-size passenger ship called the Dolphin. One feature that’s particularly near and dear to my heart—and one that has been on the “coming soon” list for years—is the ability for players to finally name their ships. It’s a minor change, but being able to put a name on your spaceship goes a long way toward making it feel like a home.

Clueing for looks

We also took the opportunity to ask about what other hidden secrets might be lurking in the Elite: Dangerous universe. Players are still coming to grips with the game’s unfolding mysteries, which include interdictions by alien ships, cryptic maps that may be keys to something, odd happenings and disappearances in the Formidine Rift region, and many other strange goings-on (most of which can be read about on the player-run Canonn Interstellar Research Group’s site).

Braben was characteristically cagey with his answer, but he said that at least for now, there might not be anything spooky or mysterious lurking in TRAPPIST-1. “There is absolutely tons of lovely stuff in 2.3 to find. People are still finding stuff in 2.2! There are a lot of things in 2.3. It wouldn’t be a huge leap of the imagination to realize that we’ve only just put this in, because we’ve been matching the NASA data—I hadn’t heard of this Core Sys sector before, since it’s such an insignificant system. So it’s not a remarkable system—there wasn’t anything there already. We might look at something between now and beta 2, but it’s unlikely.”

“The Commanders” update is expected to leave beta and enter general availability in a few weeks. It will be available to players who purchased the “Horizons” expansion; non-Horizons players will still get quality-of-life benefits from the 2.3/1.8 release (including the new camera), but those players will not get multicrew functionality or the “commander creator” otherwise.

The beta will be available for Elite: Dangerous players on Windows; Xbox One and Mac players will have to sit out the beta testing. The TRAPPIST-1 system won’t be in the initial beta, but it will be visitable starting in the second round of beta testing.