Star Citizen follows up on alpha 3.18 feature developments as the build heads towards a November release

Alpha 3.18 has been the talk of Star Citizen’s summer series of Inside Star Citizen videos, but now that Cloud Imperium is wrapping up its latest episodes and taking its customary hiatus before kicking out fall episodes, the devs are using this season’s last episode to circle back on how the gameplay features of 3.18 are coming along.

The video first notes that alpha 3.18 is looking to arrive sometime in the first half of November. It also points out that its Persistent Entity Streaming tech is going to be part of the build’s feature set. That said, the video doesn’t elaborate on that work and instead breaks down where things stand everywhere else.

• River creation has seen several updates including the ability to create cliffs that frame rivers and better generation of the land around particularly bendy parts.
• The devs have been polishing up the indoor karting track experience and closing player-found loopholes that, among other things, let players ride a kart into an elevator, ride that elevator into the upper levels of the Orison convention center, and cause untold havoc.
• The Kareah station revamp is bringing further updates to the game’s crime system: Crimestat 1 and 2 will no longer initiate a kill-on-sight response from NPC guards, as those guards will instead direct players to a kiosk to pay off their fine, and players can surrender themselves to prison at that kiosk, which will cut back on time served.
• On the subject of Klescher prison, the devs have successfully incorporated NPCs and missions.
• Sand caves are done.
• Derelict sites on Daymar have also been going through bug fixing and polishing and have also seen their missions ramp up in difficulty.
• The islands where Siege of Orison takes place will still remain available even after the dynamic event isn’t running thanks to new missions that players can take up.
• Finally, players interested in hull scraping won’t have to wait for players’ ships to blow up to find material to slurp up and sell, as alpha 3.18 will introduce generated derelicts that can be salvaged.
• Incidentally, this portion of the video explains that the Reclaimer and Vulture won’t really be different in terms of how they operate in alpha 3.18 save for cargo space; once “salvage tier one” goes live, the Reclaimer will also get the ability to process hull material, which in turn will make it more distinct than the Vulture.