Written when games were true art, Xalaria joined the text adventure to real-time multiplayer strategy.
Australian mathematician and composer Julian Cochran began Xalaria in 1998 with a universe simulator and his own 3D engine, the one that later revived his 1992 shareware classic, D-Zone. Then Xalaria took the braver path, from graphics into words: a universe told in words can be larger and more intricate, because your imagination paints every world, as it does in a novel. From then on everything served the player's creative freedom, and scientific, cultural and sociological depth.
Xalaria puts the 'science' back in fiction: stars, the worlds that formed around them, the life that grew from starlight and chemical potential, and the cultures that sometimes emerged, each layer built intricately on the one before.
Real time
The universe runs on the clock. Worlds turn on their orbits while you play, crossings take minutes, and every other traveller is out there right now.
navigate other world · arriving in 54 s
Strategy
Trade, alliances, technology, mines and quests compound over weeks. Civilisations remember what you did, and the road to the ending is one of the longest and deepest in gaming.
groups · your goodwill with every alliance
Text adventure
Everything is told and commanded in words: a station's docks, the wilderness of a frozen moon, the creatures beneath an ocean. You read your way across the universe, at your own pace.
look · each key types its word, so every command reads as a sentence
“This study attempts to realistically describe an arbitrary number of solar systems, as if observed by travelling from one star to another and simply recording what was discovered.”
Xalaria fitted no genre that existed, and its music is his own, drawn from his catalogue of classical works.
Every solar system follows from its star. Star classes, from rare blue giants to common red dwarfs, occur in the proportions of our own galaxy. A star's class sets its size, temperature and planetary disc, and so the orbits, sizes and materials of its planets and moons. A world's warmth is the starlight reaching it, heat from the planet a moon circles, and heat from its own core.
Cochran worked with leading astrobiologists, including David J. Darling, on the life a world could naturally have produced: carbon and silicon life on solid worlds, gaseous and electrical life in the atmospheres of giants, life in oceans and underground where temperature allowed. Xalaria is not mere entertainment but a realistic forecast of what you would find, probabilistically, if you were to explore it yourself. The only fictional stretches are acceleration beyond what a human could endure, and the use of wormholes. All else is as you would observe the universe itself: each world on its Kepler orbit, correct in mass and composition, and in the life that emerged from it.
One universe, shared by everyone in it.
Every traveller shares one universe at the same moment: the same stars, stations and civilisations, and each other. Meet in orbit, talk, trade gifts, go to an alien concert together, or share a quest. What you do stays in the world: a mine stays as deep as you dug it, dropped cargo waits for the next ship, graffiti sprayed on a station wall is read by every visitor, and a stranded traveller can be saved by anyone who docks to pass them fuel.
navigate wormhole · You enter the wormhole. Your vessel shudders.
Not every journey is won with weapons.
A traveller grows in two ways: in technology, by exploring, prospecting and fighting, and in culture, among the civilisations of other worlds. Culture is the subtler path.
Concerts and museums
Cities invite travellers to concerts, museum tours and celebrations. Each one brings you closer to minds unlike ours.
navigate cultural center, explore · Attend concert?
yes
Anthems
Every community has its own anthem amongst other traditions. Study their culture, and you are no longer quite a stranger there.
yes to a concert, and you learn the anthem of its city
Gifts and artifacts
A well-chosen gift opens doors that weapons close; the wrong one offends. Artifacts found in the wilderness carry the history of the cultures that made them.
offer gift · to a city's leader, a station, or another traveller
Cultural behavior
The more cultured you are, the less readily others take offence, and the stations and cities you help may come to call you their hero. Fire on a stranger without a word, and they will tell you what they think of your upbringing.
communicate before you fire
Explore culture, trade, fight, mine, or simply listen.
There is no single path. Everything you do changes how stations, alliances and civilisations see you.
Trade
Twenty-seven commodities, from aluminium and iridium to quantum neurocells and cryogenics machinery. Every star sets its own prices: learn them, and the galaxy pays you.
navigate station, communicate · b traders
Fight
Twenty weapons, from the humble Laser to Focal Death, whose fifteen-second charge warns every craft nearby that something terrible is coming.
fire · a target, then a weapon port
Mine
Survey worlds for metal deposits. Tunnel deeper and the Nature Preservation alliance notices; fill your mines in and they thank you.
explore · You find an iridium mining opportunity!
then fire a mining tool (or the most suitable thing you carry) at it
Explore
Land on planets, find life no one has recorded, and keep a journal of everything you discover.
navigate land, explore, journal
Culture
Concerts, museums and celebrations; artifacts found in the wilderness, earned on quests or bought from dealers (beware the fakes). What one culture treasures as a gift, another finds offensive.
explore a city · an antique dealer in the marketplace
· Purchase artifact?
Quests
Seven kinds of commission, from delivering messages and fuel to exploring distant worlds and settling old scores.
communicate · b leader · Accept quest?
yes
Twenty-five craft to fly, in four families.
Explorers carry the most cargo, fighters the most energy and shielding, industrial craft the most weapon ports. Destroyers come late, when you have planets earning for you.
Prices in gc, the galactic credit. Every craft can be upgraded in energy, shields, fuel, solar charging and recharge speed.
From a 50 gc laser to Focal Death.
Damage and energy per shot, and price. Blasts strike every vessel in range, shields buy you time, and mining tools pay for themselves on the right deposit.
Four allegiances, and the independent.
Stations and communities belong to alliances. Your standing with each rises and falls with what you do, and doors open or shut with it.
The universe's merchants. They make no enemies, and reward whoever keeps the commodities moving.
Guardians of fragile worlds and endangered species. They pay for mines filled in and harm undone.
An empire of peace, freedom and prosperity, and the most aggressive of the four: they want every world as free as they are. Sworn enemies of the Rebels.
Few in number and hard to find. Their quests are the most dangerous, and their weapons the most cost-effective.
Nothing in Xalaria is forgotten.
The universe keeps its own history, in public. Its first 5,000 travellers are recorded as Xalaria Founders.
The Great Charting
The first traveller to reach a star through its wormholes charts it, and their name remains fact throughout Xalaria's space-time continuum.
navigate wormhole · This star was first charted by Galen, 2026.
The Xalaria Chronicles
Concerts attended, deposits found, quests done, and the deeds that became legend: what travellers have actually done, line by line.
The Graveyard
Every traveller who falls is set in crystal, the manner of their fall carved beneath their name. Legends lie there too.
Ask for it, and it may soon be in the universe.
Xalaria is changing fast, and most ideas players send get built. Ask for a feature, a kind of world, a new way to trade, fight or meet a civilisation. If it goes in, your name goes in with it.
An empire has for centuries tormented the civilisations of your home star. Despite ridicule by your colleagues, a strange force inspires you to look towards the abyss.
Its first 5,000 travellers are recorded as Xalaria Founders. Be one of them.