This week, Cloud Imperium Games released the next major update to the super-ambitious spaceship MMO, Star Citizen. There’s a lot to the Alpha 3.2 update, so let’s dig in.
One of the biggest updates coming with the new alpha version is mining gameplay, that will allow players to prospect and scan deposits, fracture the rock with their mining lasers (via minigame that requires them to manipulate the energy levels), extract the ore, and sell it. You can learn more about the new mining features in Star Citizen via the previous ATV coverage. This feature will gain even more significance in Alpha 3.3 when in-game ship purchases are enabled. Which means players will need to be able to make tons of credits to afford the ships they want. Shopping kiosks for more general items within the game economy are also getting some polish in 3.2 as well.
The team at Roberts Space Industries says that the game’s economy is “still very much still in flux”, so expect prices for ores you’re buying and selling to swing wildly over the next few weeks. Also be aware that only the MISC Prospector is the only ship in-game that is enabled for the mining min-game, although more ships are expect to follow in successive updates.
There’s also the new grouping system that involves Quantum Linking between player groups. The leader of a player group can select a destination, and then all ships in the group can either manually initiate a jump, or the leader can choose to have all ships jump to the new location at the same time.
The FPS portions of the game also got some new features and bug fixes in the update. Sadly, there is some bad news, that being that the single-player portion of Star Citizen, Squadron 42, will not debut in 2018.
You can find the full patch notes here. If you want to check out the roadmap for future updates, go here.
We’ve also included tons of videos showing the various ship trailers and development progress that went into Alpha 3.2 of Star Citizen, you can enjoy those down below. All these ships should be in 3.2 in some state upon release, although they won’t all be feature complete. Some ships like the the Anvil Hurricane, the Aopoa Blade, the Aegis Eclipse, and the Origin 600i should now be flyable with full scanner systems in-game.
