Star Citizen – Feature Plans for 3.9 & Beyond – EAT THIS!

Welcome to some more Star Citizen, we’ve had some information from CIG about their plans for some features in 2020 and we have also had a datamined leak on Food and Drink for Alpha 3.9 and how the System will work. Let me dump a load of information on you… some of which is pretty juicy.

We had an update to the 3.8.1 LIVE Patch – Which Fixed a server crash BUT also SCLeaks Datamined some info from the PTU patches.

From Datamining of that patch we can see that Food & Drink is actually a lot more in depth for 3.9 than I had previously thought.

Food & Drink has a Nutritional Density Rating (NDR) and Hydration Efficacy Index (HEI) the higher the value the better the food and drink at sateing your hunger and thirst. 

A Standard Bottle of Water has a HEI of 80 and an effect of Hydrating

Sourced from carefully selected water-rich asteroids, this crystalline pure water contains naturally occurring minerals for a smooth, refreshing taste that makes it a perfect choice for all your hydration needs.

There was an energy bar listed that has an NDR 93, it also has a Buff – Energizing

Made with nutritious, wholesome ingredients, this great tasting bar is formulated to provide sustained energy to help you maintain your best performance.

So some will also have a buff/debuff or otherwise affect on your character, some common effects are:

• Hypertrophic – Provides additional blood flow and nutrients to key muscle groups to make them perform optimally.
• Atrophic – Restricts blood flow, negatively affecting the muscles, making tasks seem harder.
• Energizing – Provides a boost to your energy levels, allowing you to be active for longer.
• Fatiguing – Has a draining effect, causing lethargy and general sense of exhaustion.
• Cognitive Boosting – Encourages brain function by allowing additional focus while performing complicated tasks.
• Cognitive Impairing – Stymies brain activity making it difficult to focus for long durations.
• Hypometabolic – Digests slowly, making you feel satisfied for longer.
• Hypermetabolic – Digests quickly, increasing the likelihood you’ll be hungry sooner.
• Hydrating – Helps your body to better absorb water, allowing you to satisfy your thirst for longer.
• Dehydrating – Causes your body to lose water, making you thirstier.
• Healing – Provides vital nutrients to help your body naturally repair itself.
• Toxic – Contains elements that are detrimental to your health and can cause damage if consumed in large quantities.
• Immune Boosting – Helps your body stay healthy when exposed to harmful elements.
• Immune Suppressing – Weakens your body’s ability to fight off harmful elements.

There will be other foods in 3.9 and some of the items in game now will be edible too.

Golden Medmons are listed with an NDR of 74 again with the Energizing Buff – Grown in temperate climates on the Maru Ebony Tree, Golden Medmons are left to fall off the tree when ripe and collected. The fruit at that stage is extremely firm and astringent. They only become edible after being ‘bletted’ or softened through ethylene ripening. Once softening begins, the skin wrinkles and darkens, while the inside flesh is loses moisture until it has a creamy consistency and a flavor reminiscent of caramelized lactose. This process can confuse those new to medmons, as the bletted fruit looks as if it has gone off.

The Energy Bar and Bottle of Water are likely available from Prison Vending Machines for Merits BUT I would also expect to be available in LZs and Stations too… I am quite looking forward to using my coffee maker and eating food around the Verse… Oh no… my poor little turtles! The exact numbers, length of time that they sustain you, mechanics behind the effects remains to be seen.

CIG release a Pillar Talk that looked at some plans for 2020 which I’ll summarize here:

Server OCS & Server Meshing is being worked on now. SOCS is already in game in it’s first iteration BUT it needs more work, it’s also a pre-requiste of Server Meshing. They want players to be able to move between server seamlessly so that you can respond to another players distress signal even if they are not on “your server”. It’s worth mentioning that CIG have much more sensibly explained what they want from Server Meshing, they’d like everyone on the same server if possible, HOWEVER it sounds like as a step towards that and as maybe a backup plan, everyone will be affecting the same game and have access to the same missions and the like but may transition between instances seamlessly based on what activity they are doing, with this maybe they wouldn’t have to worry about landing pads on stations and LZs as players would be in instances that overlap until it was necessary to put them in a more focused instance if you see what I mean.

Persistence & the iCache they are working on allows for item location info to be saved but also the iCache is the database with all the player and entity data in, so you can leave items or ships somewhere and come back to them in another session. There will be systems that might clean up certain items after a certain amount of time tho, based on their importance.

The idea here is that eventually you can also have bases you set up and stumble upon other players leavings…

There is a vast amount of Gameplay area in star Citizen that players will be able to populate.

Persistent Resources are planned for 3.9 – this will see a limited amount of resources in the verse OR at least a way of tracking how much of a vein has been mined and spawning less minerals because of that BUT the idea is there are a fixed amount of a mineral in any given area in the ground. 

Eventually they want the discovery of minerals and veins to be meaningful and valuable as well as ways to more fully survey areas.

But in 3.9 this will have you having to move around and find other spots BUT also having conflict over changing mining zones.

Prison Gameplay is in 3.9, they are planning to iterate on the Law System for the next several Quarters. The idea of prisons is to increase risk for lawless players.

There is lot of negatives to prison, you don’t have your ships or gear… you have to earn you way out or escape.

New Star System Pyro 2020 – The Stanton System was one of the most complicated Star Systems to create… which is one of the reasons they chose it, it gives them a huge amount of assets to create all the other systems with, while developing their tools to a very good level.

This hopefully should give them a good foundation for the rest of the game now.

The Pyro System is much more simple, it’s hotter which could cause environmental issues for players BUT it’s only got a couple of major LZs and a lot of procedural content.

Jump Points will connect this system, but also allow in the shorter term a place for them to spawn/despawn other NPCs, be they traders or pirates or vanduul from other systems… like Magnus.

Mapping & Finding new Jump Points / Wormholes will be a thing some will provide shortcuts, many will be limited in duration tho. 

Pyro is a Lawless System, there is a higher risk reward element to it, it’s dangerous as UEE law does not apply, it’s the Wild West… it will be tense meeting other players.

There may be very valuable materials to mine, dangerous missions and more.

Fuel and supplies might be harder to come by here, tho there is Ruin Station, they talk about being able to mine fuel and refuel other players too.

The Pyro System will be coming in 2020.

One of the Next Gameplay Loops will be salvage. Pyro is expected to be good for salvage.

Group Gameplay – They want lobbies and the ability to get groups to a much better state and unify all their group/friends systems. UI work across the game has been a bit of a bottleneck BUT they have a new Building Block UI system that will dramatically reduce this. 

Theatres of War a Objective Based Quick Action FPS/Combined Arms Star Marine Mode is being worked on with the first map being for upto 40 players. This will allow things to get rapid iteration for balance & testing as well as evolving systems in a more focused way from the PU. They want to have Lore and Historical Scenarios in the future, the first one will be the Crossroads of Crime on Nexus 3 that we saw at CitizenCon. There are different phases for the maps in Theatres which have the gameplay constantly changing. tho ToW’s major selling point is the Scale of Star Citizen’s Engine, they can have this across a planet or in space. It’s planned for the first half of 2020. They want amazing scenes with spacestations crashing into planets when destroyed.