The Carbon engine that powers Eve Online is now available on GitHub, roughly two years after the studio then known as CCP Games said it intended to open source the technology. The company now operates as Fenris Creations.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, senior development director for core technology Ben Hunter said the release had been a slow-burn project for the core tech team, with most of the work compressed into the last 12 weeks. The stated motivation is inspectability rather than revenue: Hunter said the company concluded two and a half to three years ago that there was nothing proprietary enough in the code to justify keeping it closed, and that more eyes on it would benefit both the studio and its players.
What is and isn't in the release
Carbon ships as a set of modules. Most are covered by the permissive MIT licence; spatial audio clustering is released under Apache License 2.0, and the IO module under a Python Software Foundation License. None of the licences carries a commercial condition, so the engine can be used, forked or built on for free — including to make a competing MMO.
Eve Online's in-game economy is not part of the release. Hunter said deciding what to carve out was the hardest part of the project, both in separating genuine engine code from two decades of systems that accreted around it, and in replacing middleware and licensed components that could not be redistributed.
On security, Hunter said the risk was real but that publishing the code did not create the vulnerabilities. For a 23-year-old engine, he said, the number of security-related pull requests received so far has been small — which he attributed to years of hardening driven by the scale of Eve's fleet battles and by people who had already tried to disrupt them.
Governance borrowed from Godot
Fenris consulted the Godot project on how to run an open source engine at scale. Hunter said the useful lesson was architectural rather than procedural: the right structure limits the surface area contributors can touch. Carbon is moving to a plug-in architecture for its tooling, which the studio also plans to open source in the coming months.
Contribution guidelines cover testing requirements and require contributors to disclose whether they used a large language model. Hunter said such contributions are permitted but may face different scrutiny. The team has also identified a gap in its own workflow: engine changes are currently tested inside Eve Online or Eve Frontier, and Fenris intends to build a simple example project to test against instead.
Community members have already filed pull requests for security fixes. Asked what he wants in five years, Hunter said he hopes for a large Eve-centric community building tools and experiences around the universe, in the way third-party applications grew out of Eve's public API.
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