The last time Star Citizen iterated on mining gameplay, it was back in alpha 3.16, when it introduced the mining gadget. It looks like mining updates are on the menu once again with alpha 3.19, as the sandbox’s latest weekly video offers a look at what’s changing for rock crunching players of the PU.
Many of the upcoming updates effectively boil down to balancing passes to mining attachments, laser heads, gadgets, and sub-items, as well as the mineable rocks themselves: Values to all mining-related things have been adjusted, rock resistance and instability levels have been tweaked, and there are now clearer definitions of the benefits and drawbacks of certain mining heads to make them more tailored to gathering specific materials.
Speaking of materials, new resources are being added such as iron and genalite, the former of which being mineable only from ships (for now) and the latter only from FPS mining (because data shows nobody is doing FPS mining). Resource distribution across the Stanton system is also being updated, with standard minerals being moved to distinct locations. Finally, the mining UI is getting another update pass intended to make it easier to read and less cluttered.
All of this is focused for alpha 3.19, but that’s still on the horizon, as alpha 3.18 is still not released to the PU yet. A checkup of that build’s progress shows that public testing opened up to all backers last week, while several patches to the PTU version have been applied in the following days.
