CCP Games has announced the winners of the EVE Frontier × Sui 2026 Hackathon, concluding a three-week online event that brought together over 800 participants. The competition saw 120 entries, all involving projects exploring how players can extend and reshape a live game universe. CradleOS, a system for managing player-built civilizations, took first place.
CradleOS, developed by modder Reality Anchor, secured the $25,000 grand prize for its player-led civilization management system, which included $15,000 in cash, $10,000 in SUI Tokens and a trip to EVE Fanfest 2026. Designed to manage everything from governance and defense to logistics and economy, CradleOS represents the pinnacle of the competition’s mission: empowering players to move beyond surviving the dangers of the Frontier and begin architecting the foundations of its universe for the far future.
Second Place went to Blood Contract, a bounty system that lets players place rewards on targets and define hunt conditions, with automatic payouts that turn PvP into a structured and repeatable activity. While third place went to Civilization Control, a control system that lets players manage infrastructure like gates, trade routes, and defenses from a single interface, with clear tools for setting rules and access.
Category winners announced
In regard to the Category Winners, EasyAssemblies won the Utility category. This was a beginner-friendly tool that lets any player configure Smart Assemblies through a simple visual interface, customizing structures like gates, storage, and defenses in minutes.
The Technical Implementation category was won by Frontier Flow, an open-source visual tool for building Smart Assemblies. Players drag and connect logic to design, test, and deploy automation in their browser, without coding, while still generating real, working Sui Move code.
A project called Bazaar won the Creative category, showing off an immersive walkable marketplace that turns trading from a menu into a shared social space, letting players explore shops and interact with others inside a living Bazaar within the Frontier.
The Live Frontier Integration category was won by Frontier Factional Warfare.
This was a player-driven feature that creates live conflict zones with capturable objectives, letting players join factions and fight for control through rules enforced directly by in-world structures.
Finally, the Weirdest Idea category was won by Shadow Broker Protocol, a project that
turned spycraft and intel into a tradeable resource, it lets players buy, sell, and weaponize data and intelligence as a form of power alongside traditional warfare.
EVE’s modding community
Players create mods in EVE Frontier by configuring how in-game infrastructure behaves and by building tools that interact with the live universe. Using Smart Assemblies, they place structures such as stargates, storage units, and defenses into the world.
Each of these structures has its own interface and a programmable layer, allowing players to define how it operates. These systems run directly inside the game world and respond to player activity in real time.
This creates functionality that exists as part of the live environment, persists after deployment, can be extended by other players, and continues to shape the Frontier over time.
Centered on the theme “A Toolkit for Civilization,” the Hackathon challenged participants to build these systems directly into the Frontier, either through Smart Assemblies or through external applications connected to the same live environment.