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Eve Online's Carbon engine is now open source: Fenris Creations explains why

"If we improve the code and we can all benefit from it, it's good for everyone," says Fenris's Ben Hunter, as he addresses security concerns, LLM coding, and help from Godot

Image credit: Fenris Creations

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by Alex Forbes-Calvin<br>Contributor

Published on July 1, 2026

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In 2024, Fenris Creations – then called CCP Games – said that it was planning to make its Carbon game engine open source. Now, some two years later, the tech behind the long-running sci-fi MMO Eve Online is available on GitHub for everyone to use.

The open-source project is something that the company's core tech team has been working on at a "slow burn" for some time now, with the bulk of the work done in the last 12 weeks. Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Fenris Creations' senior development director for core technology, Ben Hunter, explains the reasoning behind it all. "We wanted to get the code out there for inspectability and building trust with the community," he says.

Ben Hunter | Image credit: Fenris Creations

"Fenris has a long history of building communities and engaging with them. If you look back to the early days of Eve Online, when we exposed our application programming interface (API), that was the start of our effort to engage with the community and let them build something with it. We arrived at this point two and a half to three years ago, where we decided there's nothing really special about our sauce in terms of the actual code. We, and the community, would be better served by actually getting it out there, having more eyes on it, so that we can actually learn and grow from that, and people can do crazy things with it, which we're very excited to see."

It's early days at the moment. Hunter says that things are "leaning towards" people using Carbon to build within the Eve ecosystem. Members of the community have already been submitting pull requests (PRs) – proposed changes to a codebase – for security fixes, and there's been chatter about someone making a web app to watch Eve Online content.

"We have to see how that manifests, but essentially, you can build anything with it," Hunter says.

Carbon is available in its entirety across a number of different modules. Most of the tech is under the MIT License, a popular and permissive option. Only two modules aren't under that banner: spatial audio clustering is covered by Apache License 2.0, while IO has a Python Software Foundation License.

None of these licenses has any commercial element; someone can use all of Carbon for free. They could make their own MMO using the tech, for free. They could even fork off the engine and build their own version, similar to how the Linux distro system works.

But making money isn't the point of this venture.

"It's about garnering the actual interest from people so that they want to invest their time, their effort, their money into contributing something," Hunter explains. "It's this belief that rising tides lift all ships. If we improve the code and we can all benefit from it, it's good for everyone."

Security concerns

Open sourcing creates a bit of extra work for the core tech team; they've got to handle PRs and monitor the changes. This is something Fenris has slowly been hiring towards for years now.

"We announced our intention to open source a couple of years ago, then throughout that period, slowly ramped up in some of the teams, not specifically for open source itself, but rather just to augment the teams so they'd have more bandwidth to handle the mechanics," Hunter says. "We have reserved time during our sprint process to review PRs, process them, and go through everything."

Eve Online launched back in 2003. | Image credit: CCP

There are many benefits to opening up your tech and letting anyone take a look under the hood. But bad actors are always out there, looking for any exploit they can find. Hunter says that security is "absolutely" a concern moving forward, adding that it's a pressure that ensures the team "increases the effort" they put in when reviewing code and making architectural decisions.

"But at the same time, the holes that were there would have been there anyway," he says. "Actually having the ability to have third parties contribute to and help us close any potential security gaps is very good. To be honest, for an engine that is 23 years old, the number of security-related PRs that we've had is quite minimal. That's eye-opening, in a good way – there's been a lot of work done over the years. As you can imagine, Eve Online has garnered a lot of interest over the years because of the scale of the fleet fights, the battles, and things like that. Nefarious...