Oolite is a single-player first-person space simulator with non-linear gameplay.
The basis for this game was Elite, a game written in 1986 for the ZX Spectrum home computers. After its great popularity, Elite can be considered the founder of the space simulator style.
The goal of the game is to fly from planet to planet, buying and selling goods, shooting pirates or committing acts of piracy.
The player controls a spaceship capable of traveling between nearby planetary systems using wormholes created by the ship's engines. Each system has only one habitable planet, around which an orbital station orbits. The player selects a destination system based on the name of an inhabited planet in that system. Although a wormhole can be created anywhere within a system if there is enough fuel, the destination system still places the ship at a considerable distance from the station. Consequently, after exiting the wormhole, the player must navigate the ship through "normal" space to the station. This involves encounters with other ships, sometimes leading to space combat.
The main weapons of the ships in the game are lasers and missiles. Most of the battles take place at close range, and the ships do not obey the laws of Newtonian dynamics: in particular, they do not have inertia and do not experience the effects of gravity.
