So yesterday I shipped the Query Console, a paid Intelligence tool that lets subscribers query the EF-Map chain indexer in plain English. The AI part of that turned out to be almost embarrassingly easy to build, and once it was working I sat back and asked the obvious question: with the plumbing warm and the cost this small, is there anywhere else in EF-Map this pattern fits?
System Finder was the obvious answer. If you have not used it, it is the free tool that filters the EVE Frontier universe by celestial properties. It is also, if I am honest, a wall of checkboxes. Twelve filter sections, hundreds of options, orbital zones, world families, landscape signals, nebula types, ancient civilizations, star classes, planet and moon types, each section with a Match Any or Match All toggle. I know what all of it means. A newer player opening that panel for the first time probably does not, and the Any versus All distinction trips up even people who do.
So System Finder now has a box at the top where you just type what you want. "Cold red stars with lots of moons." "Systems with a station and no stargates." "Ancient ruins that are still pristine." A small language model reads your request against the full filter catalogue and ticks the boxes for you, opening the sections it used so you can see exactly what was selected. The results and map highlights update instantly, and if it misread you, everything is ordinary checkboxes you can adjust, or clear with one button. Nothing is hidden and nothing is irreversible.
Why this surface fits so well
The pattern only works where the output is a small, strictly checkable structure. System Finder is exactly that: a closed vocabulary of named options. The AI cannot invent a filter, because everything it returns is validated against the real catalogue before it is applied, and anything unknown is dropped and reported rather than silently accepted. The model's whole job is matching human phrasing onto named checkboxes, plus a layer of judgment I had to teach it: that "few planets" means the low count buckets, that "giant planets" plural means match any rather than all, that star classes run hottest to coldest so "cold stars" means K and M rather than every class. I know it needed teaching because I playtested it myself and it got all of those wrong on the first evening. Each miss became a rule the same day.
The playtest also caught something better: a real flaw in System Finder itself. The zone and moon count buckets were built as single-select, so a human asking for "9 to 11 or 12 plus orbital zones" literally could not express it. That is fixed now, for the checkboxes and the AI both. Adding an assistant to a surface turns out to be a good way of discovering what the surface itself cannot say.
Free, and why that is fine
The Query Console sits behind the Intelligence subscription because live database queries have real scaling economics. This does not. System Finder runs entirely in your browser against data you already downloaded, so the only cost of the assistant is the translation call itself, roughly a quarter of a token-cent per question on Cloudflare's Workers AI, and Cloudflare includes a daily free allowance that everything I run has yet to exceed. There are sensible per-person limits so nobody can script it into costing me actual money, and if you hit them the checkboxes keep working, because they never stopped being the real tool.
Like the console, there is also a briefing file download next to the ask box. It is a generated document describing every filter section and option, current to the minute, meant for pasting into your own ChatGPT or Claude. Ask your AI what is findable, and it can hand you back either the exact checkboxes to tick or a sentence to type into the box. All the open-ended exploring happens on your subscription, not mine.
An honest v1
I will say the same thing I said about the Query Console: it will stumble on some phrasings, and that is expected. Every question asked is logged anonymously, the question and what got selected, never who asked, and the misses are reviewed and turned into fixes. Six of tonight's fixes came directly from my own first hour of playing with it. The tool gets better by being used, so use it, and be weird with it. I am not announcing this anywhere loudly. It is just there now, at the top of System Finder, waiting to see if people find it.
And a quiet thought to close on: EVE Frontier is a game where the good information has usually belonged to whoever could code. Between the Query Console for indexed intelligence and now this for the universe itself, most of what EF-Map knows can be asked for in a plain sentence. That feels like the right direction.
Related Posts
- The Query Console: Ask the EVE Frontier Indexer Your Own Questions - the paid sibling this pattern came from
- System Finder and the Name Visualizer - the original System Finder feature
- What EF-Map Knows About EVE Frontier Solar Systems - the data underneath the filters
- Privacy-First Analytics: Learning Without Tracking - the anonymous logging approach