This weekend CIG opened the public test universe (PTU) to all backers. I don’t usually jump into the PTU unless there’s something there I really want to see, but I am very excited about the new persistent hangars and cargo moving missions so I duped my LIVE folder, copied my character to the PTU, and patched up yesterday.

Whenever we log into the game right now we start off in a “HAB” in the last place we visited that had HABs. These are small apartments currently serving as our spawn locations. However, we do not yet get a permanent address so we can’t really call any one HAB our very own. That means we can’t decorate, or store our stuff, though we can steal items that aren’t locked down if we really want to.

One of the biggest updates (if not the biggest, depending on who you ask) coming in 3.34 is that we will now get permanent hangars or, rather, persistent hangars. When we create our character we have to choose a “home” from one of the four current planetary locations and that’s where our persistent hangar is registered. We can use other hangars elsewhere, but this is the one single location we can customize.

Star Citizen has been awarding “hangar flair” for years now, but none of it was useable until now, though some items aren’t designed to work with the modern system and cannot be deployed. I tossed out a large fish-tank I had gotten at some point, and then went to the shops to buy some additional furniture: a couch, some tables, and some chairs (not shown). My Luminalia Pico is chilling on the couch, and I stole a medical gurney from one of the emergency medical bays in the hangar to complete the scene.

In .23 whenever we want to call our ships we do so from the main concourse of wherever we are at, take an elevator to whatever random hangar the system assigned to us, and we’ll find our ship (hopefully). Now, we have the concept of “named hangars” which are uniquely ours. In .24, our ships are always delivered to our named hangars. More importantly, our named hangars are always available to us through the elevator, and we can summon ships from terminals inside our hangars.

Hangars come in different sizes so our hangar is as large as our largest ship; my largest ship is the Reclaimer so I get an extra large hangar and when they say “extra large”, they mean it. Even the Reclaimer itself has a lot of room to spare in this space, and the small Pisces shuttlecraft is comically tiny when viewed from a distance.

Party members are supposed to be able to see their own and their party member’s hangars to allow players to visit one another and board ships; randos cannot accidentally visit your hangar as they cannot see your named space in the elevator, and the system should eject non-partied players who sneak into your elevator just a few seconds after they enter your personal space. We can also shoot other players in our hangars now which I don’t think is the best solution for solving such issues, but…Star Citizen, everyone!

Another key feature of the persistent hangars is the freight elevator and personal inventory kiosks. In .23 our inventory both personal and external is managed through a single interface. Whenever we landed at a city, station, or outpost we get two columns of items; the left being what we’re wearing and carrying, and the right being the inventory of the location we are in. Our home locations would collect all kinds of stuff — arms, armor, food, ammo, medical stuff, clothing, ship parts, and so on — and the single interface with limited filters was a real pain to work with.

In .24, we will be able to access our local inventory only through inventory kiosks. Due to some unfortunate bugs, apparently, using one of these terminals simply brings up the .23 two-column UI which allows us to move items from local to our person, and vice versa; attempting to use inventory without the kiosk only shows the left-hand column of personal inventory. This is making inventory management a bit difficult at least semantically as I’ve gotten so used to just having the “cloud” based inventory anywhere I go. Also, there’s supposed to be a skewmorphic UI when using the terminal that CIG had to take down and re-tool, so no idea when or if that’s coming back for the PU release.

Freight elevators, though, are changing the way we work with inventory, especially large and cargo items. Every hangar has these alcoves, sometimes two per hangar. We can access a terminal nearby which lists what’s in the local storage and what’s on the elevator.

We can get access to all (I think) of our local inventory here, including what we’d normally see through the personal inventory kiosk. To retrieve items from local, we first need to send the elevator down — it defaults to being up in the hangar which doesn’t make sense, and because of this I didn’t know why I couldn’t get my local items onto the lift the first time I encountered the terminal. Once the elevator has been sent down, we drag the item from the right pane to the left pane, up to 1120 SCU (as shown on the decal at the back of the elevator). Then we recall the lift and voila! Our items are all physicalized and ready to go.

This plays a big part in the new shipping missions. Like a lot of other missions, players need to take an initial “eval” mission which has us moving a small amount (~6-8 SCU) of cargo from one location to another. After taking a mission, we will see the cargo we need to move in our warehouse inventory at the location the mission starts us at.

At this point, we call up a ship — hopefully one which can carry the cargo amount we are meant to take — and we are expected to manually load all of the cargo from the freight elevator to the ship’s cargo hold. My intro mission had me moving 6 SCU of Tungsten, represented in 6, 1 SCU boxes. In order to move these, I needed to use a tractor beam (beams have undergone some re-work in .24 to make them both a bit specialized) to move each box from the lift to the ship.

From there, I had to fly to the drop-off location and reverse the process. I got paid when the cargo was successfully lowered on the recipient freight elevator.

The kicker is that players need a ship that can handle the bulk, meaning those with only a starter package are going to be SOL, and that’s OK because not all loops are for all players at all times; once players have earned some aUEC, they can rent a small cargo ship and get to work. My MSR easily handled the 6SCU boxes, but once I completed the eval mission and was granted access to fourty more hauling missions, I saw some medium offerings that wanted me to take 90SCU. This is and will be a point of contention because that mission only pays about 14k aUEC which, for the amount of time it would take to load, fly, and unload 90SCU of cargo, is a pitiful sum. I also hope that 90SCU would be represented in larger SCU containers so as to require less beaming to move them, but that would of course require larger ships to move. To that end, I do not know how external-loading ships like the Hull series deal with this entire process. I have a small Hull A as a loaner, but I have only tried external loading once before and hated every minute of it so I can’t speak to how this all works in those cases. Eventually I know the plan is to allow players to choose to either manually load their ships, taking however long it takes (bringing friends will certainly help split the work), or to pay stevedores to load the cargo for you; the latter will result in some downtime as it won’t be instantaneous, but that’s a trade off for convenience, I guess.

There’s a bunch of other changes, updates, and features in .34 that I am not aware of, as I haven’t been keeping up with the patch notes prior to gaining access to the PTU. I will check out Spectrum to see what the testing roster is listing so I can get a better idea. As always, there’s a bunch of bugs with this in the PTU, showcasing why this was excised from the last patch, and we’re not talking inconvenience bugs either; there’s apparently some show-stoppers still being worked on and a few that I personally ran into during my limited time testing (I added my Me Too to the Issue Council because that’s what a Good Citizen does when on the PTU). I’m not sure when .34 will get the green light to go to the PU, but I know CIG is under the gun. I bet they wanted to use CitizenCon (mid October) to be everything 4.0 and Pyro, but the longer .34 is kicking the backs of CIG’s seats the less of a cheerleading impact such hoopla will have. Maybe they can fix up the issues and release an excellent update Soon(tm) or next month; maybe they’ll kick it out the door just so they can pat themselves on the back with “All 4.0, All The Time” starting with CitizenCon. We will have to wait and see, because if there’s anything Star Citizens are good at, it’s waiting.