Its been a busy week for the Star Citizen team! A good portion of the project leads have gathered in Manchester, England where we have been focusing on all issues related to characters, animation, cinematics and Squadron 42. The goal of this summit has been to sync up the rest of studios with the incredibly talented team at Foundry 42 for the major push to release the first chapter of Squadron 42 towards the back half of next year. It has been a fantastic week, full of passionate debate and pure creativity that I’m proud to say drives this project… but while we’ve been heads down making sure Squadron 42 lives up to the larger vision for Star Citizen, it seems a stretch goal or two may have passed! :)

Between the final days of the anniversary sale and the roll-out of the Anvil Carrack explorer platform, we’ve managed to surpass $66 million in crowd funding! It’s an astonishing number that both old backers and new made possible: while many existing backers pledged for Carracks, we also had over 7,400 new backers who decided to find out what all the fuss was about. Thank you to all and welcome to our new players; we’re happy to have you onboard on this adventure!

At $64 million, pets are a ‘go!’

• Pets – We have repair bots, we have fish… but we haven’t implemented a pet system in Star Citizen yet. At $64 million, that changes. From Jones the Cat in Alien to the Battlestar Galactica’s Daggit, pets have a place onboard starships… and we want to give you that option in Star Citizen. Expect traditional terrestrial options, plus anything exotic we can dream up in the Star Citizen universe! (Those Torshu Grey crabs that keep escaping are just the start.) This stretch goal is in honor of Paddington, Strike Dog of the UEES Paul Steed. In one of our first videos Paddington helped us get to $4 million back in the initial campaign, and sadly passed away recently.

The last letter hinted at the $65 million stretch goal: a revamp of our modular ship design drawn directly from player feedback. As Star Citizen stands today, the ships are extremely customizable. You can switch engines, thrusters, guns, missiles, turrets, sensor suites, scanners, cargo pods and some interior ‘seats’ (and much more.) Starting with 1.0, we’ve added the first iteration of the technology for a paint system that will allow us to create promised skins and ultimately let you alter your ship’s exterior appearance. For 1.0 it is used to handle the various paintjobs for the variants. But longer term this will allow us to give everyone the skins they have backed for and ultimately this system will allow for some user generated paintjobs!
 

One huge piece of feedback from the Constellation and Cutlass sales has been that backers want more: they want to customize the roles and the internals of their ships to a higher degree than we initially envisioned. Based on this feedback we intend to make changes to the ships that make sense to better represent what you want. The team at Foundry 42 is already building a number of modular capital ships, like the Javelin, that can change their internal and external form factors through an array of optional user-configured modules. What we intend now to do is take the technology and design work done for these capital ships and apply it back to a number of Star Citizen’s smaller personal craft.

• Enhanced Ship Modularity – So you have the ship of your dreams, but really wish that it could be customized to suit your needs a bit more than the off-the-shelf models? This new goal, a massive undertaking, is going to be of interest. We are looking to overhaul any suitable ships (including the Cutlass, Avenger, Retaliator and Redeemer) to allow many modular components to be available as swap-outs. For example: if you have purchased a Redeemer, then using the new system you would have a variety of new modules available to refit the ship, internal and external, to suit your play requirements. If you wanted to make it a Bounty Hunter ship, you could buy a “Stasis Chamber module” for the lower deck and you would be able to capture and store fugitives to be delivered for their bounties at your leisure. You could configure the upper deck to be outfitted with a “long range communication suite” allowing you to keep in touch with your “Infoagent” even when in deep space. Fed up of Bounty hunting? Swap in a larger cargo module in the lower deck to make that profitable run you have been planning for a while, or add the Explorer Module with deployable vehicle for some planetside recon. Manufacturers will still be offering pre-configured variants, but should you be looking to adapt a hull to suit a certain task then your ship has come in (and is now ready for modification!)

Of course, $65 million isn’t the only milestone we need to discuss in this letter. Starting with $66 million, I want to start focusing everyone on the level of detail and immersion that everyone’s support is enabling. So instead of always having a feature or a reward I want to share a deeper view into an element of the design that has been enabled by your continuing support.

This time around, we’re going to tell you about Star Citizen’s multi-crew ship seat actions. With the release of the Carrack, there has been a lot of discussion about how ships can be flown solo, whether or not they need a crew… and there have been a lot of questions as to how any of that will even work. You can read on below to find out the answers to those questions and more. (This letter’s design update was put together with the team here in the UK, who are also currently looking forward to the multi-crew ship features for Arena Commander 2.0)

This doesn’t mean we won’t still occasionally reward backers with in-game content (flair, UEC, ship upgrades and more types to come!) or propose new ship types to celebrate major milestones but I would like the focus to be more about the amazing game that you are all enabling rather than the amounts we have raised. The real story is that with a community and the team sharing such a passion for making something special, with all of your continued support we have an opportunity to make history.

As always, thank you for making all of this possible. It’s an honor to be at the head of development of a game that already means so much to such an excellent group of backers. You’ve earned your Citizenship! Finally: please sound off in the comments section: does this new system work for you? We WILL be listening!

— Chris Roberts
 
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