The first major patch of 2026 has released and with it comes a new event, new rewards, a new ship, and a few new features.

Clear the Air

I had originally been cool on this “new event” because it looked like all of CIG’s old events, but after getting the details in the patch notes, I’m firmly on board.

Because of the current state of the tech, any events that CIG creates are generally either combat focused or “move the dot” focused. “Clear the Air” encompasses both, and adds directed mining, harvesting, and salvaging tasks for people to work on. This event is the most comprehensive event yet, and has something for literally every type of Star Citizen player.

After I managed to fight the queue and get into the game last night I took a small 6-box (I forget the actual SCU) delivery mission from A18’s Riker Memorial Spaceport to a Lagrange station out towards the Stanton-Magnus jump gate. For my troubles, I earned 40,000 aUEC and some points towards my event participation.

There are basically three distinct types of tasks: delivery, acquisition, and defense and these should be pretty self-explanatory even if you don’t play Star Citizen. Each task completed moves a needle along an individual track as well as an overall event track. As you can see in the image above, by the time I got into the game — which was maybe an hour or two after the patch dropped — players had already contributed 16,401,049 points to the event! Star Citizen has a way of accumulating numbers.

Each track has milestones, and at each milestone we get a reward. For the individual tracks, we get a “division” jacket at 10%, and from there it varies. I am partial to the transport division because I can get a jacket, a MaxLift tractor beam skin, and a skin for the ARGO Raft, which I have. We also get rewards from the overall track. 30% provides a set of light armor (which I like as I sometimes consider getting into medical play), 90% provides a skin for the Apollo Medivac, which I have, and at 100% we get a skin for the Perseus — which I do not have — and a skinned ParaMed medical device. We also get a specially branded item fabricator which is very cool, but crafting didn’t make it into 4.6 so this is a future grant for when the fabricators are available in the game.

I think there are good points all around for this event. First, I like the rewards and I feel compelled to participate to get most of them. Second, in previous patches whenever we would group, the payout would be split between participants. This time, everyone gets 100% of the points as a means to encourage players to team up. Whether this means we can “divide and conquor” — all team members take and share missions, but execute them as individuals — and still get 100% of the reward remains to be seen.

I am very interested to see how the “acquisition” missions work. As I wrote previously, my attempts to get back into mining have been comically terrible. Having to source specific items without the ability to really scan well is going to be pretty difficult, so the ROI for ship, vehicle, and hand mining might not be worth it compared to how quickly and easily I can schlep boxes around the known Universe.

RSI Hermes

This patch’s most controversial addition — because we always have to have a controversy — is the RSI Hermes cargo ship. It’s built on the same chassis as the Apollo medical ship and that’s where the complaining starts. Some people like the Apollo design, but apparently a lot of people do not. Beyond that, folks are wondering why the Hermes cargo bay is wider than it is tall:

Which is kind of a dumb question because the hull is wider than it is tall. The Hermes can fit 288 SCU of cargo, which is a very good amount, putting into the current “medium” cargo hauler class, although that’s an opinionated scale as everything is in flux and many large haulers aren’t in the game yet. Another prevailing complaint is that the only way to get cargo in and out is through the rear ramp, and many people are saying that the entrance is too narrow. The peanut gallery seems obsessed with using cargo ships as “jacks of all trades”, and a popular whine in this case is that the URSA — specifically the NURSA, the medical variant — can’t fit through the door. I managed to get a ROC (mining cart) and an ATLS-GEO (mining mech) in without a single issue, so I’m pretty happy. The Hermes also has a tractor beam which can operate internally along a rail system which is very cool as it allows me to organize the boxes deeper in the hold than in any other ship.

I am very pleased with the Hermes, so I’m going to melt the one I had acquired with store credit (returning to me that store credit) and then CCU my long-suffering Mercury Star Runner which I had been using as my cargo-slash-small vehicle transport when I wanted to try ground mining. The MSR has issues, some technical, some design, and it’s not on the roadmap for it’s “gold pass” as far as I know. The Hermes is a more modern ship with modern design and feature support (though not the LAMP features for some stupid and unknown reason) and can carry more cargo than the MSR, so for me it’s a solid switch.

New and updated features

There’s a comfortable selection of other updates and fixes added in, most of which I don’t really care much about. I did mention the inclusion of the “low-light amplification” (LAMP) system to some ships. I jumped into the newly minted “gold standard” RSI Aurora and was able to see the LAMP system in action and it seems like it’s at least 75% of the way towards what everyone has always wanted for those forays to the dark sides of planets, moons, and stations. CIG added some “essentials” kiosks to immediate urban landing zones which provide food, drinks, fuses, and other sundries that everyone needs, but were previously only available on the other side of the tram systems. Scanning updates made it into this patch which I have yet to really test, but I assume were necessary for the event as we’re being asked to go out and harvest things; we need to know what we’re looking at in order to decide if we need to harvest it or move on. There were also updates to the VR system which, in all honesty, is getting way more love from it’s champion dev Sylvian than the entire Star Citizen project gets from all of CIG. I’m glad to see someone is hyper-focused on a gameplay system over there.