Star Citizen Alpha 3.18 Cargo Refactor & The Future Of Cargo Gameplay
Welcome to some more Star Citizen CI have finally given us details of what’s coming with the Star Citizen Alpha 3.18 Cargo Refactor, it’s gameplay and what will come later.
We also have a look at the evolving RaStar Outpost and Structure building tool that CI are using to populate the Verse with content and eventually for player bases…
Inside Star Citizen: The Cargo Show
Star Citizen Alpha 3.18 will have a Cargo Refactor.
Starting to move away from the simple version of cargo they had previously, towards a much more in depth simulation.
The heart of this is the physicalization of commodity cargo.
Currently commodities are bought and automatically loaded into your ship in blocks and then you can go off and sell it elsewhere. There is no real handling of cargo, little choice and minimal gameplay, only 1/8th size cargo boxes could be moved. When a ship exploded with cargo, some smaller interactable 1/8th SCU boxes can be generated to loot but this is a bodge job.
Larger 1 SCU boxes can now be picked up with tractor beams. This also means that when a ship is destroyed it’s cargo will also be dropped in a much more sensible way and is tracked with PES… it’s not faked. Between 0 – 90% of the cargo will remain after a ship explodes…
The ability to move commodity cargo and larger boxes is incredibly important at expanding out the economy and star citizen cargo gameplay.
This will allow for much better piracy and looting gameplay too.
There is a new commodity kiosk.
This much more clearly states what cargo you have, what the shop will accept and is selling.
This also shows your remaining cargo space at a glance.
There is a lot more cargo gameplay coming after 3.18.
CI are working on manual loading / unloading of cargo at LZs and stations as well as automatic facilities.
We know that CI want times and costs associated with the loading and unloading of cargo.
Big Box Cargo missions are being worked on, that will help make cargo ships more important in game too.
Something pretty exciting for the future too CI plan to have an interim solution for even better looting on the way towards physical components and damage they are going to allow ships husks to persist and for cargo in those ships to remain relatively intact rather than some of it exploding, that said you can expect probably in the future that cargo can be damaged during combat and some cargo will be perishable.
As CI are working on the Resource Management System and Cargo Gameplay now… I would expect to see this in the not too distant future… at least part of the 4.x branch of the game.
So although the Cargo Refactor for 3.18 is pretty basic it’s nevertheless important and adds a good amount of additional cargo gameplay with a lot more planned to come. But whether it’s looting and piracy or collection of goods after a disaster the updates to cargo are welcome. It’s the foundation for an expanding economy.
That all said… I don’t really want to gather 100s of boxes from a wreck… but that might just be because they don’t really have value to me yet… when Star Citizen has no more resets… then I’ll be looting like a champ.
RaStar is the Tool CI use to place outposts and structures in the Pyro and Stanton Systems.
Eventually this will be used by players to place their own bases, tho it will have evolved somewhat and have a player facing UI by then.
RaStar allows for CI to much more easily edit and place outposts than the old prefabbed approach. Placement of buildings will automatically adjust to the biome and topology of the landscape.
The modular editing of this then allows for highly customizable and detailed outposts with a huge amount of variance.
This means a lot of gameplay, exploration, missions and landing zomes for players.
They also suggest this will be used for other structures in space at somepoint too.
The tools have been improving since they were first shown at CitizenCon last year.
They can combine other editing tools with Rastar easily now too.
This is all working with the latest Streaming Object Container and PES tech too.
The server can load / despawn these locations on demand too.
The structures are built with item ports and the resource management system in line as well… so it’s all ready for when that tech comes online.
There are a load of new POI assets and building CI are going to be phasing into the game and RaStar makes that all possible. Alpha 3.18 will make use of some of this with the Daymar Crash Site (and potentially some other locations).
Alpha 4.0 will use this all over Pyro.
More on bases… we know that you won’t need a Pioneer to build a base… the Pioneer is more of a base building and mobile factory now, that will probably let you build bases, quicker, more efficiently and probably let you build some better buildings.
Player bases can be used for storage and exploitation of resources… but the exact details of bases are yet to be fully discussed by CI especially after they have changed so much… expect base building to be pretty in depth and the surveying of land and resources on them to be important. I am personally expecting the ability to mine, refine, store, craft, farm and live at a base… and to have a large range of buildings to build for many purposes.
Hopefully CI will start talking about bases again next year…
We are just 2 weeks away for this Years Star Citizen 2952 IAE… starting Friday 18th November at 4pm UTC… the Corsair is flyable… theres another new Drake ship… freeflys, sales, an expo at New Babbage on microTech… it’s going to be awesome!
Boom that’s it for your update today…