ohboyohboyohboy! While for many (myself included) today, January 20th, is given over to the pending World of Warcraft Midnight pre-patch, the other half of my mind is on what’s wending its way through the colon that is Star Citizen’s PTU and Tech Preview channels.

Currently in the PTU (public test universe) we have features such as the low-light visibility on some ships (always some ships and never all ships) which is, quite frankly, long overdue and also unfortunately is the best item from the PTU patch nodes. We also have the new mission arc, “Clearing the Air”, the exciting-for-some-reason-to-me “gold standard” pass on the RSI Aurora, and what CIG is calling “price surging” tests. There are some other things being teased through the Star Citizen Leaks Discord such as an image of what appears to be the upcoming Levski “dungeon” area:

As well as some data mining which lists keybinds for base building.

Outside of the patch notes, however, CIG is trying to get blueprints working so that they can push a time-limited, audience-limited test of crafting into the PTU.

Although this is “Tier 0” and comes with an additional footnote of what will and will not be working in this preview and subsequent release, this is a massive milestone for Star Citizen. Crafting was mentioned as the primary mode of progression in the game, so if progression is what draws you into an MMO, then this is your wake-up call to lend an ear to what’s going on here. Crafting will allow players to make items which are better than stock versions, and to customize items so that no two editions of the same base object behave the same. Eventually this will spread from firearms, ship weapons, ammo, and armor all the way up to entire ships — if you and/or your org can field the right amount of quality resources to make them, that is.

But this isn’t a post about crafting; I’ll circle back to it once I am able to get my own hands on it to be sure. Instead, it’s about CIG’s cadence with their releases, Squadron 42, and what actual, focused game development looks like after almost two decades of missteps, mistakes, and enough Kool Aid to drown a city.

Meandering Towards Bedlam

Star Citizen’s development has been…interesting, which is word I chose as a polite shorthand for what I’d rather say. Under normal circumstances, any project managed the way Star Citizen has been managed would have folded years ago, but CIG has something that similar projects lack: a completely unhinged fan-base, possibly made up mostly of older men with deep pockets and no self control, who really love flying Internet space ships. Star Citizen has pulled in enough money to keep going even through years of mismanagement and general mistakes, both internally and externally — I am assuming — and I firmly believe we have arrived at this point in time as much by accident as we have through persistence and skill. Quite simply, Star Citizen is shaping up to be the statistical realization of giving enough monkeys enough typewriters.

Squadron 42 is Real

I mean, it has to be because there’s no good reason to believe that it isn’t, but CIG has said over the years that Star Citizen, while it was receiving updates and patches, was playing second fiddle to Squadron 42. This odd situation is reminiscent of Epic’s Fortnite situation in that what was originally advertised to consumers (Star Citizen, and Fortnite’s Save the World mode) had overnight switched to something completely different that no one had asked for (Squadron 42, and Fortnite: The Enshitification and Money Printing Machine).

We have been told that development on SQ42 was winding down and that it was entering into its “polish phase”. That meant that developers who were dedicated to SQ42 could be moved to work on Star Citizen, satisfying all of those trolls who believe that the speed and accuracy of a game’s development can be solved by just “throwing more people at it”. In this case, they unfortunately may be correct because it seems that CIG’s 2025 progress, as well as the appearance of crafting in the tech preview/PTU channel, and now hints of base building, seemed to coincide with the announcement of SQ42’s release target. While correlation is not causation, I don’t think we’d be seeing the movement on Star Citizen if A) Squadron 42 wasn’t close to it’s long-awaited beta phase, and B) developers/artists/audio folks were not being moved from SQ42 to Star Citizen.

Is This What I’ve Always Wanted?

It’s kind of hard to imagine Star Citizen actually moving ahead like this. To contrast, I’ve been keeping 1/27th of an eye on the development progress of Star’s Reach, which started about 2 centuries after Star Citizen did, and which seemed to be flying along on it’s own development journey compared to the former. I would sometimes look at Star’s Reach and wonder what it would have been like had Star Citizen not just fucked up so many times over the years, had stuck to it’s better-than-the-Kickstarter-but-still-less ambitious guns, and didn’t live by the mantra of “hold my beer” before releasing every patch.

It feels like we’re finally seeing “actual development” from CIG where Star Citizen is concerned. For some, it’s too little, too late. For others like myself, it’s a source of cautious excitement because I know that CIG’s gotten a head of steam before, only to blow it due to an apparent inability to stay on course. Any course. Engineering, released just before the 2025 Holiday break, was a visit from Broken Patches of Updates Past, and the upcoming 4.6, resource gathering updates, and crafting could be another iteration of CIG’s usual “Tier 0” fire and forget. We just don’t know right now, and won’t know until about patch 4.7 when we can look back and assess whether or not CIG is benefitting from the C-Suite shake up a few years back and the influx of SQ42 worker bees. But if I close my eyes and listen to the soothing sounds of patch note promises, I can imagine a Star Citizen that I’ve always dreamed of, finally downloading to my hard drive. It’s tempting to be lulled into a sense that CIG is finally on the right path, and that their meandering way can be forgiven as it seems the end is in sight, but who knows what the next few months will bring?