Asset Brief

01How to use this

Each entry gives an id, a brief, and the constraints that make it fit. Feed a single entry to an image or model generator; do not feed the whole document at once, because the constraints are per-asset and a generator will average them.

A workable prompt is the brief, plus the art direction in §03, plus the faction livery in §04 if the asset belongs to one. The constraints are for whoever wires it in, not for the generator.

Priority

02Technical contract

Origin at the centre of mass — for a ship, roughly the centre of the hull, not the nose. The ship rotates about its origin, so an off-centre origin makes the hull swing rather than turn.

Scale

Ships are sized by hit_radius, the radius of the sphere weapons test against. A model must fit inside its hit sphere — anything outside it can be shot through.

ShipClass.visual_scale is a multiplier on the client's placeholder model (a primitive assembly about 4 m long), sent at login since M29 so a cruiser reads as one: carrack is 30, drone_hauler 2.2, the fighters 1. Author to the table above and drop it. A model whose true size is a data-file multiplier is a model nobody can inspect.

How the first models are wired in (M35). The generated set does not meet this contract yet: each file is normalised to about 1 m and a hull's nose points along −X. The client turns hulls −90° about Y, measures each file's furthest vertex and scales it to the placeholder it replaces, so ships still draw at placeholder size. Files are found by id (ships/<class>, stations/<base>, structures/<kind>, props/…); a missing file leaves the placeholder.

Polygon budgets

Interest management replicates up to 24 ships at once, so a busy station means two dozen hulls and their effects on screen together.

Naming

<category>/<id>.<ext>, using the id from the data files verbatim: ships/kestrel.glb, icons/commodity/iron_ore.png, audio/weapon/pulse_1_fire.ogg. The ids are the join between this document and the code; renaming one breaks that join silently.

03Art direction

The reference is Freelancer (2003), not Elite Dangerous.

Hulls are readable at a glance and slightly stylised: clear silhouettes, flat panelled surfaces, visible engine glow, colour that says who built the thing. Not gritty photorealism, not cartoon. A player should be able to name a ship class from its outline at 2 km.

Space is dark and coloured. The clear colour is very nearly black with a blue cast. The key light is warm white at a low angle; ambient is cool and dim. That contrast is deliberate — it makes hulls read as lit objects in a dark place rather than as flat sprites.

Palette

Taken from the code, so the world and the interface agree.

04Faction identity

Four factions. Each needs a livery, a logo that reads at 32 px, and a structure palette.

05Ships

Three hulls, each flown by players and NPCs alike — an NPC is a ShipInput producer, not a different kind of object.

Hardpoint offsets are exact, in metres, in hull-local space, from assets/data/ships.ron. They are where muzzle flashes, mining beams and engine effects attach. Model the corresponding hardware at those points or the effects will float. The offsets are given at the placeholder's ~5 m scale: multiply by roughly four when authoring at full size, and keep the arrangement.

kestrel Kestrel P0

Class

LightFighter

Top speed

90 m/s

Hold

30 m³

Hit radius

11 m

The starter hull and the most-seen object in the game. A compact single-seat interceptor around 20 m long: forward-swept wings, a canopy set well forward, two engine bells aft. It should look cheap and fast — a hull somebody could afford as their first ship. Panel lines flat and functional, no ornament. The canopy should be transparent enough to imply a pilot without one being modelled.

Guns just outboard and slightly below the nose, disruptor under the chin, countermeasure launcher aft-ventral. Two thruster bells at approximately (±0.45, 0, +1.9), as separately named nodes so the engine glow can attach and scale with throttle.

bulwark Bulwark P0

Class

HeavyFighter

Top speed

78 m/s

Hold

60 m³

Hit radius

15 m

The gunship, and what Compact Wardens fly. Broad-shouldered and armoured, about 26 m. Where the Kestrel is swept and thin, this is blocky and layered: bolted-on plates, a heavier nose housing the centre cannon, twin engines set wide. It should look like it can take a beating — visibly thicker than the Kestrel at the same distance. It also has to wear the police amber stripe well, so keep a long uninterrupted flank surface.

