Star Citizen Alpha 3.12 Incoming
Star Citizen Alpha 3.12 has just gone to Evocati and although we can’t talk about the specifics of that Evo Patch we can look at what’s planned for 3.12 in a bit more accuracy and detail.
The most common question I see is when will the Patch Go Live… CI have said Before Christmas so we should see the 1st Wave of the PTU within a couple of weeks imo.
Spacescaping and Gas Clouds are being added to give POI especially Space Stations more depth and texture. This has large nebula and gas pockets wrapping around these POI to create beautiful vistas and interest as well as highlight areas.
Refinery Decks are being added as dedicated areas in Space Stations that allow players to drop off mined materials to be refined and buy new mining equipment.
3.12 will see gameplay with them too
Kiosks will be placed around the Refining levels that allow players to take their raw mixed mining ore that they mined in their ship and refine it. The player can use these kiosks to create multiple refining jobs which are persistent and complete over a period of time, based on the quantity and complexity of the process you choose. Once one or multiple jobs are completed, the player can pick up the refined materials which can be sold for a lot more than the unrefined ore.
This will continue while you are offline, jobs can be a few mins or even hours for larger orders.
They are continuing their planetary improvements they are investing in a more detailed global painting pass with consideration to global climate data and introducing some new assets to the biome packs. They will be updating the remaining geology assets to the organic shader to utilize the latest features. For the release the planets Hurston & microTech, as well as on the moons Cellin, Daymar, Wala and Lyria. (Yela getting updated got pushed to Q1 2021) are all getting these updates.
Something pretty major is Reputation V1 – Reputation/Org Service
This system will introduce the first iteration of persistent reputation in the Star Citizen universe, as well as persistent NPC Organizations. It sounds like we might get mission progress tracked from patch to patch. We know that NPCs will respond to you based on your completion or failure rate with them and may offer you missions more often or stop offering them to you for a time if you have too many fails in a row. There are various bits that CI have talked about with more Org based features and more potentially coming with this feature too… It will evolve a lot in the future.
We have a lot of NPC/AI Improvements and updates…
AI Ships and Turrets will be able to actively target and take down torpedos, helping to defend capital ships for example.
Connected to this too they’ve made (well they say S9) Torpedoes more deadly – with only a few direct hits required to bring down larger ships. This extra damage comes at the cost of speed, however, affording the opportunity for ships to counter attack by destroying them.
There are improvements to targeting for turrets and ships… they will use smaller turrets against smaller faster ships for example… though a lot of factors are considered now when working out sensible targets. Along with this AI ships are getting changes to their accuracy that will reward players for taking evasive action… so AI aren’t dumb BUT they don’t autohit.
There are Capital Ship Behavior Improvements – focused on their maneuvering, targeting and weapon use. This involves ensuring that the Ship has full awareness of its loadout, available turrets and the size/number of combatants it is facing. The pilot will react and position the ship accordingly to each combat scenario. This will be properly utilized when a player enters a Rest Stop Armistice Zone with a high CrimeStat, and finds themselves coming up against a Navy Idris that has been called to help enforce the law.
There are also – Improvements to destruction deathmasks, turret firing, missile trails, torpedo visual and sound effects, to enhance the look and feel of combat against and destruction of capital ships. Combat with capital ships will also be visually improved with changes to shield impacts to provide a more visually appealing combat experience.
These combined are largely for the implementation of the NPC Security Idris that will spawn to defend stations against combined high ratings of Criminals. The Idris will be a difficult target to take down and is supposed to provide a genuine challenge for groups of players assaulting a station.
Counter Measures v1.1 – The amount of deployed countermeasures will play more of an important role in the chance of spoofing missiles. Single countermeasures will be less effective, but players will have the ability to choose how many should be fired with each burst. Different missiles will have varying degrees of countermeasure resilience.
(Missiles/Chaffs/Flares) restocks have been added to the station and LZ services with proper pricing differentials between items when restocking your ships. They are going to at the same time do a bit of insurance rebalancing too.
