Star Citizen’s 4.8 update continues to be a trainwreck. It was released in order to spearhead the Drake DefenseCon sales event which is an excuse to release key ships to the market that CIG wanted to sell, although their marketing materials really only want to talk about the Tactical Strike Force event. We all know why we’re in the state we’re in. We are also still waiting for a promised hotfix, and are hopeful for an announcement that CIG has a patch in the wings that will return the game to a working state.

Still, there are some bright spots for those who persevere (or who are gluttons for punishment, or who have become numb to Star Citizen’s vomitous ups and downs over the years). I acquired the new MISC Starlite, a single-seater refueling ship. I hadn’t been paying attention to the verbiage on updates to refueling gameplay because I decided that I wouldn’t be looking into refueling. Well, here I am, and I have to say that as far as game loops goes, refueling is pretty chill when just starting out.

Since I decided to buff up my secondary account with the Starlite, I opted to start his career in Pyro. Yes, Pyro. The lawless system that I railed against for something like two years. See? This is that numbness I mentioned in the previous paragraph. On one hand I figured that if someone wants to prove how badass they are at PvP by attacking a solo refueling ship, then they have my sympathy re: the love they are missing in their lives. On the other hand, I might suspect that a lot of people are over in Nyx doing the Tactical Strike Group mission, and that Pyro might be less populated right now than it usually is. Thankfully, and for whatever reason, I have yet to see another living person during my time in Pyro, so I guess I’m doing OK. I don’t expect it to last.

Refueling missions are (at my current rep level) pretty simple. I need to fly out to a POI with tanks full of Hydrogen and Quantum fuel. I find the poor soul who couldn’t calculate their mileage correctly and transfer the goods. I get paid by the union who sent me, and everyone leaves the scene happy and hopefully wiser for the experience.

Right now, docking with a target is automatic. I just have to extend the boom arm and point it at the customer. With the ship targeted, I approve the connection, and the NPC makes the link. Eventually, I believe that this will become a manual process like how ship-to-port and the player-to-player refueling used to work prior to there being missions offered to handle NPC requests. I don’t quite intuit the docking glyphs, seen above, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out for when the time comes to need to understand what I’m looking at (pitch, roll, and yaw are all represented and need to be aligned, I get it).

Once linked, I can open the valves to the tanks. In my case, I have Hydrogen fuel on tank 2 (left) and Quantum fuel on tank 1 (right). I can (or maybe, should) only open one valve at a time, so I fill Hydrogen first, close the valve, and then open Quantum. There are a few other icons on there, such as “vent fuel” and an unlabeled icon indicating that I will someday be able to syphon fuel. We already have the options to salvage derelicts and take their components, so being able to drain their fuel tanks is a gameplay loop that just makes sense.

Naturally there have been issues unrelated to refueling, though. For one, we can only take one mission at a time no matter what the mission; this is a Known Bug(tm) and CIG claim it will be addressed in a patch update. Second, I wasn’t getting initial confirmation that I had a mission. I could fly out to the mission point and even find the target, but I got no UI confirmation or intro — new missions are almost always voiced. It wasn’t until I finished the job that all of the UI elements came flooding in, in the order in which they were received, ending with the mission intro voice lines. After that, things seemed to be OK. At one point, though, I was my own worst enemy: I went on five different missions but could never target the ship to be able to authorize docking. I quit the game, jumped servers, did all kinds of tricks to fix whatever was wrong and was about to chalk it up to Yet Another Bug until I realized that my power allocation had more spare pips than it should…sure enough, the game thoughtfully removed all power from my radar, the component in charge of targeting. After reallocating power, I could target with wild abandon, but I was pissed I spent over an hour and wasted so many opportunities for a payday because I didn’t think to check the power distribution of my own ship.

NPC refueling missions are paying about 37k aUEC which, considering we had a 98% wipe with 4.8, isn’t bad for a character who starts off with very little aUEC. Refueling is quick and pretty simple, and having to buy fuel up front for the tanks reduces the payout somewhat, but not to the point of pain, IMO. Some people in the community want refueling (and all game loops) to offer a path to riches, to which Community Honcho Jared Huckabee replied “no” with a tired stare straight down the camera lens on last week’s SCL. I agree. Refueling is one of a few altruistic gameplay loops in the game…or in any game, really. Players who want to support other players, whether freelance or in an org, can look to refueling as a necessary and praiseworthy vocation. Its adopters are giving over their game time to help others and sure, right now we can get paid for it but expecting to get rich driving a tanker ship around is more of a symptom of today’s Gamer Mindset than it is a reality. It’s fun until it’s not, but in some circumstances player events will fall apart if there’s no easy way to refuel, so it can be necessary. Other game loops may make players wealthy, but refueling can make players heroes, and I think people should consider that.