Star Citizen Alpha 3.24 Features Fundamentally Change The Game
Let’s delve deeper into Star Citizen Alpha 3.24’s new cargo patch as we have some updates for the evocati build, confirmation of features and some patch notes to check out… it’s an awesome patch… with some much needed features…
CIG said they are sifting through a large amount of data gathered over the last couple of days with the Evocati Test of 3.24 and should be releasing a “noticeably better build” for later today (Thursday).
In the latest Roadmap Update CIG basically confirmed the contents of thee 3.24 patch saying Storage Access (Previously Banks), Freight Elevators, Caro Hauling, Personal Hangars and the Blockade Runner Dynamic Event are all in and confirmed.
So what’s actually in the Evocati Build For 3.24 and it’s Patch Notes?
3.24 fundamentally changes how players interact and organize their belongings. From Cargo, to items to ships. Freight Elevators will introduce a new mechanic for retrieving and storing larger items at various locations. Hangars will now be instanced and in case of personal hangars, persist everything within them. Ships are now spawned via Ship Elevator and Item Banks now replace the omnipresent local inventory. To connect these updates with other existing content, we’re also introducing Hover Trolleys and Hangar Decorations.
Personal & Instanced Hangars – create an instance of the player’s hangar to allow for uninterrupted management of cargo, inventory, and vehicles. Personal hangars are found at the player’s home location and allow for customization and organization of the hangar interior.
All hangar types are instanced, meaning they are able to physically stack on each other in the same location without interference. All hangar types have ASOP terminals, Item Banks, and Freight Elevator (SCU amount depends on hangar size). All hangar types have ship elevator platforms which will lower when players request a ship to be spawned. Any ships already on the platform will be lowered and then stored via asop. All hangar types should be accessible to party members of the Hangar owner. Players can only retrieve ships while inside a hangar that fit the size of the hangar.
Personal Hangars exists for the player at the selected home location at all times and is as big as the largest ship on the player’s account (ships purchased in-game don’t increase size of personal hangar). Any items left inside the Hangar will persist indefinitely, though items on the Ship loading platform may disappear
Freight Elevators – players need to physically load and unload cargo to and from their ships by conveying cargo to and from hangars, landing pads, garages, and docking collars. For the new cargo flow we will be storing cargo in the local player inventory and allow them to use the freight elevator in their hangar to access the inventory physically. This will be extended to cover the location inventory access that is currently handled by personal inventory. This means that anything stored to or retrieved from local inventory at a location must be accessed by the freight elevator. Furthermore we will remove the ‘invisible’ player inventories for vehicles in favor of using physicalized inventory inside the ship. All ships have at least some small personal inventory that the player can put personal items for easy access. Additionally, we will be adding physicalized inventory containers available for purchase that players can use to store and haul larger items in the cargo hold. The freight elevator kiosk will have added functionality for inventory management including sub inventories like these boxes so players can move things around and recall it for manual transfer on/off their ships.
Players can find Freight Elevators in personal and staging hangars, as well as outposts and scrapyards. Players can interact with a Freight Elevator Kiosk (FEK) to load items onto the elevator platform. Players can put items on a Freight Elevator platform and then interact with the kiosk to store items to their warehouse. Players can see information about mission relevant items when storing and retrieving them via Freight Elevator Kiosk.
Commodity Kiosk Updates – Players can buy different SCU-sized containers via Commodity Kiosk. Upon purchase of commodities, players can chose to automatically load them onto a stored ship at a cost of aUEC for the automatic loading service. This will take an amount of time during which the ship will be inaccessible for automatic loading process (information on loading progress is visible on ASOP terminal).
Storage Access – kiosks exist in various places in all landing zones and space stations. These kiosks replace the old local inventory. Using these kiosks, players can store and retrieve FPS items via the Storage Access UI.
Hover Trolleys – Players can purchase Hover Trolleys at Cargo Decks in space stations and Dumpers Depot in Landing Zones. These can be retrieved and stored via Freight Elevators. These new hover trolleys can navigate much rougher terrain than wheeled trolleys.
Hangar Decorations – 3.24 brings decorations into player’s hands. These new decorations can be purchased at Kel-To and Dumpers Depot then retreived from their hangar’s freight elevator. These decorations can be placed anywhere a player wants in their Hangar and have full interactions like sitting on chairs and couches (caveat that the Ship Platform will delete items stored on the ship elevator while storing ships). Hangar Decoration will persist in personal hangars but will get deleted in staging hangars (Hangars that you don’t own outside of your main landing zone)
Other Updates
- Made Further Minor Flight Controller Tuning Changes to most ships for Afterburn and SCM Speeds
- Increased RSI Mantis Engine Attachment Health
- Reduced RSI Mantis Emissions
- Greatly Increased the Health on All Ship Gimbal Sizes
- Added ESP Dampening Strength Modifiers to Game Settings Tab
- mobiGlas Contract App UI Polish
Maintenance gameplay loop or actually fix the box missions, your choice CIG
I could be a hero if we had this.
Or, and hear me out, we could get the kiosk to work correctly. Please. I just want to move boxes and instead end up being a part of some cult making monuments to the chaos god of shipping.
Someone followed this up by asking:
is there any hope that the upcoming cargo missions will also have code that makes these box missions more robust?
CIGs Chad McKinney Responded – The entire delivery mission system was re-written for 3.24, both to support the hauling missions for the cargo patch, but also to be better setup for server meshing.
There was also a post:
Please, for the love of Chris Roberts, we are begging you…
That was pleading for the ability to carry your weapon, lowered with a keybind.
And SPOILERS as of 3.24 there is now a key bind for this to toggle you weapon in READY or LOWERED. It’s more of a visaul and showing the intention of your character update BUT this will actually make peoples immersion, videos and screenshot a load better.
What is thee current status of RTGI (RayTraced Global Illumination) as this will be a major graphical upgrade.
Ben Parry
RTGI is going well, visually improved and recently we’re ironing out a lot of the gotchas that would stop us from turning it on. We’re also working on getting the performance up to a usable level and removing some things that are blocking us from turning up the range that it applies. It’s still a fair way to go but I hope we’ve got something updated visuals for you soon.
Did you have a chance to check the San’tok.yai propulsion in landing mode?
Actually was just informed this is fixed in 3.24.