The unique thing about the Heart of Gold is that it is powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive, which is a small golden device resembling a cricket (or Krikkit) bail, at the heart of the ship (hence its name). It is, of course, powered by an infinite improbability generator. As soon as the ship's drive reaches infinite improbability, it passes through every point in the Universe, thus allowing the ship to go anywhere without all of that mucking about with hyperspace and what not.

The starship Heart of Gold was the first spacecraft to safely make use of the Infinite Improbability Drive, after the failure and Gratuitous Total Existence Failure of the Starship Titanic. The design crew had worked secretively for quite a while on the Heart of Gold on Damogran. The engineers and researchers who built it were mostly humanoid, though there was one who was a superintelligent shade of the colour blue. There were also a few reptiloid atomineers, two or three green sylph-like maximegalacticians, and an octopoid physucturalist or two. Most of them wore multi-coloured ceremonial lab coats.The craft was stolen by then-President Zaphod Beeblebrox at the official launch of the ship, as he was supposed to be officiating the launch.

Later, during the use of the Infinite Improbability Drive, the ship picked up Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect, who were floating unprotected in deep space in the same star sector, having just escaped the destruction of the same planet. With Zaphod Beeblebrox and Trillian, Ford and Arthur then travelled to the legendary planet Magrathea, which had originally built the planet Earth as part of a 10 million year long experiment by extradimensional white mice seeking the question to the ulitimate answer to life, the universe and everything (which is 42). Galactic police attempted to arrest the fugitive ex-President, causing a hyperspace feild generator (behind which Arthur, Ford et al were hiding) to explode, opening a temporal rift through which they were thrown to the Heat Death of the Universe (or Gnib Gnab), site of Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where they were reunited with Marvin, who had been stranded on Magrathea, now site of Milliways for a consireablt number of billions of years.

Stealing the personal starship of the Admiral of the Hagunnenon Fleet with Marvin's help; in an attempt to return to their own time, Arthur and Ford were forced to abandon ship in a life pod which deposited them on a starship, the Golgafrinchian B Ark, which then crashed on the island of Great Britain on Earth two million years in the past.

Meanwhile, Zaphod had been attacked by the Hagunnenon Admiral, a shape shifter who had turned into the ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Trall and who then ate Zaphod before shifting into an escape pod, allowing him to escape. He had a dream visit from his pre-Presidential self who revealed to him that he must go Ursa Minor Beta, headquarters of the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy to make contact with a mysterious man named Zarniwoop who would tell him something to his disadvantage. There he met Marvin and a Guide researcher named Roosta. The building was then uprooted by Frogstar scout robots with Zaphod and Roosta, leaving Marvin behind. The building was deposited on the Frogstar Planet, where Zaphod was thrown into the Total Perspective Vortex, a machine built with the intention of showing beings the infinity of creation, which had become used as a method of torture. Zaphod Beeblebrox was subjected to the vortex and became the first person to survive it.

At some point, Zaphod crossed over into Zarniwoop's electronically generated universe, designed expressly to keep Zarniwoop safe. Retrieving the Heart of Gold and Marvin, he travelled 2 million years into the past to rescue Ford and Arthur, having discovered Arthur's towel fossilised in the rubble of the destroyed Earth. Escaping a Vogon fleet and Gag Halfrunt, Zaphod Beeblebrox's personal brain care specialist, and arriving on the planet Brontitall, they fell out a cup 13 miles in the air (part of a collossal statue of Arthur), falling onto the backs of huge birds (the devolved inhabitants of Brontitall).

Arthur Dent encountered three Lintilla clones on the planet of Brontitall, and took a liking to (at least) one of them. He killed one of three male anti-clones, all called Allitnil (Lintilla backwards), sent by the cloning company to get her to "agree to cease to be" (although the other two of her "consummate" this legal agreement with their respective anti-clones).

Arthur left Zaphod, Ford, and Zarniwoop van Harl stranded with the Ruler of the Universe and his cat, he taking one of the Lintillas with him aboard the Heart of Gold. Later, Lintilla surprised Arthur by inviting three more of her "sisters" aboard...

It should be noted that this Arthur, the four Lintillas and this Heart of Gold and Marvin are all products of Zarniwoop's electronically generated universe. There are other iterations of Arthur, Marvin, the Heart of Gold and presumeably the Lintilla clones somewhere in the Galaxy due to the alternative realities generated by Earth's being situated in a Plural Sector.