Space Tomato flew as close to the NDA Sun as he was able by giving an audible recap of his time working with Star Citizen’s crafting system on the EPTU servers. Based on his information, a few things were rolling around in my head.

Material quality and availability

Like other games that overlap in the Venn diagram of PvPvE MMOs, CIG admits that there will be people who never want to go anywhere near PvP. CIG and other games do not openly admit, however, that they will design the game to push players in that direction regardless.

Materials used in crafting will have quality levels, and ST’s video mentions how the materials found in Stanton were in the 200 range, while materials found in Pyro — the PvP system — were 500+. He made note that the weapon he crafted using q200 materials got him about 8 more rounds per trigger pull over the stock weapon, while q500+ materials he used to make the same weapon netted him 32 more rounds per pull. He flat out stated that it seems that even if a player doesn’t have the most powerful weapon on paper, a weapon crafted using the highest quality materials can certainly sway the outcome. “People who want to min/max are going to be crazy about it”, he says, and that already sums up a large part of the Star Citizen community, even without crafting.

CIG wants carrots to get players into PvP situations. Material quality is going to be one of the their funnels of choice.

Using the fabricator

I liked this explanation: apparently, if the fabricator is in your hangar (I assume the home hangar only) or is attached to a cargo grid within a ship, we won’t need to load materials into the fabricator to get something out of the fabricator. Instead, it will use whatever materials we have either in our hangar warehouse (or hangar floor), or attached to the cargo grid in our ships.

This will allow us to take the fabricator, attach it to a cargo grid in a ship, and go out mining. We can put the mined materials into crates, locked to the cargo grid, and use it as a supply hopper to create things.

Using the fabricator loose, though — not in the hangar or not attached to a cargo grid — will require us to “feed” the machine. The fabricator can only take 2x 1SCU/1x 2SCU boxes so the ingress is more limited.

Item recovery

Right now when we die, we respawn with all of our equipped and carried gear. This was a stop-gap response to players complaining that they were dying to bugs and had lost their granted or found items, and that’s a shitty way to watch our rewards get pissed away.

When crafting is introduced, we will see an increase in rewards being granted as blueprints rather than completed items. Not to say that completed items are going away and everything will be crafted, but CIG’s next tier answer to item recovery is that we can always “rebuild” lost items. This allows the game to return to personal inventory loss on death, looting bodies, and still provides a way for players to recover their important items.

This seems like less of a solution and more like moving goalposts. If I have a set of armor that I got through an in-game event, holiday grant, or part of a purchased package, and I lose it, there’s no guarantee that I’ll have or have access to the materials needed to recreate those items. Granting us blueprints so we can re-create items in perpetuity seems like a dodge so CIG can put their hands up and say “now it’s up to you whether or not you want to recover those items” by pushing us to do what’s necessary to obtain the materials needed to fabricate what we lost. I can only imagine that some of these grants, awards, and purchases will not be limited to easily obtainable materials, and that most of them will require materials only found in PvP areas.

For some people, those items might as well have gotten sucked into a black hole.

I am aware of how insurance will play into this, and I’m purposefully only talking about crafting right now. When insurance reaches it’s own “tier X” and becomes something meaningful, I’ll most certainly be back to re-evaluate how item recovery works with insurance, without insurance, and with crafting in between.

Not all doom and gloom

So there’s some good news, too.

Mineable rocks will now be “one and inert”, meaning that an asteroid or ground rock will be, say, “aluminum and inert materials” while another will be “gold and inert materials”. No more will we be presented with “E-Type” or “Q-Type” rocks filled with two or three random materials plus inert. Scanning will also show us exactly what materials are in a rock, which should greatly speed up our searches for what we need.

Eventually — not now, sadly — people who are unwilling to give in to CIG’s relentless push towards PvP will be able to purchase materials from other players. I’m sure orgs are already in the planning stage for how they will be spinning up ops to get materials from Pyro and Nyx and sell them to players in Stanton, Castor, and Terra. While I’m not a fan of having to deal with a middleman like this, especially when there’s no checks and balances on price gouging (and a million ways unscrupulous players will justify doing so), it does mitigate the need for everyone to get into situations they don’t want to be in.

There’s also deconstruction which isn’t fully implemented, but eventually should provide at least above average quality materials when we break down items we don’t need. Even I agree that it would be stupid for a high quality item to yield high quality materials on decon, but I would also consider it stupid for a high quality item to provide only crap baseline quality materials on decon. I believe the quality of materials should lie somewhere between baseline and the quality used to make the original item. This would also cause the quality of the item to degrade over successive deconstructions until it’s not even worth deconstructing the item at all.

Refining is still a wildcard. Being able to refine lower quality materials into higher quality materials would erase most of this post in a split second. Yes, I would fully expect to have to spend 2, 3, or more times the original amount of material to bump up the overall quality, but simply being able to do so would make me — and a lot of other players — incredibly happy. I do expect this to become a thing, though, since during last week’s ISC Jared, Eliot, and Thorston were constantly talking about how players can tailor their experience and expectations by understanding that everything we can get from low sec areas can be had in high sec areas, just with significantly more work. This should mean that we can mine low-quality copper and turn it into higher quality copper, but it would be quicker — not easier, just maybe quicker — to go to Pyro and mine it at a straight-up higher quality. I’m OK with this trade-off, though.

While I am excited to receive crafting (and the new inventory UI) in an upcoming patch, I’m always leery of CIG’s inability to release a fully-forward feature. It’s always a case of “one step forward, two steps back” as a new feature debuts and other, older and established features mysteriously stop working they way they did before the patch. Having access to crafting will certainly be true, but it’ll only be a subset of the full-featured implementation until gawd knows when, as CIG is also lax about following up tier-0 releases in a meaningful timeframe. Assuming crafting releases in March, I expect to be stuck with introductory crafting for the rest of 2026, possibly half or more of 2027 as they look to release more tier-0 systems in the interim. Even a tier-0 crafting system would be better than what we have, and would allow players to provide feedback that will hopefully push the feature towards the cornerstone of the game it really needs to be.