The Talon & it’s Variant the Shriek Light Fighter and Light Missile Strike Craft respectively.
These are awesome looking Tevarin Ships with iridescent shaders… I love them… samurai space bird spaceships are cool.
We have the start of the more active tractor beams starting with the personal one, as a new module for a multitool:
This first implementation will primarily be used for quickly and remotely moving cargo and miscellaneous objects, towards or away from you both on-foot and in EVA without the need for physical contact. The size and weight of the object will determine how far you can move it.
While in EVA the Tractor Beam can also be used as a grapple hook to quickly latch onto objects and pull yourself towards it… SataBall anyone? Well not quite… not yet anyway.
We have a new Behring FS-9 LMG and Gemini A03 Sniper Rifle as well as Weapon Zeroing with associated scopes that allow you to range find and set your weapon to fire at distances and adjust for bullet drop.
Something more minor yet still important are the elevator panels getting all brought up to spec an the retiring of “innerthought” buttons in areas where that is possible.
Also now ship entry points will be highlighted when close to ships so you can see how to enter more quickly and these will only show valid entry points WHICH might change if you are landed or flying in space… even I forget where entrances are at times!
Along with these UI updates and Refining Gameplay being added there is also a brand-new UI for all mining vehicles, which will provide the player with a clearer overview of what they are currently experiencing, including: Mining Consumables – What you have equipped, their current state and their duration. Cargo – Your cargo pods now show their contents and update in real-time as you extract materials from mineable deposits. Volatile Cargo – The health and estimated time that the cargo will last in your cargo pods before collapsing, and volatile cargo itself is highlighted in the UI so that you can’t miss it when you collect it. Flight UI – The current flight and gimble settings your ship has active are visible at all times.
Beyond what’s currently on the Roadmap we will see the Evolution of the 3.11 Features, tweaks to balance, bug fixes, expect issues with the MSR’s fuel consumption to be addressed in an appropriate way BUT CI have been working on various networking improvements too.
There are a lot of other possibilities and things that CI are working on with no real dates given of when they will turn up BUT some are possible for 3.12…
We could see another ship or 2 in the patch… Cloud Imperium often have a secret straight to flyable ship in these patches…
The Constellation Taurus as well as Hard Dock for the Connies have all seen a lot of work recently.
With the actual implementation of the Idris we know that CI had been wanting to get the Last Arlington Gang Mission in game with (more lawful) players fighting an Idris as part of that.
There is Xeno-Threat which is expected to have a roaming large fleet with capital ships… but we don’t know when they are coming… it’s might be with Pyro it might be well before.
Vehicle in Ship Spawning has me a bit confused… we might be waiting for icache for that now… I was hoping we would have it ASAP.
We know that CI have plans for more content in the Stanton System too, the Aaron Halo, GrimHex’s Race Course and Betting area, more missions and mission givers.
Volatile Cargo?
On the Preview of the New Roadmap we saw…
FPS Radar & Scanning as well as cooperative locomotion all potentially being finished for 3.12.
FPS or Personal Radars passively detect sound signatures and actively detect IR/EM signatures that ping is FPS Scanning.
This doesn’t have to be enemies necessarily either… I think this might be useful for Mining too.
Tho not a 3.12 Feature the New Roadmaps should be out to us around the same time as the LIVE release though it’s just the Upstream Teams that are going to be shown off at this stage.
WHATS NOT IN IT
SCLeaks said that the Hercules C2 wasn’t in for 3.12… that said I think it’s still a possibility BUT more likely for Q1 2021 now.
Icache, Server Meshing, Pyro, physicalized components, salvage, repair they are not in 3.12… we know that Icache is planned for the middle of 2021 and that the other features will follow.
And that’s it for Alpha 3.12 and what’s currently showing on the Roadmap and what we could potentially see from the patch. We won’t be covering any evocati Leaks on this channel… mainly because we can’t as I am an Evocati Member and NDA’d but that 1st wave ptu patch will be with us in the very near future.
What do you think will make the 3.12 patch, do you think anything will slip? Do you think we could see anything more added to the patch?