Star Citizen would very much like it if people could focus on what’s next for a bit as the Inside Star Citizen videos continue to roll out, with this week talking about plans for tractor beams in the near and long term. But we’re going to start with another progress report on the sandbox’s now two-week-long bomb of alpha 3.18.
The status page posted another update notice earlier in the week that talked up continued hotfixes server-side and client-side, with the most recent client hotfix rolling out to players to address some key issues. Even so, the current build of the game still remains couched in a partial outage state.
Meanwhile, the 3.18.1 patch that is CIG’s current focus for fixing the game is beginning to detail major improvements in the works, starting off with more open-ended ship claiming updates to stop the alpha’s current ship claiming problems. The vast majority of player replies, however, call attention to still persistent problems with endless loading and character repair.
As for the tractor beam-focused video, that talks up distant plans like different handheld and ship borne tractor beam types and additional uses for beams like tugging ships or having multiple people beam on to the same item, while alpha 3.19 will let players pluck things like power components, missiles, and weapons off of soft dead ships to either attach to their own ships or bring back to sell for a profit.
