The Future of Star Citizen Persistence – Custom Hangars, Habs & Bases

Welcome to some more Star Citizen, PES and deeper persistence is coming to Star Citizen Alpha 3.18 but this is just a stepping stone towards a whole host of important features. I want to talk about Persistent Hangars, Habs, Homesteads and Bases as well as their customization… it’s going to be a mix of what CI have previously talked about, Theorycraft and personal expectations.

PES allows for the tracking and saving of item location and state and can restore that even if the server crashes. This is a major part of Server Meshing tech that’s needed to have multiple servers come together to form a shard, potentially allowing for 1000s of players in the same megaserver.

But there are a lot of other things that are now much more much closer to becoming a reality for Star Citizen Gameplay…

Persistent Hangars had been seeing development recently with the feature that CI had been focused on – Work that grants players the ability to have their own Persistent Hangars. This will also bring changes to the Cargo gameplay loop by allowing players to pack their grids manually. 

This was a feature that we were originally going to see in 2022 but CI decided it needed more work and you can see by it’s description that it is very much tied in with the Cargo Refactor that currently planned to come with Alpha 3.18 along with PES.

So it looks like Persistent habs could be coming really soon… but what would a first implementation actually look like? There is going to be a healthy amount of theorycrafting here:

I expect it to be similar to what we have with spaceports and public hangars to be honest.

You’d go to an elevator at a spaceport, then maybe if you had your own hangar there be able to travel to that… tho I wouldn’t expect it to have it’s own physical location / address it might say PERSONAL HANGAR on the elevator button but it would take you to different locations each time you logged in however it would load in your hangar to that area if you see what i mean… a persistent interior… but changing location or at least having a shared exit… that could evolve somewhat over time… I am expecting to see lots of the areas and districts around cities to potentially allow for players to leave them via roof tops, mini hangers ect… too. They don’t need truely physicalized addressed hangars to have all the gameplay of a persistent hangar is what i am saying.

With persistent hangars you can expect your ship and item inventory to be housed there, tho it might cost you some aUEC to rent based on the amount of items / ships you have stored there. If you want to store a load of cargo you should be able to do it here as well.

Now you could argue we effectively have “persistent hangars” now in game as we can store items at a planet but really we are talking about expanding out the gameplay, some physicalization and customization of the interior things like that, storing cargo, shared spaces.

I would expect there to be different sizes of persistent habs because the exit needs to accommodate your largest ship. It’s likely as well that in the future you could have multiple ships on display and out in your hangar BUT expect there to be some form of handwave underground storage for a good portion of your ships as displaying a fleet… that would require a lot of space. 

There were plans for customization of your hangars with additional facilities, workbenches, storage space ect… a lot of this could be handled with some form of UI but we don’t know how much customization power we will have with hangars… you’ll be able to place flair and things around, and we know that CI is likely going to allow for a lot more customization it’s just they haven’t talked about it for a while.

I am still expecting a public hangar system that allows you to land and take off without any form of additional storage or customization. But I am also expecting fees associated with landing, take off, loading unloading and ship storage and for personal hangars to potentially be cheaper over the long term. 

I also expect that one of the things will get for orgs are shared hangars so you can use other peeps ships and you’ll probably be able to get access to friends hangars when they have a solid permissions system set up.

Now something we kind of touched on there was Custom Habs / Rentalable Habs. When we spawn in at a Landing Zone we are typically waking up in our bed in a hab.

Eventually you’ll be able to rent and potentially buy these in different cities. And this will be another place you can customise with flair and trophy items but also some functional things like food and coffee makers. You can potentially have lockers here with loadouts pre-saved bam you are ready to go. I think it will be much easier for CI to implement physical addresses to these habs in the future as they can have a huge amount of floors and basements in buildings to house players with elevators going to each AND they can have rental fees of these habs controlling the amount of players there somewhat. 

Also they are expanding out a lot of the cities in the game and there is a huge amount of space on a planet… you could probably house all the players that will ever be in game on ArcCorp for example…

Again they might just go the save the interior but have your address moving around route in the shorter term tho… (which is actually what they previously had done).

But you can expect the evolution here to be – more customization of interior of a hab, costs associated for rental, different types of hab at cities to rent and then permanent physical addresses associated with them IF THAT IS POSSIBLE AND SENSIBLE.

CI had also previously said that homesteads were going to be somewhere we could live and customise and this was associated with the new Colonialism Outposts that are coming to Pyro. So I’m expecting that settlements and towns in game will have areas where players can spawn and customise just like a hab in a city…

Will Space Stations have rentalable habs and more variety of habs than just a tiny room… probably but CI haven’t really discussed that previously… it makes sense tho. Some players are going to want to live in space stations or grimhex right, so why not let them buy habs there? It might be that the smaller space stations or ones at lagrange points just don’t have rentable habs only TEMPORARY ones.

A bit of a magnitude beyond all this are Player Bases. CI have been building out and using the RaStar Tool which they use to place outposts and structures but this will eventually form the foundation of a player facing tool to build bases in game.

You’ll be able to build bases with or without the Pioneer (that ship has become more of a floating fabricator / factory that allows you to build more, quicker and more efficiently) 

In UEE territory you’ll need to purchase a land claim to build but in areas like Pyro or that our lawless you’ll be able to build on any surface flat enough, BUT you will not have the protection of system security.

What exactly will you be able to build at bases, we don’t 100% know yet, it’s likely going to be for a mixture of storage, resource extraction, refining, crafting, defence, repair, refuel logistic and living area. 

My expectation is that you’ll be able to make ammo, fuel ect… at bases and then use them as staging platforms in systems like Pyro. Orgs will be fighting each other over resources but to really push them out of a system you need to locate their bases and capture / destroy them. So then they can’t resupply and are forced to go to another system to get that.

Will we be able to store ships at bases… I am hoping there are hangars or underground hangars that will be able to handle ship storage.

CI have already talked about the importance of base location. As you will be able to exploit nearby resources. So surveying will be a major part of exploration and base building gameplay… this does also imply that at least some bases might be temporary and used while you nom up all the resources in an area. That could be minerals underground, liquids ect… but also you might build farms for example, some might require more of a biodome others exposed to the elements.

We know as well that bases / structures will make use of the Resource Management System that CI are building out (and hopefully coming next year), basically they require power and this will power the lights / machinery / components, life support ect… it’s effectively the same setup as a ship.

Breaking into bases and turning off the defences is something I foresee but also… you’ll need to think about power generation and potentially things like food and water, building wind or solar panels.

How do these persistent things Persist across Multiple Shards? Well that’s the question… if I have a base on a planet does that mean that it can get attacked on multiple shards at the same time? What if I edit it or expand it? Does it then appear or change on another shard? What if 2 players try to build on the same area at the same time? There are certainly a lot of questions with how this all works with SM and edge cases with how the mechanics work. CI have previously said maybe bases will exist on all servers but only be interactable and enterable in one of them at a time… that seems odd tho as does that mean you can only attack them in special circumstances? We don’t know how this is all going to be handled and I suspect that CI don’t know yet either until they have dedicated teams working on it.

You’ll be able to build base defences but how effective will they be when no-one in your org is online? Is it fair to be able to attack them / or not attack them… its certainly something that CI need to work out…

Obviously habs, hangars and bases are all incredibly important to the game and a lot is yet to be determined for exactly how their persistence and gameplay will pan out BUT it will evolve from when they are first put into the game, it’s not final, player feedback, advancing tech and what makes sense will always drive the development of them as features forward.

Bases are probably a couple of years away but Persistent Hangar and Habs a lot closer than that…