Star Citizen 3.17 Fueling Fortunes Out Now

Star Citizen Alpha 3.17 Fueling Fortunes is Now Live, let’s take a quick look at it’s new features and how they work and highlight what you need to know for this patch.

The Patch has various new features

Expanded selling & looting – Items in shop inventories have been updated, items removed and some can now only be found in loot boxes at POI like Bunkers or Wrecks and on NPC / Player bodies.

It’s worth searching around too as various items including weapons and gear can be sold to shops too, I recommend just looting weapons, gems & rare items personally.

Also always bring a backpack and gravity tool with you. Items are worth more when selling to a shop that stocks that actual item.

Ship to ship refuelling premieres in this patch allowing the Starfarer’s rear fuel arm to act as a dock for ships looking to top up on hydrogen or quantum fuel. To dock just target the Starfarer then press N to request to dock, the starfarer will need to accept, you can then use the mobiGlas Vehicle Services App to buy.

The Starfarer can charge for the fuel and must operate the fuel console to set prices and pump the fuel across once the customer is docked.

Mining Gadgets are purchasable at all good mining and refining stores, you deploy them in FPS on a mineable and it will give you some bonuses based on the one you purchased, I use them to make mining solo in my Prospector easier. You can often collect the Gadget back up after use as well.

The MISC Hull A is new in this patch and it’s an entry level cargo hauler that makes use of an expanding spindle that cargo can attach too… this heralds the way for the Hull-C later in the year.

Lorville has it’s Hospital Maria Pure of Heart giving it the facilities of the other planets and Space Station clinics now have more unique modular designs.

The first River has been added to the game, it’s on Planet microTech.

If you fly from New Babbage at bearing 205 you’ll eventually come to the river after around 435km. This tech will evolve and allow for many rivers on many planets and is partly related to getting roads in game too.

Character faces have been updated with more variety and better quality especially with the textures & eyes.

There is a MISC ship sale celebration going on as well with the Prospector, Starfarers, Hull A, Razors, Reliants, Freelancers all on sale on the RSI Website and various paints for them too.

A huge amount of ships have been added to the ones purchasable in game at New Deal (Lorville) & Astro Armada (Area 18) – Aegis Redeemer, Anvil Spartan, Argo Raft, HoverQuad, Hercules A2 Starlifter, Ares Ion & Inferno Star Fighter, Cutlass Steel, and Origin 400i.

There are various more minor things too, there is a coffee vendor kiosk / NPC with new behaviours at Area18’s Spaceport.

Ship components can now be transported in cargo

Planet & Space Station Inventories are separate.

You can purchase carriable containers for looting.

There hasn’t been a persistence wipe, tho you will need to re-customize your character (now with newer tech tho).

There have been FPS and Ship Weapon updates, Distortion weapons have been replaced with laser repeaters for ship loadouts.

S2 shields are now 2 faced rather than bubble shields.

You can set a key for ATC landing / takeoff WHICH YOU SHOULD, this is the best QoL update in ages (setting it as double press N or alt-N seems like the best suggestions I’ve seen)

Survival and Injury gameplay have been tweaked, you won’t bleed out as easily, when you go down it’s much less likely going to be an instant death.

There’s a networking update to reduce ship to ship desync issues. The direction and position of other player ships should now update closer to real time and feel much more accurate.

There are also various optimizations with parts of the Gen12 renderer and replication layer coming online.

There are however various known issues with the patch, thankfully most of them happen pretty rarely and the ones that happen more often are for the most part minor and some are older bugs that haven’t yet been fixed but are actually now listed:

Ships can explode after players exit them
While docked to a Starfarer the Valkyrie will continuously tilt instead of remaining stationary
Items do not immediately transfer from loot crate to personal inventory
It’s not possible to “De-select” attachments on FPS weapons in shops that sell them
Combat Assistance Mission Fails to Progress – Hornet Pirate AI Pilot Doesn’t Load In, stalling the mission when destroyed
Damage to player health can become delayed and can trigger after the player has fully healed themselves
Combat AI can sometimes rubberband, teleport, jitter, or move unexpectedly
The Argo Raft’s elevator controls cannot be interacted with from either inside deck
Emptying and reloading consecutive magazines will break reloading
A ship’s targeting pip may be missing or disappear for some players; they cannot be targeted when this happens
Character’s head, mobiGlas, and other equipment can sometimes go missing after being released from Klescher
Medical beacon may not complete mission/payment when player is brought back from incapacitation
Weapon holsters or un-holsters unintentionally
Players cannot buy components directly into ship storage

I think we can expect to see a hotfix in the next couple of weeks and we are moving into when CI are going to want to start looking at a 3.17.1 build already for Fleet week at the end of May and that Scorpius Heavy Fighter that is likely to come with it.

Some of my own thoughts.

Selling items especially in bulk is long winded and fiddly at the moment, the whole gameplay loop of collecting and selling needs to be ironed out for maximum enjoyment and we can probably expect that in the near future.

Stability and performance for me has been great so far. It’s a pretty good patch and once they fix a couple more of those known issues it will be genuinely pretty great.

The addition of all those ships available in game, a whole host of new features especially the looting and selling, really makes for a lot more gameplay. I do think we are on for a fantastic fleet week in the next few weeks.