Star Citizen already has some space truckin’ to be done, but that can arguably be seen as pretty bare bones overall. Making cargo hauling a “true” career in-game is the focus of CIG’s latest video digest as well as the focus of the newly formed NAPU team.
The video first opens with a lot of hay made over this team, which combines several devs from Austin, Los Angeles, and members from the recently acquired Turbulent studio in Montreal, Canada, all the while remarking how this “superteam” will be able to put together larger features for the Persistent Universe and be “utterly transformative to the overall Star Citizen experience.” This leads viewers into the cargo career, with the NAPU team working on features like freight elevators, instanced hangars, and persistent hangars.
Freight elevators will be an interface feature that lets players prepare cargo to be physically put into their ship or delivered from a ship, and is quite literally described as creating the fun of friends loading a moving van through the use of a tractor beam to move freight from one place to the other. Freight elevators are planned for station hangars, outposts, and underground facilities.
The addition of freight elevators at stations holds hands with the creation of instanced hangars, which will allow multiple players to dock at a station and handle their cargo tasks at the same time, without being bothered by other outside forces or creating an open world chokepoint as players wait for a hangar to become available.
As for persistent hangars, these are effectively described as a form of rudimentary player housing: Players can place items, ships, and vehicles, customize it and upgrade its size to park larger craft, and invite others to hang out. A timeline for this feature is not outlined, and creative content lead Jared Huckaby takes some time in the video to explain that persistent hangar features are “the current intention of the design team at the time that [the studio] film[ed] this.”