The centre cannon sits above the nose line and the mining laser below it. That vertical separation should be visible — it is how a player tells at a glance whether the thing pointed at them is a gun or a tool.

drone_hauler Drone-class Hauler P0

Class

Freighter

Top speed

55 m/s

Hold

275 m³

Hit radius

24 m

The industrial hull, and what the NPC haulers fly — so it is seen constantly on the Halden–Harrow run. A slab-sided freighter about 44 m long, built around its cargo section: an obvious spine with modular container bays clamped along it, a small crew module forward, four engines aft. The name is Drone-class: it should look semi-automated, few windows, a lot of external machinery. Two turret rings, dorsal and ventral, must be visibly rotatable hardware: since M29 they really do turn, leading the locked target within the hemisphere they face.

Three rig mounts are the Hauler's character. It has grid for days and a processor that runs out long before it, so a fully rigged freighter has to choose. Model them as visible external hardpoints along the spine, big enough that a fitted module could plausibly be bolted there.

carrack Carrack-class Cruiser P0

Class

Capital

Top speed

42 m/s

Hold

160 m³

Hit radius

60 m

The capital: 32 000 hull, 9 000 shield, six heavy turrets that aim themselves. Player-flyable (Capital Ships skill, 6 000 000 cr at Halden), and flown by the Wardens in a Drift they hold and the Clans in a Gap they hold. Docks only at stations. About 110 m long, a warship rather than a freighter: a long armoured keel, a raised command tower aft of centre, a broad engine block of six bells. Its silhouette is its six turret barbettes (dorsal fore and aft, ventral fore and aft, one on each flank), each a heavy twin-barrelled mount on a ring that must read as rotating. Compact livery is navy and white with gold trim; the Clan one is the same hull stripped, rust-red and patched.

Per hull, also needed P1

• LOD1 at ~30% triangles, used past 2 km.
• A damaged state, or at minimum a material variant with scorching and a blown panel or two. Hull integrity is replicated and shown on the HUD; seeing it would be better.
• Four liveries as texture variants sharing one mesh.

06The world

halden Halden Station P0

System

Harrow Reach

Position

(0, 0, −3000)

Radius

220 m

Dock within

600 m

The Compact's industrial station: bar, trader, ship dealer, equipment dealer, repair, refinery, manufacturing, market orders. The busiest place in the game and the first thing a new player flies to — it sits 1.8 km straight ahead of the spawn point and the whole approach is spent looking at it.

A central spindle with a habitation ring, flanked by refinery stacks and a manufacturing block with visible gantries and cargo handling. Lit windows in irregular clusters. The docking approach clearly marked with a lit bay mouth and approach strobes on the nearest face. Compact livery: white and navy, clean, expensive, with an enormous stencilled registration. It should read as a place where several hundred people work.

It must have a distinct front. The player always approaches from roughly −Z-ward, and a station that looks the same from every angle gives them nothing to aim at.

drift_relay Drift Relay P1

System

Vell Drift

Position

(1500, 300, 1500)

Radius

180 m

Dock within

520 m

The Traders Guild waystation in null security: bar, trader, repair, refinery. A compact ring with ice-processing tanks on one side and heavy shield plating facing Cinder Hold. Lit like it expects visitors and has had bad ones; Guild amber, used sparingly.

cinder_hold Cinder Hold P1

System

Vell Drift

Position

(−2600, −400, −3800)

Radius

200 m

Dock within

560 m

The Cinder Clans' home: bar, trader, repair, market orders; refuses anyone who has been hunting them. Kessler Yard's bigger, older sibling: a hollowed rock fortified over generations, trophies welded to the outside (hull sections of ships they took, still in their owners' liveries), ember-red light leaking from cracks.

Player structures P1

Two kinds, deployed by players in null security. Currently a 60 m grey mast with an amber ring at its head; stationary, hit radius 28 m, and they must read at several kilometres as built by somebody. warden_relay: a Compact signal mast, clean and regimented, blue-white beacons, the Compact star. clan_beacon: a salvaged reactor with a war-banner welded on, burning, trophies hung from the frame. Each kit (relay_kit, beacon_kit) wants an icon in the commodity set.

kessler_yard Kessler Yard P0

System

Kessler Gap

Position

(600, −200, −2200)

