After long and frequently problematic Evocati and Wave 1 testing, Star Citizen’s alpha has quickly jumped to open testing. So, it’s time for the next installment in my popular Essentials videos, where I go through the major points of the release for those who have not been following this under a microscope. If you want to sample the new release or share it with a friend, here is a quick summary of the whats and whys of the new release.
Overall, release 3.24 does not have the huge laundry list of changes like 3.23 did, but the smaller list of features have some much larger impacts, including some that will only be evident in the future. It has been nicknamed the “Cargo Release,” but some of the changes have impacts beyond cargo.
Number One: Item Banks
These terminals were added all over the place in 3.23 non-functionally, but in 3.24 they have become operational. Now, anything you saw prior to August 16th about how these work is wrong. This should be taken as a counter to all those folks who say CIG never listens to users. They admitted that how they had designed the kiosk was not working out as they had hoped and rolled the system back to be simpler and more like the prior inventory, likely throwing out quite a lot of programming effort in the process. Now, when you use the item kiosk, it displays similar to the familiar “I” key inventory but with the station inventory available on the right side of the screen, on the other side of the paper doll. But if it is so similar to the “I” key, why have these kiosks at all? Apart from a bit of verisimilitude, it also gives designers a device to say that there are certain places where you can access the station inventory and other places where you can’t. As an example of why that might be important, consider the conflict zones that have been previewed to be part of space stations in Pyro. Under the old means of station inventory, you could go to the conflict zone with an essentially unlimited supply of ammo, weapons, and supplies, and an equally unlimited ability to store loot. But if there are no functioning item banks in the conflict zone, which would make sense, you have to plan what you are bringing in and decide what is worth carrying out. Also, as a quick note, if you are buying something like a burrito and want it to go into your hand and not have to retrieve your burrito from a kiosk, then tap the “F” key rather than press and hold.
Number Two: Hangars
Hangars are either more permanent or a lot more permanent depending on where you are. At your home city that you choose when first logging into a new version of the game, you get a hangar that is based on your largest owned ship. For example, my largest ship is a Hercules, so I get a large hangar. The hangar is presumed to persist, including anything you leave sitting around or whatever, until presumably there is a wipe. Think of this as tier zero for eventually having player bases. Every place other than your home city hangar will be based on what size of ship you brought to or, if for example, you arrived on somebody else’s ship, what size of ship you just retrieved. This hangar also persists but only until you leave the location, at which time it is presumed to be cleaned up for the next user and any stuff moved into storage. Now, as far as game lore exists, all these hangars are real hangars all the time, but of course, we realize that there aren’t enough doors on the landing zone for this to be the case. So, at a behind-the-scenes technical level, these persistent hangars exist in what you might describe as a parallel pocket universe. When you call for the doors to be opened, either departing or arriving, your hangar will be moved from its pocket parallel universe to the real door. This is being called “granting a gateway.” Now, what happens if there are more requests for gateways than doors? Well, there is a queue—a very slow-moving queue—so when things are busy, patience may well be needed.
Number Three: Freight Elevators
The freight elevator is a means for moving larger items, including cargo, to and from the station inventory and your hangar. It functions much like the item bank did before Friday but on a much larger scale. You lower the elevator to give it access to the station inventory. You then move items to and from the elevator by selecting or using the mouse button with dragging and dropping. You then raise the elevator, the door opens, and there it is. This is going to open up the ability to use stations as your own warehouses and logistics centers. You now have the ability to store things in the station inventory that you couldn’t before. You used to only be able to buy into your ship’s cargo or sell from your ship’s cargo. You didn’t have the ability to simply unload cargo or load what had been purchased or created before. A lot of detailed logistics have been opened up by this.
Number Four: Cargo Timers
The old style of being able to buy from or sell to your ship’s cargo hold is still there. When selling commodities, there’s the option to pick your ship as the source of the cargo being stored, and when buying commodities, you can choose to send them to your stored ship. When you buy commodities, you specify the size of containers that you want. Container size affects loading and unloading times and cost. A single 32 SCU container loads faster than 16 size 2 SCU containers. So, this means that when buying for a ship like the Hercules C2, you should first buy all the 32 SCU containers that will fit and then buy all the 2 SCU containers that will take up the remaining space.
Number Five: Ship Elevators
Hangars now have an ASOP terminal inside of them. This is now paired with an impressive and noisy new animation to bring ships into the hangar. The hangar floor lowers, the doors close, the doors then open, and the hangar floor rises to the top with the ship now on it. Unlike what was shown at CitizenCon, for the time being, this is how vehicles are brought into the hangar. You retrieve the vehicle, drive it off to the side, and then retrieve the ship you’re going to carry it in, then drive it aboard. This sometimes runs into problems with the limit of the number of ships you can have spawned at one time, but there has been an ongoing limitation and not one specific to the new hangars.
