Star Citizen Alpha 3.19.1 MASSIVELY IMPROVES THE GAME
Star Citizen Alpha 3.19.1 should release to live almost certainly later this week…
The patch mostly focuses on fixes and improvements to various gameplay as well as addressing bugs BUT it actually goes a long way to making the game more stable and fun while also ironing out some features. Let’s talk about what in this patch and what it’s going to do for the game.
Star Citizen Alpha 3.19.1 paves the way for the 3.20 patch but also is a patch that will stick around for a while… the 3.19.x patch cycle is here until the end of September at least!
It genuinely looks like a lot of the problems with stability, 30k’s, performance and long running issues have been addressed along with trying to improve player enjoyment in the short term.
There is No Planned Wipe with 3.19.1 in fact CI suggested (imo) that there probably won’t need to be a wipe for 3.20 either as they have solved some issues with data migration between patches. However they did say however before 3.19.1 comes out there are a couple of things you can do to help ensure that items persist.
Take an item or ship out and store it again. That basically makes sure there is a database record of it in the LTP.
It’s also good practice that everytime you reclaim a ship you take it out and store it again.
Ammo, Consumables and refinery jobs aren’t copied across.
Hopefully even if players don’t do this the system will copy a lot of it over still and it shouldn’t be an issue after 3.19.1 anymore.
Actual content of this patch…
There has been a ton of updates to Lorville’s Performance and it’s LODs. This has improved framerates around the city they also appear to have further tweaked restricted areas as you can go round here with even more freedom it seems.
The city looks great and doesn’t run you down to single digit frames.
Tractor Beams have seen updates so they Now ignore rotation when attaching Mining items, gimbal, salvage items, and rockets. Previously you had to move them into the correct position and rotation which could be unnecessarily fiddly.
There has been various tweaks to Mining & Scanning now accounts for active laser modifiers, without having to shoot the mineable with the laser.
Rock Instability Values are More Predictable so Players Can Better plan and react.
Breaking rocks won’t constantly cause your ship damage.
A big thing is that they have Lowered Insurance Timers and Expedite Costs Across the Ship Lineup after they had been raised in 3.19. They are not currently as low as they used to be pre-3.19 but it’s a good step and it’s possible CI will go even further.
There has been an ASOP Technical Refactor, this improves a lot of backend stuff but also ship delivery times have been set to ZERO… so you don’t have to wait additional times beyond claiming. They have also fixed a huge range of ASOP and ship spawning problems that have plagued the game for a while. Ships being in Unknown States, ships getting randomly impounded, locked terminals, black screens and much more.
Various 30k Issues, players should be suffering from less 30k disconnects tho we won’t know for sure until we are on the live build. CI are still trying to solve as many of these issues as possible.
Character Repair is currently enabled – this is the lighter weight character reset tool. It’s looking like that will help 3.19.1 have an easier time with players as they will be able to resolve a lot of issues that come up themselves with this tool.
Balance Pass for Salvage, Bounty, and Assassination Mission Types. AI appears to be a bit more responsive.
Salvage missions will roughly net you 50% profit from a hull scrape plus the value of any weapons, items and cargo you reclaim.
3.19.1 Completely Rebalances the Ship Loot Cargo Manifest System.
Now when ships are destroyed as part of missions, NPC bounties OR found during them or at salvage sites they may have cargo on them to loot IF they have a cargo hold.
Salvage Contract ships will almost always have cargo if they have a hold.
They have removed items that can’t be sold. Items and commodities that can be found are based on the mission, area, ship etc…
Loot you can find will range from 300auec for 1 SCU to 100kauec per SCU.
Players are encouraged to search and loot ships after they defeat them or as part of salvage and these rewards should be worth it but not SUPER OP.
In 3.19 bought/owned FPS Weapons in weapon racks appear to reappear when a ship is claimed… don’t know if that’s a feature or bug that’s going to continue in 3.19. You do have to make changes to the ships loadout after storing the weapons.
I hope it it does stay or even gets less fiddly… it makes people actually use the rarer weapons and gives players looting an actual prize.
Another interesting thing I’ve been seeing in 3.19/1 is people using the Starfarer as a launch platform for Furies… you can basically replace the tanks with them it seems and have them QT with you. I might be doing a video on that later…
A Huge amount of additional bugs were fixed:
Like NPC Replication
The reclaimer’s elevator, in fact a ton of ship specific issues
NPCs standing on Chairs & Objects
Infinite loading and inventory issues
Mining & Salvage Issues… loads!
MFD Glitches
And various mission specific fixes too.
A few other bits… they
Made Improvements to Thruster Rotational Performance and Fuel Usage
Elevator responsiveness
Some minor ship updates
It also appears to have a lot of under the hood, responsiveness, redundancy and database backend improvements too.
There are still various Known Issues with the patch tho, hopefully only the more minor ones will make it into the live build… some of the more major issues are:
- New Deal and Vantage Rental Kiosks Are Missing
- EVAing onto SPK can insta-kill you
- Players are falling through disappearing trams to their deaths… Also Trams are out of sync, not appearing on time or overlapping – mostly an issue at area 18.
3.19.1 is the Last Chance to get the Pirate Aggressor Badge / Award in AC’s Pirate Swarm.
This is because 3.20 has a new updated Pirate Swarm and new award for completing it.
Beyond giving you a forum badge I believe this allows access to purchase a Caterpillar or Gladius with a Pirate skin.
Alien Week is coming up real soon (somewhen between the 12-17th June.)
This is part of the 3.19.1 cycle and some people have speculated that the
San.Tok’Yai Xi’An Medium fighter might be ready for release AND / OR there are New Alien Ships that CI may have on sale and straight to flyable. We do know the San.Tok’Yai was close to being complete and there are also a couple of Unannounced ships and vehicles that CI have been working on.
We may have more 3.19.x Patches… it doesn’t appear that 3.20 will be turning up until end of september at the earliest… and CI are keen to get PES and various gameplay mechanics into as good a state as possible in the short term so it’s likely we will see a 3.19.2 maybe even .3 before 3.20 launches later in the year.
With all the improvements and updates here 3.19.1 looks to be one of the most solid patches we have had in a while… but it is all assuming it’s deployment goes well… as we saw with 3.18… terrible things can go wrong BUT as CI appear to be getting PES under control it is looking pretty good now.
You can probably expect CI to run XenoThreat / SoO at somepoint during the cycle as well.
BOOM! That’s it for your video on 3.19.1 and what to expect! I am much excite and hype for the patch. I am interested to know your expectations or worries for it… and if you’ve been playing with 3.19.1 on the PTU what your experiences of that are.