When alpha 3.12 arrives to Star Citizen, you’re going to have a few new things to do as a cruncher of space rocks. As CIG has been keen on bringing up over the past few weeks, refinery decks are coming to the game, and in this week’s episode of Inside Star Citizen, we get a first look at the refinement process itself.
It should be mentioned that the costs, prices, and other granular details of ore refining are subject to change, but the overall process is pretty similar to any other mining job that’s happened in spaceship sandboxes — bring your ore to a refinery, go to a kiosk, pay the costs associated with refining the ore, and wait for the job to complete.
There are a few unique wrinkles to refining in Star Citizen, however. Certain refinery decks can be specialized in certain ores (meaning players could get more yield), and all refineries will have a capacity system in place; there are no hard limits to how many jobs a refinery can take, but if there are a large number of work orders, subsequent work orders will cost more. Both of these features are meant to entice players to shop around for the best places to complete their orders. These refining features are said to set the table for additional gameplay loops such as cargo hauling, piracy, and crafting.
The video then offered a closer look at new types of sniper scopes which will take advantage of zeroing distance features coming in alpha 3.12. There are three different types of scopes that will be added: a basic scope that lets players manually set their zeroing distance, a more advanced scope with a rangefinder that lets players adjust their zeroing distance with some visual aids on the fly, and a highly advanced scope that can automatically set the zeroing distance of whatever target players are aiming downsights at.
While it’s hard to really gauge a moment in the current PU build where such refined sniping will be needed, it’s good to have options. Or, perhaps, these are features that will be best suited to Theaters of War.
