Fenris Creations Open-Sources Carbon Engine; First Community Fork Immediately Adds Battle Pass
REYKJAVIK — In a move hailed by developers and deeply feared by players, Fenris Creations has released the complete source code for Carbon, the engine that has powered EVE Online for over two decades. Within forty minutes of the GitHub repository going public, a community fork named Carbon-X had already merged a pull request adding a seasonal battle pass, daily login rewards, and a premium currency called AurumCoin.
“Carbon was built for a very specific purpose,” said Ben Hunter, Senior Development Director for Core Technology at Fenris Creations, in what analysts now believe was either genuine optimism or an elaborate cry for help. “Open sourcing Carbon is about making that foundation visible, understandable, and useful to others.”
The foundation, it seems, was immediately made useful by a GitHub user named @capsuleer_42069, whose first commit replaced the venerable EVE skill queue with a Battle Pass Tier System requiring players to accumulate “Space XP” through daily challenges like “Mine 100 units of Veldspar” and “Lose a battleship to a gate camp.”
Other early forks include:
- Carbon-NFT: Replaces all ship textures with procedurally generated monkey JPEGs
- Carbon-Twitter: Auto-posts every gank to a dedicated social feed with unskippable reply threads
- Carbon-EA: Charges 500 AurumCoin for docking permission; loot boxes contain random module drops
Sources inside Fenris confirm the company is “monitoring the situation closely,” which industry observers translate as “watching in horror from behind reinforced glass.” A spokesperson noted that the original EVE Online repository remains the canonical version, though they admitted the community fork now has more stars, contributors, and active Discord moderators.
When reached for comment, a Fenris Creations representative stated: “We anticipated modding. We did not anticipate the modders would be faster than our own build pipeline. The Carbon-X branch currently compiles in twelve seconds. Our internal Jenkins takes forty minutes. We are taking notes.”
The company has promised to review major community contributions for possible integration, though sources say the first candidate under consideration is a pull request that replaces the entire sovereignty system with a rock-paper-scissors minigame accessible via the Neocom.
EVE Online remains free to play. Carbon-X requires a “Founder’s Pack” available for $49.99.
