Star Citizen New Biomes & Jump Points

Welcome to some more Star Citizen today I wanted to look at the new planet microTech, it’s city & it’s biomes as well as Jump Points with the Tech and Plans behind them. This is a Summary of Travelers Guide to the Galaxy microTech and Inside Star Citizen Jump it off.

Travelers-Guide-To-The-Galaxy-MicroTech

We had a Travellers Guide to the Galaxy looking at microTech and New Babbage with a load of new pictures and eye candy, the new planet tech and updates here make Star Citizen look even more amazing.

Stanton 4 is also known as microTech and it’s available as a new planet in Alpha 3.8

It along with the updated moons and planets of 3.8 makes use of the new v4 planetary tech allowing for larger scale, better looking terrain with less popping in of assets and more effects associated with environments.

Stanton IV is a large, cold, unforgiving planet. Due to an error during the terraforming process, cloud production became unusually dense, resulting in a mostly frozen surface plagued by harsh weather and dangerous storms.

It’s the home of microTech and New Babbage, there are huge amount of computer farms that make use of the cold planet for cooling.

The planet has extreme conditions and you’ll see some basic snow / blizzard type weather even in 3.8 BUT later when we have the player status system this weather will require you to wear environmental protections to survive ALSO we should see proper dynamic weather in 2020 as well rather than the more linear weather and effects in 3.8. The environment within each given biome may see trees and the ground there with more snow on based on the annual snowfall of that particular area.

New Babbage’s Exterior is in 3.8 but interior zones, mission givers, shops and zone traversal is coming in 3.9. You’ll use a mag-lev tram to move around the spaceport & city.

There are garages as well allowing you to grab a ground vehicle and drive around the planet.

The City and Planet are dotted with high tech buildings, enclosed domes.

They mention Wally’s Night Club as a location here as well as the city’s signature building, Aspire Grand, is home to “The Nest,” your habitation center in New Babbage. You can expect incredible and unique views of the city from every apartment, as well as immaculate, high-tech spaces for you to rest, relax, and recharge your creative batteries.

The Planet has 6 distinct biomes currently for microTech:

Biome 1: High altitude mountain ranges. Beware the tricky-to-traverse terrain, fraught by perilous wind & punishing storms.

Biome 2: Low frozen zones. Explore and you’ll find interesting pieces of terrain exclusive to this biome like frozen-over and petrified-in-ice trees.

Biome 3: In warmer transitional areas, the monochromatic pallet of microTech gives way to rare but beautiful floral fields, but the snowy mountains are never far away.

Biome 4: Red, orange, and green colors begin to show through in warmer forest regions, offering a bittersweet look at what microTech could have been if not for the terraforming mishap.

Biome 5: Frozen Tundras beset with glacial structures of ice and obsidian.

Biome 6: Frozen oceans and cold coasts line the edges of the landmass. If you’re flying above these bodies of water, or walking on top of them, you’ll find sheets of ice, frozen and shattering individually over time. Icebergs line the edges of the coasts after melting and refreezing into various unique shapes.

These biomes will naturally blend into one another for a natural looking planet.
Inside Star Citizen: Jump On It | Fall 2019

Jump Points and a New Star System Pyro are planned for release 2020 in the PU.

Jump Points are built with a few features and gameplay mechanics in mind.

You’ll need a ship with a Jump Module to be able to use a jump point and commonly used Jump Points are mapped and have a Star Gate Type device that helps stabilize them.

Approach the game and activate it.

The Stanton to Pyro Gate is on the edge of a nebula and has a lot of gas clouds. Using their cloud tools they turn geometry into traversable clouds.

When in a Jump Point it is it’s own scene / object container. It has it’s own bespoke shader, effects & particles. They have the potential of having branching and secondary routes when moving through Jump Points, at least they are visualized. In the future you could use these to go to different locations.

Roller Coasters were an influence to how they wanted Jump Points to feel.

They are built to be able to be modular, with routes, obstacles (known as columns) BUT also very flexible. It sounds like in the future they may have plans to have more WormHole type unmapped points as well.

There are plans to have an element of pilot interaction when traversing Jump Points, like being pushed down a river by the rapids & you could take damage or be knocked out in deep space if you crash into an obstacle or wall.