Star Citizen looks to be spooling up its hype drives for the sci-fi sandbox’s next alpha build, starting off with this week’s Inside Star Citizen that zeroes in on two of the patch’s upcoming main gameplay features: the promised arrival of cargo elevators and freight gameplay, along with a new in-game event.
The video opens with a look at that event, called Blockade Runner, which tasks players with chasing down specific goods being ferried by Ninetails pirates, then bringing those commodities back to stations that are being guarded by enemies. CIG points out that players may want to disable enemy cargo haulers as opposed to destroying them in order to have more commodities to bring back and thereby earn more rewards.
The event was spawned by watching players engage with the Xenothreat event, which saw some players flying defense while others moved cargo from one place to another, so Blockade Runner will try and encourage a similar level of cooperation as well as give players an event that’s not purely focused on combat.
Speaking of non-combat gameplay, the second half of the video casts a spotlight on freight elevators and their associated cargo missions. Readers will recall that this gameplay loop was originally scheduled to arrive with alpha 3.23 but had to be delayed because it would quite literally break the game, but it looks as if this loop is stable and set to arrive with the update, letting space truckers pick up missions that move large amounts of cargo from multiple places, manually load them aboard their haulers, and bring them to where they need to be.
