I heard a wiseass remark that “the stock market is just astrology for bros” and I chuckled. But as gamers, we spend a lot of time tying to divine the course of our favorite in-development titles with the unfeigned seriousness of a 2AM infomercial hosted by Dionne Warwick (sorry kids, just nod like you know what I’m talking about), so “armchair development is just astrology for gamers” is also kind of apt.

Space Tomato is my current favorite Star Citizen analyst, and last week (?) he posted this video on one of his channels:

Alpha 4.6 is currently fast-tracking itself into the hands of the first wave testers, and while I am not one of those folks, I do have access to the patch notes thanks to the SC Pipeline Discord. Star Citizen’s inaugural patch notes are usually broken out into three sections: testing focus, features & gameplay, and bug fixes. The features & gameplay section is always the “fun” stuff because it mentions the new elements making their way into the game.

So the tl;dr is that there’s a new narrative event called “Clearing the Air”. The MacGuffin in this case is “bad air filters makes people sick” and the meat of the meal is that players will have all kinds of opportunities to fit into the story, from moving medicines and cryogenically frozen patients to escorting medial ships to fighting pirates to recover kidnapped citizens. In terms of gameplay, CIG is covering every single base that Star Citizen currently offers such as FPS and ship combat, cargo moving, and — of particular interest for this post — resource gathering.

Right now, players can gather resources in two ways: salvaging and mining. Salvaging is focused on breaking down ships, and while there might be some hand-waving involved to fit salvaging into this patch’s narrative, the real focus is probably on mining, and might fall into the column of “we need these minerals/ores, and the more you harvest and contribute to the cause, the more your participation meter goes up”. This is a mechanic that CIG already deployed a few patches ago when players were asked to move cargo for one of the four main corporations in Stanton, or the Pyro gang affiliations players could choose to support when Pyro was first released. The point isn’t the event itself, but what it means for mining to be included as a first-tier mechanic in the event.

I went out last week in my Prospector to my usual asteroid field to get a handle on what mining is like in 4.5. I hadn’t actually done mining since the ATLS-GEO (mining mech suit) was released, and even then it was only to kick the tires on the new vehicle and wasn’t a long-term game loop. Prior to that, I can’t even remember when I went out mining as a primary activity, but it must have been a long time ago because I was very disappointed by the state of mining in 4.5. I was having a hard time finding decent mineable in space, and while ground mining worked out better, there were still a whole lot of bugs that cut short a lot of my attempts. That is partially on me because I haven’t been keeping up with the changes made to the mining profession, but it’s also partially on CIG for their meager and spastic realignment of mining during a period when they obviously had no intention of nailing it down.

By including mining in this event, I have a suspicion that CIG is now ready to nail it down because their plans for 2026 are forcing them to do so.

CIG posts a progress tracker on their website, and they’ll be the first to say that this is their planned roadmap and that everything is subject to change. Of course. As we see above, then, “crafting” is currently planned to be worked on now through the end of March. That’s good, but what does that have to do with mining?

Planet tech V5+ is going to allow CIG to create better planets and moons by defining planetary conditions and letting the system — creatively known as “Genesis” — build those bodies based on numbers. Biome creation has been the poster child for this new system as we’ve been treated to visually striking demos of savannahs, mountains, swamps, tundra, and ice caps, but it’s beneath the surface that I’m slowly and agonizingly getting to for the purpose of this post.

If you’ve played Star Wars Galaxies, then you’ve experienced the Greatest Crafting System Of All Time (So Far). In this system, players had to scout out areas of resource concentration, place harvesters, and check and refuel those harvesters over time. Extracted resources had quality levels, so players would always be seeking out the sources with the highest quality because the quality of the resource determined, in part, the quality of the items created with those resources. From what CIG has said in their CitizenCon presentations of yesteryear, they are looking to create something like this, where players will need to scan for resources, extract them (which will eventually deplete those deposits), and pay close attention to the quality of the resource they are using.

Since CIG is devising a planet tech which uses numbers rather than hand-deign to generate planets and moons, this system will also be in charge of placing and managing these deposits. They made a big deal out of saying that the planet tech will create “natural” locations for resources which will allow players to seek out visual markers such as certain types of rocks or certain areas of ground and be rewarded with resources represented by those visual markers, therefor resource quality distribution is going to be tied up in the Genesis planet generation technology.

So if we apply armchair math, CIG’s inclusion of “harvesting” in this latest patch event sounds to me like they want players to get (back) in the swing of mining. Since crafting is currently slated to arrive (early) this year — albeit in a “tier 0” form, no doubt — this tracks: players will need to harvest resources to use in crafting. Venturing out on a very thin and shaky limb, then, I’d submit that, although we don’t have it on the dev tracker, planet tech shouldn’t be too far behind…maybe at least in testing by the end of this year. That is a pretty exciting concept as it will significantly increase the eye-candy in a game that’s already brimming with it, but it won’t just be eye-candy if we need to make decisions on which biomes to visit based on what resources we need for our crafting jobs. This should bring mining — the oldest profession in the game, as a matter of fact — as close to it’s final design as it’s ever been which might actually make it the first system to reach a 1.0 version.

We can only hope, I guess, and knowing CIG it’s not going to be a smooth ride.