Radius

160 m

Dock within

520 m

The Cinder Clan outpost: bar, trader, repair, refinery, market orders. Low security, no police, and it pays well for what it cannot make. Smaller and meaner than Halden — an asteroid with structures welded onto it, or a captured hull section repurposed as a base. Asymmetric, patched, no two modules matching, deep red running lights. Where Halden looks maintained, this looks held together. One obvious docking slot, badly lit.

harrow Harrow P0

Kind

Planet

Position

(6000, −800, −9000)

Radius

2800 m

Land within

3600 m

Traders Guild. It grows and digs, and imports everything made in orbit. A green-and-ochre habitable world seen from orbit: continents of cultivated land, visible mining scars, a thin atmospheric haze on the limb, a handful of settlement lights on the night side. Needs an 8192×4096 equirectangular albedo, a matching normal, and a cloud layer as a separate slightly larger sphere. Currently a flat #268C59 sphere, which is the single biggest visual gap in the game.

Jump gates P0

Two, one per system, each 500 m radius — a ring you fly into, not a door. Harrow Reach's is at (−5200, 300, −1400); Kessler Gap's at (0, 0, 2600).

A massive open ring with four or six anchor pylons, inactive by default, the interior holding a faint distortion that flares when a ship jumps. It should be visible from several kilometres — this is a navigation landmark, and a gate a player cannot find is a system they cannot leave. Include a slowly rotating outer collar so it reads as machinery rather than architecture.

Trade lane rings P1

Three lanes: Halden to the Kessler Gap gate and Halden to Harrow in Harrow Reach, the gate to Kessler Yard in Kessler Gap. Each has an end ring at both ends (enter within 300 m; currently a 120 m torus) and a smaller line ring every kilometre between, all facing along the lane. Currently amber #F2B34D emissive tori.

An end ring is a docking-ring-sized hoop on a short pylon, with a beacon that reads at several kilometres: it is where a pilot lines up. Line rings are lighter versions of the same shape and, in a row, should read as a route at a glance. Rings flashing in sequence as a ship rides past are optional, but that is what tells a pilot the lane is carrying them.

Asteroid fields P1

Six to eight asteroid meshes, 300–1,500 triangles each, instanced with random scale and rotation. Irregular, cratered, dusty grey-brown with darker crevices. Two variants should carry visible ore veins — a warmer, faintly metallic streak — because a miner should be able to tell a rock with iron in it from one without, even though the simulation does not yet distinguish them. Add a mined variant with a fresh bright scar, and a dust-and-debris particle layer filling the field volume so flying into a belt feels like entering something rather than crossing a line.

System backdrops P2

Today every system shares one generic starfield (900 unlit dots 40 km out), so arriving somewhere new looks like arriving nowhere. Each system gets its own sky. The look to aim for is deep-space astrophotography: Hubble and Webb nebulae, the Milky Way as long-exposure photographs show it. Not painted sci-fi space with planets and lens flares.

The three must be told apart at a glance from the arrival point. That glance is how a pilot knows a jump worked: warm gold for Harrow Reach, dark brown dust for Kessler Gap, cold blue-violet for Vell Drift.

Technical contract

Orientation. The image is the sky seen from inside. The centre of the image is −Z, the direction a pilot faces at the spawn point; a quarter to the right is +X, the left and right edges are +Z (behind), the top row is +Y.

Leave the sun out. The engine draws the system's star so it lines up with the light that shades the ships, at about (u 0.81, v 0.32) of the image: right of centre, a third of the way down. Keep that patch free of bright features, or the sky shows two suns.

Brightness. The HUD is green text drawn straight over the sky, and contacts are small grey hulls. Most of the image should be near-black (sRGB below about 40/255). Nebulae peak around 60–70%. Nothing white bigger than a star. If a screenshot of the HUD over the brightest part is hard to read, it is too bright.

How hard this is

Making a beautiful nebula image is easy for any current image model. The hard part is a seamless, full-sphere image at 8k. Single-image models (GPT Image, Midjourney, Flux, Imagen) do not wrap left to right, distort at the poles, and top out around 2k. There are three ways to get there, best first:

1. Real star field plus a generated feature (recommended). Start from NASA's Deep Star Maps 2020 (Scientific Visualization Studio): a real all-sky star map from Gaia and Hipparcos, already equirectangular, up to 64k (as HDR .exr), free to use with the credit line “NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio; Gaia DR2: ESA/Gaia/DPAC”. Turn it differently for each system so the skies differ, dim it, then composite one generated nebula or dust feature per system into the horizon band, painted on black (prompts below). The stars are real, the projection is already right, and only the feature has to be generated.
2. A dedicated 360 generator (Blockade Labs Skybox AI, or a panorama-capable model). It handles the projection and the wrap, but check the poles and upscale to 8k.
3. A single-image model with fix-up. Generate at 2:1, upscale (Real-ESRGAN or similar), then fix the wrap: shift the image half a width, inpaint the seam now in the middle, and shift it back. Paint the poles over with star field.

