One thing that’s both good and bad about Star Citizen is that it’s a simulation. It’s good (for some) in that everything that a player can do feels like a person is doing it. Flying, repairing, waking up, eating and drinking…it’s all real-time. It’s bad (for some) in that everything that a player can do feels like a person is doing it. Flying, repairing, waking up, eating and drinking…it’s all real-time. Right now, my needle is somewhere closer to the “it’s bad” only because that, in order to get to the meat of a system, it takes a lot of individual steps and hell of a long time to get there.

Since I am impatient, I jumped into the public test universe (PTU) to take a look at the upcoming 4.7 patch. It’s not just impatience, though, as I’m treating this as a learning activity, to kick tires and see what I’ll need to be concentrating on when 4.7 hits the live servers.

Inventory

This is the new inventory. If you don’t know what’s new about it, don’t worry; just accept that it’s a step in the right direction, IMO, but needs improvement (Star Citizen’s classic advertising slogan). The inventory view is still split into left and right columns, but the columns are dynamic; were I wearing armor, you’d see the contents of that armor on the left. On the right, you see what’s in my home location stash. In this case, I’m browsing my armor selections, chest pieces specifically. I’d select an armor piece, then drag it to the port that surrounds the character model. It’s kind of hard to see, which is one of my grievances, but it works pretty well once I untrained myself from the inventory system that I had been used to after years of service. I managed to break the inventory once, using the search mechanism, but that might have been transient as I have been able to search since that time without issue. There’s a bit of a lag, but it’s Star Citizen, so…yeah.

Crafting

This is my current testing goal, but as of right now I haven’t been able to really give it the ol’ college try. The fabricator is an item that players can call up from their warehouses and place in their hangars or on their ships. They are available for purchase in the in-game shop, though on the PTU I had one standard and my Alliance Aid grant in my warehouse, the former probably there for frictionless testing.

Right now, my blueprints are limited. I don’t know if these are what players will find when 4.7 launches. I haven’t made the motions to gain any more (though there are some easy hoops to jump through to obtain others). In the above screenshot, I’m looking at the magazine blueprint for the P4-AR which happens to be my weapon of choice. It’s telling me that I need Hephastanite and Iron. This does have echoes of Star Wars Galaxies in that crafting is broken out into “parts”, with each part requiring a different material or (I assume, eventually) materials, plural. In this case, the magazine itself requires the Hephastanite, while the “core” requires Iron. I’m not sure which part are the bullets, but I’m assuming CIG is handwaving the specifics away in the interest of expediency and starter blueprints. See, I don’t have either material, which kind of sucks. So I have to go out and get some.

Mining and material quality

I headed out to a local Lagrange point station to bum around in the asteroid field looking for Hephs, Iron, and Aluminum (the last of which is also needed to make an actual P4-AR). As of 4.7, asteroids show up as their core material. In the above shot, I know I can get Aluminum. What I found, however, is that this is a representative label. There will be inert materials (useless in every way), but there might also be other materials that will probably be useful eventually, but not for my current goals. I had been focusing on finding rocks of Hephastanite, Iron, and Aluminum, but only managed to find two of the three types.

What’s also going to be a PITA is the material quality. As we craft, we can supply materials of differing qualities. The better (greater) the quality, the better the item’s stats will be. You can’t really see it in the screenshot, but at the time this was taken, my cargo bags were holding two types of Aluminum, one of a quality 429 (6.11 SCU) and one of a quality 325 (2.75 SCU). Quality does show when scanning the rocks; the purple outlined asteroid in the screenshot is registering as a 429 quality rock, so I know what I’m getting when I’m vacuuming up the particles. The issue, of course, is that the quality seems to be random. If I find an initial rock with a quality — say, 429 as above — then all Aluminum that I get from that rock will be q429. However, if I want more q429 then I’m going to be hard pressed to find a way to track that down in the universe. I’ll have to keep scanning all Aluminum rocks I find, or just take what I can get, use the best quality to make items, and leave the lower quality to “fill in the blanks” when I don’t have anything better. It’s still up in the air as to whether or not refining will allow for the boosting of quality values. At this point, normalizing quality across disparate rocks of the same type would be welcome, even if it’s just the average value of the different quality types being refined.

I have 53 minutes to go on my refinery job before I can get my materials, then I have to head out and find some Iron so I can try to craft some P4 magazines. I could source it from NPC shops if I were hell-bent on just trying the crafting aspect, but as an industry-focused player I want to know what it’s like to source the materials, farm to table, so to speak. It’s looking like it’s going to be a long road, this way, since finding the right rocks of decent quality is going to take up the lion’s share of exploration, trial, and error, but I guess that’s what we get for living in a simulated universe.