Number Six: Cargo Missions
This is a new form of the hauling profession where you are being paid by somebody else to move their materials rather than having to buy trade commodities yourself. Thus, it does not have a large cost of entry like trading does. You do need a ship that can hold a few full-size SCU boxes and can load and unload them easily. So, my personal best choices to start with are the Nomad and the Hull A. Your initial qualifying mission will be bringing fewer than 10 SCU of something from the low orbit station to the landing zone on the same planet. After that, as your reputation increases, missions will increase in scope from local missions around a single planet to solar missions between the planets and moons of a star, to interstellar missions that will go to and from the jump point stations and presumably in the future through them to other star systems. This will increase from direct point-to-point missions and also include cargo with multiple pickup and drop-off locations, and they will increase in the number of containers being moved. My advice is to stick with direct missions that can be completed in a single run with the largest cargo ship you have. Draw out the missions too long, and there are too many opportunities for things to go sideways and result in failure. However, since Friday, with these hauling missions beyond the first one being shareable, you can now take a larger mission than you can handle personally in one trip, group up with your friends, and…
Number Seven: Tractor Changes
This was a relatively late change in the patch, but previously the multi-tool tractor beam was good enough for nearly every purpose you could reasonably have. Thus, there was relatively little need for anything else. This is no longer the case. Need to move a 32 SCU container? The multi-tool tractor beam won’t handle it, and you’ll need the tractor rifle. Want to grab things from further away? You will either need the tractor rifle or the ship-based tractor beam.
Number Eight: Furnishings
This was presented as a way to decorate your personal persistent hangar, but I am finding the more exciting possibilities are elsewhere. There are now seats, tables, couches, etc., that can be purchased at the landing zones. You can then bring them to the freight elevator in your hangar and use them to make it feel more like home. But more than that, you can load them onto your ship, and they will even snap to the grid where applicable. Then you can still use them as furniture to sit in or whatever. This means that any cargo ship can be used as a troop transport, and also, if you don’t need to rely on the up-armored hull, improved life support, or extra guns, they make an acceptable ad hoc drop ship. But it also means that any cargo ship can be turned into a mobile home with tables, chairs, fish tanks, and so on. And then there’s the question of what other functional pieces of furniture might be available in the future to add to your cargo ships: workshops, prisoner pods, livestock pens, med beds. We’ve waited a long time for modularity, but this ability to have functional furnishings might be, in many cases, a much more exciting possibility than just modularity.
Number Nine: Salvage Changes
Directly or indirectly, there have been some big changes to salvage. First of all, the rules on found salvage have been loosened. That means that if you come across the leftovers of a battle or an abandoned ship, you can go ahead and tow it or salvage it in place with far fewer repercussions. The second is that the salvaging of ship weapons and ship components for sale is now viable. It used to be you could pull the components from any gold standard ship and store them in your hold, but they were awkward to ship because they just sort of bounced around, and there was no way to move them from your ship and hold them someplace else where you could store and retrieve or sell them. But now ship weapons and ship components do snap to the cargo grid, and you can use your freight elevator to deliver them to the station or spaceport storage and thus sell them at an appropriate shop. Now, the downside, perhaps as a result of this, is that the trade value of RMC has been reduced, perhaps so that salvagers will not just take the RMC and leave the rest as not worth their time.
So, those are the essentials. Not as many as 3.23, but still not at all trivial. And as a bonus for good measure:
Number Ten: CIG has made no mention of needing a wipe, although speaking honestly, I would expect there to be a wipe for 4.0.
Looking forward ahead, now for an update on our giveaways. To start with, we have a special membership level to cover the cost of doing live coverage of CitizenCon with its own giveaway for the Hull C, that colossal cargo container carrying craft. I am expecting to make the trip to Manchester or to get the tickets. The giveaway will still occur even if the live coverage, for some unexpected reason, has to be done remotely. Plus, we have our regular growth channel ship giveaway for the Zeus 2 Cargo, just waiting on the subscriber goal, as well as the marvelous multiplayer multi-role mining meta, the Argo Mole. One entry per video, be a member for automatic entry with each video, or subscribe and comment, somehow including the secret word. And the secret word for this video is “sharing for cargo missions.” Fly safe, keep it real, and I’ll see you in the verse.