Star Citizen Alpha 3.16.1 Live & New Sprint Report

Star Citizen Alpha 3.16.1 is now live it’s a relatively minor patch that hides some bits that will be coming on next week AND We have had an Inside Star Citizen: Duty of Dereliction which was basically all a glorified sprint report giving us a whole heap of development updates including ones on the Banu Merchantman and Drake Corsair (which is now in active production).

Maria Pure of Heart Hospital on Hurston is getting ready for Alpha 3.17, it’s got all of the features any of the other planetary hospitals have but with the Hurston theme.

Mercy Hospital at Levski is also seeing work they showed greybox progress with the lobby, nurse station, elevators, insurance, pharmacies booths as well as some miscellaneous areas.

Mining Gadgets have had their full loop completed ready for 3.17… they are just polishing and bug fixing now. You’ll buy a mining gadget that you want based on your mining needs. You could store a load of them on your prospector or mining ship.

Then find yourself an asteroid that might benefit from one of your mining gadgets. Equip the gadget and place it on the asteroid.

You’ll then need to adjust the waveform on the UI screen of the gadget to match as closely as possible and activate it. This will then apply the modifiers to that asteroid and allow you to hopefully mine it more easily. Remember there might be negative and positive modifiers based on the gadget you are using. You can also sometimes collect your mining gadget after the asteroid is mined.

Do you remember cluster missiles back in the day? Well they are returning at some point and they have been testing them out BUT not just missiles cluster bombs too. They showed the bombs exploding effecting the trajectery of other bombs.

The Drake Vulture was shown in it;s final art pass. It’s a focused single player salvage vehicle, they showed the utilitarian interior with the cockpit, habitation area that includes a bed, toilet and storage, traversal sections and salvage processing area.

They showed greybox progress on the RSI Scorpius Heavy Fighter. It’s moving along at a good pace and they showed it’s wings fully extended.

The Hull A saw more work and they have been working on the extending and retracting nature of the ship and cargo grid. They also show the engine assemble.

You want to see early Banu Merchantman Work? OF COURSE YOU DO.

Early whitebox work continues on the ship exploring various elements of it’s interior, they want to have lots of movement with the engine room when it’s done. They also showed a little room towards the front of the ship that will be more banuy in the future.

The Drake Corsair is in active development and they showed it’s whitebox, it will go from here to it sounds like completion thru 2022.

Gas Clouds have seen work for various POIs in the Pyro System. They want to make sure the colour pallets are appropriate for the areas but also that they dress these areas with appropriate wrecks, salvage, asteroids etc… They said they are on the Road to Pyro this year.

Outlaw space stations are seeing more work these will populate the Pyro System. There is lots of jury rigging.

They then showed a station exterior with some of the spacescaping and gas clouds they have been working on all together… it’s relatively early and unpolished BUT looks great!

3.16.1 has a a load of new caterpillar crash sites for players to explore.

There are dangers there with trip mines But rewards for if you do search around.

There are also various jumping puzzles and that sort of thing to solve while you loot.

However this is just a small step towards lots more derelict types in game with something more systemic. They have concepted various ship crashes in various types of biome and being crashed for different lengths of time, from still being on fire to being reclaimed by nature.

Also they want to potentially use crashed ships in makeshift structures and outposts.

We saw a whole range of biomes here too, from forest to swamp.

I also saw some more info on Pipeline formerly SCLeaks with some info from Jake at CIG:

Reclaimer Derelicts are in production and should be in game soonish.

They are looking at Outposts for Nyx which we will see after Pyro.

We should know a lot more when we have the Roadmap Update next week.

Star Citizen Alpha 3.16.1 LIVE

• Derelict Spaceships V1 – Planetside Points of Interest

Updates to the Derelict Spaceship missions to include more points of interest that will be scattered on planets. These derelict spaceships can now include newly added activities such as puzzles, tripmines, traversal problems, and hostile AI encounters and may reward players handsomely when for resolving the activity. These new derelicts will include the 1st implementation of laser trip mines into the game which players will encounter. This trip mines are explosives that use a beam of light that will detonate the explosive when someone or something comes into contact with the beam.

• Ship Shield Delay Changes

Shield face regen delay timer will now also trigger if the ship hull is hit and shield face is already down. Shield regen delay timers will now trigger for all faces when the power state of any shield generator is changed.

• Quantum Travel Polish

Made additional stability fixes that should help Quantum travel engage more consistently.

• Increased scaling ratio payout per crimestat of target for player bounties

Weapons and Items

• Reduced Mustang Delta Rocket Pod Damage

There were a load of bug fixes including

• Being stuck in the queue to respawn at an ICU indefinitely
• Various Shield holes
• MFD and cockpit problems
• You can now leave prison without breaking

However there are still various known issues

• It is possible that some servers may stop updating their mission offerings. If the issue persists, try leaving the server, waiting a few minutes and rejoining the PU, or change region.
• Attempting to log back into a ship bed may result in a long loading screen before being sent back to the Main Menu w/ Error 30009
• Players will experience positional desync with one another after they have died and respawned
• Many mineable asteroids can’t be scanned
• Spawn closets do not recognize unconscious AI and close the door on them possibly leaving mission critical AI unreachable
• Ships sometimes wont appear in the VMA app unless the player spawns the ship first then spawns a different ship after, only then the ship will appear in VMA
• Logging out from the Reliant ship’s bed and back in will cause the Reliant to be in flight mode and the player is stuck inside the ship sleeping area
• Cannot Repair, Refuel, Restock at LEOs
• Ship may despawn after player death instead of staying at it’s last location
• Hammerhead doors to turrets may not open for players if they leave the seat during QT, trapping them inside

Where is the CNOU Hoverquad? It was in the patch notes and then removed from them… You can expect it to turn up over the next week and we also have XenoThreat 3.0 starting end of next week too… I’d expect them to want to bundle a few ships together for a sale along with that new hoverquad.