Real Hubble and Webb images are the right style reference. Using one directly is possible, with care. NASA images are generally public domain. ESA/Hubble and ESA/Webb images are CC BY 4.0 and need a credit line. Check each image's credit. They are flat frames, not skies, so they can only be composited in as a feature. Famous objects (the Pillars of Creation, the Carina Nebula) are recognisable and break the fiction. A generated feature in the same palette is usually better.

The systems

Prompts

Each prompt is the system's sky plus the shared style. Use the panorama form with a 360 generator; use the feature form for route 1 or 3, where the feature is composited onto a star field.

Shared style (append to every prompt)

Panorama form, prefix

Feature form, prefix

harrow_reach

kessler_gap

vell_drift

Acceptance

• Load it in a panorama viewer and turn a full circle: no seam, no pinch.
• Put the game's HUD screenshot over the brightest part: the text reads.
• Put the three side by side as small thumbnails: each is recognisable.

loot Cargo container P1

Spawns where a ship died, holding what it carried, and disperses after a timeout. Currently a 6 m yellow cube. Should be a 4 m armoured pod with a strobing locator beacon, scorched on one face. It must be findable: the beacon is the whole point, because these appear mid-fight and expire.

Distance markers P2

Eight small spheres every 500 m straight ahead of the spawn point, so a new player can read their speed off the world instead of trusting the HUD. Replace with something intentional: a line of small unlit navigation buoys, one blinking light each, receding into the dark.

07Weapons and projectiles

Every weapon here is a projectile. There is no hitscan, and leading a target is a skill.

The projectile is a real object the player watches travel, so how it looks matters more than usual. Each weapon needs a muzzle model at its hardpoint, a projectile look, and audio (§11).

Impact effects P1

• Energy — a bright flash and a brief circular scorch.
• Kinetic — sparks and a puff of debris; visible ablation.
• Explosive — a small fireball with a shockwave ring.
• EMP — a blue-white electrical crawl across the target hull.

Shield impact must be distinct from a hull hit: shields absorb before hull, and a player needs to know which is being eaten. A hexagonal ripple spreading from the impact point across a spherical shield surface, brightest at the centre, fading in about 0.4 s.

07aEquipment

Seventeen modules, three of them switched on in flight, bolted into mounts by kind and size. Most are internal — a shield capacitor is a box in a bay — so the need here is icons first, hull attachments second.

Every module's effect is a percentage of the hull's own numbers, and the trade-offs are authored in pairs: a capacitor holds more and refills slower, an emitter array does the reverse. An icon set that reads those pairs as opposites is worth more than seventeen unrelated pictures.

Icons P1

64 px SVG plus PNG, in the same flat single-weight language as the commodity set.

The three active modules also want four states on the HUD (off, on, hot, burnt out). One icon plus a tinted frame is enough.

Hull attachments P2

Five of the fourteen are plausibly visible from outside, and a ship that looks fitted is most of what makes fitting satisfying: the two plating modules as bolted plates sitting proud of the flanks in the hull's livery, the burner tank as an external cylinder near the engines, and the hold expanders as visibly larger cargo bays or an extra clamped container. Each is a small separate mesh attaching at the rig or thruster offsets in §05. The rest stay internal and need no geometry.

Mount markers P2

Empty mounts should be visible at close range: a capped socket, a blanking plate, an unarmed pylon. It is what tells a pilot looking at their own ship that there is somewhere left to put something.

08Visual effects

09Interface

The HUD is currently monospaced text in five panels. It works and it is readable; what it lacks is anything drawn.

Reticle and markers P0

Panels, bars and the navmap P1

Five panels — net diagnostics top left, flight bottom left, station centre while docked, contacts right, chat bottom. They need a frame that reads as a cockpit display without eating space: a thin bevelled border, a slightly darkened translucent backing, a corner notch. Two variants, HUD green #9EDBB8 and station amber #EBD69E.

Shield, hull, weapon energy, afterburner fuel, throttle, cruise charge and training progress are all fraction bars, currently drawn as [====    ]. One segmented bar graphic with a filled and an empty state, tintable per use.

The navmap is ASCII today. It needs a system node (a circle with a name label, plus a "you are here" variant), a jump link line, a route highlight, and a system detail card listing bases. Two systems now; designed for dozens.

10Icons

All flat, single-weight, legible at 24 px. Supply SVG plus 64 px PNG.

Commodities P1

The category should be readable from the shape language: Raw rough and irregular, Refined geometric, Manufactured mechanical, Consumable rounded.

Contacts P0

Four, and these carry real information in a fight: Player a neutral chevron, Pirate a red angular hostile mark, Police a blue shield, Trader an amber cargo chevron. They must be distinguishable by shape, not only by colour.

Services, skills and damage types P1 P2

Eight station services (P1): bar, trader, ship dealer, equipment dealer, repair, refinery, manufacturing, market orders — a glass, a scale, a hull silhouette, a wrench-and-module, a welding spark, a distillation stack, a press, a candlestick chart.

Twelve skill effects (P2) for the training screen's effect column: cargo, shields, hull, damage, thrust, handling, mining, refining, production, trade, research (a flask), invention (a lit bulb over a blueprint).

Four damage types (P2): Energy a bolt, Kinetic an impact star, Explosive a burst, EMP a waveform.

11Audio

Positional sources mono, music and ambience stereo. Loop cleanly where marked.

Ship P0

Weapons, impacts and interface P0 P1

One fire sound each for the six projectile weapons plus a looping mining beam. Lasers short and electric; the cannon a heavy percussive thump; the disruptor a wet electrical warble that sounds obviously unlike a gun.

Impacts: hit_shield a resonant absorbed thud, hit_hull metal-on-metal penetration, plus per-damage-type variants, explosion_small, explosion_large and debris.

World and interface (P1): dock_granted, dock_clamp, undock_launch, jump_engage, jump_arrive, loot_scoop, mining_impact, trade_confirm, trade_refused, skill_complete — a small satisfying chime, because this fires when something trained while you were away — and the four UI clicks.

Ambience and music P2

Five ambiences: high-security space (calm, distant traffic chatter, a low tonal bed), low-security (sparser, colder, irregular unexplained noises), asteroid field (pebble impacts on the hull, dust hiss), station interior (ventilation, machinery, muffled voices), and the bar (conversation, glasses, a bad jukebox).

Music is orchestral-electronic in Freelancer's register: melodic, unhurried, never busy. Loop cleanly and leave silence — this is a game people play for hours.

12Typography

The HUD is monospaced by design: the columns line up and the panels are tables. Bevy's bundled font has no em dash and no box-drawing characters — every on-screen string in this codebase is plain ASCII, and there are tests asserting it.

Needed: one monospaced family with a technical, slightly condensed feel, in Regular and Bold, covering Latin-1 plus arrows and block-drawing (─ │ ┌ ┐ └ ┘ █ ▓ ▒ ░ ← → ↑ ↓). Supplying those would let the panel frames be drawn in text and the ASCII-only tests be relaxed. A second, proportional family for headings and station signage would help, but is P2.

13Manifest

A first pass, in build order. Ticks are kept in this browser.

14Deliberately not here

Nothing should be generated for a system that cannot show it yet.

• Mine-layer hardware. HardpointKind::Mine exists in the model and no hull declares one — the content loader now refuses a mount nothing can fill, so this stays empty until there is a module.
• Capital ships, gunboats, cruisers, transports. HullClass lists them; no content defines one.
• Player structures. Deferred to sovereignty.
• Jump holes. Hidden gates exist in the model and are filtered out of what the client is told; nothing discovers them yet.
• Character portraits. Three named characters: Ilse Varga (Traders Guild dispatcher, Halden), Captain Imre Hask (Compact Wardens) and Sabe Ronn (keeper of the Cinder Clans' stores, Cinder Hold). There is nowhere to show a portrait yet; the bar is text.