Maximilian Keilich

Like Sebastian explained, we do talk to the engineers, right? They ask us what we would need to create underwater biomes. And then it's a back and forth. We make some white box kelp meshes, for example. And then we say, OK, we need them to sway in the water. And if that's not something that they've done yet, they have to make that and come back to us. And that's the process that we have for creating this. Obviously I don't want to take anything away from their upcoming river special, which will touch on the underwater stuff. But we did look into that a little bit to support them early on so they know what we eventually need. Basically, we want to scatter stuff around bodies of water. We want to have different vegetation underwater, different rocks. How do the rocks behave in comparison to planet surface rocks? Just so that the player sees what he or she would expect to see if they go underwater.

So these conversations about underwater stuff are happening now?

I mean, it's a process, right? It's a development process. It starts somewhere, right? Eventually, they ask us. But I don't want to spoil anything, right?

It has come up, though, with rivers and players walking into the river and them dying feels a bit weird. So, sparking conversations about underwater.

We would very much love to do that. Earth is obviously the big goal we eventually want to get to. There's a lot of things that still need to be solved to be able to do anything as diverse as Earth. But I think we can definitely already do something that's more diverse than single-biome planets. And I think we're already doing that for the most part. For the future, we'll definitely do more diverse planets. And we'll also come back to existing ones and add more diversity as the tech evolves and allows us to do stuff like that, like rivers and waterfalls. Once those are going to be a thing at scale, we'll definitely come back to them. And probably also make some biomes that go along with them, just so they're nice. But all the other stuff, we all want to do that. It's just, more or less, all the interesting biomes, like a swamp, you definitely end up being in a place where you want terrain displacement, like snow or mud you walk through and wade through, and get the player trekking through and leaving a depression in the mud, stuff like that. A lot of interesting and exciting things we do want to do and we hope to get to in the near future or in the far future, we'll see, but it's still the goal. Until we've done Earth, I think we aren't there yet, tech-wise and content-wise. So it's definitely the goal and we will just get more and better the longer we do it, but there's still a ways to go.

If you look at how we started with Cellin and Daymar and Yela, they were technically like Star Wars planets, right? They only had one thing. And then we tried to push it with every new release. And then eventually we had microTech, which was very different. You have the icy, snowy parts and then the lusher regions with the trees. So I don't think it's a spoiler because people saw some of that already during CitizenCon, but I feel like Pyro and Nyx will push the biome diversity to a degree that's different and better than what we have right now. So I think people will enjoy that when they eventually see it.

Sometimes we do have these things happen where you have a weird bug, right? But then the fans really like it. We have this one example, it's called the scatter rock, I think that's the name of it, and one day Sebastian sent me a thread from the forum and he was like, oh, was this a point of interest or was this a bug? And people complained that this huge overhang plate on Magda, I think it was, was gone. And apparently it became this travel destination for people to check out. I don't know if we took it out on purpose or if someone just tweaked a setting in the procedural generation and it disappeared, right? But if we look at that, it just looks wrong, right? But then obviously the players see it and feel like, oh, what's this? Looks different. That's super cool. Let's go there. Let's meet up. So we did feel a bit bad that it disappeared, and we brought it back. But in general, we also want more interesting cliff formations, more points of interest for people to find. But like you say, we could build that, but there's so much space that we would need to fill. And until we have a solution that lets us confidently fill all of it at the same quality bar, we don't try to do that. Because then it just sticks out like a sore thumb, right? You have this one area that's neatly dressed, and then you go five minutes to the right and it looks a bit procedural again. So that's a tricky balance.

I guess the plan is that you only find certain mineables on certain planets, right? So that there's an incentive for a player to visit the Pyro system instead of going to Stanton again, right? Because you need a very specific resource. We're not in the loop, I think, on the whole economic aspect of it. If they need us to make different assets, like new harvestables, new mineables, we're happy to do that, right? But I don't think the plan is that you can find everything everywhere all the time.

I think we already did some new harvestables for Pyro in the past. It's been a while now since we started work on Pyro. So I think they exist, but it's been over a year since we worked on those, maybe more.

That's not a spoiler, right? OK, we made some new stuff. We made new content for a new system.

It is worth noting, though, that while there certainly should be things that are unique to Pyro, these systems have been explored and traversed for decades in our fictional timeline, sometimes hundreds of years. So there's going to be cross-pollination. There are going to be people who bring melons from one system and plant them in another system, with these colonial outposts and stuff like that. So I think folks can expect a mixture of things that are unique to the Pyro system and things that are shared with Stanton. I mean, even the stuff in Stanton, if you look at the lore of some of the harvestables that you see in Stanton, the fiction behind them originated in other systems and they were brought to Stanton in the lore. So there's going to be some cross-pollination, and that includes the fauna as well, because settlers bring cows with them, horses with them and stuff like that.

So I guess I could start by saying that, at least personally, I guess each one of us has a lot of crazy ideas we would like to see for caves, like lava caves under a volcano would be awesome. But of course, as we talked about, there are tech dependencies. Ice caves, fungi caves where you have a lot of bioluminescence going on, stuff like that. I personally would love to see that, but I guess...

Right now we have rocky caves, right? So we definitely will need more archetypes for caves, because we can't put a rocky cave on, I don't know, the icy regions of microTech. So that will need its own cave. And we've done work on that.

You're allowed to say that we're working on new cave archetypes.

I never know what I'm allowed to say and what not. We have plans to extend the current cave systems and add more archetypes. So rocky is what we have, but we want to improve the look of the rocky caves. Then desert caves that will fit nicely on Daymar, which obviously are going to look way different than the rocky caves. Then we're going to have, hopefully, caves that are more overgrown, like moss and lots of foliage, ice caves, and acidic caves.

It wasn't one of us, but that's more a limitation of the system, where it can't differentiate between the golf cart vehicle that we have and the rover, for example. So we understand that that's frustrating. And it's also tricky for us to get that right with some of the randomization values that we have, where a small rock that the golf cart would get stuck on, or that you would expect the golf cart to get stuck on, but the rover to drive through... We have to decide on one or the other. For now. Eventually, the system is going to get improvements. It's going to automatically check, for example based on the bounding box, if an asset is supposed to have collision or not have collision. But for now, we understand it's a bit of a problem. So we try to avoid that. Little succulents make the vehicles flip, which is unfortunate.

And we can't wait for the succulents to start exploding when you drive over them. Hopefully it will happen.

We've heard the feedback in the past, and I think we try nowadays to keep in mind that there needs to be a good balance, right? It can't all be covered in boulders and rocks to get stuck on. So we also went back, and I hope the fans and the players will see that, we did go back to the old moons and try to have more drivable space in there. But for us, it's a struggle, because obviously we want to cover everything nicely and have something interesting everywhere. But I also understand that if you want to have a race and you get stuck every five meters, that sucks. But for example, on Pyro and Nyx, we did keep that in mind from the get-go. So there is a good balance of biomes where you immediately know, okay, this is one where driving is going to be tricky. And then you have another one where it's like, okay, this is a good one to drive through, to kind of guide you a bit. So we're doing better on that.

You can say it's the one you worked on.

I'm going to say Pyro 2 for that.

And I'll say Pyro 4.

Why Pyro 2, Daniel?

So the thing about Pyro is that I feel the planets feel unique themselves. They have an identity, I think. And Pyro 2 mostly because it was a planet I worked on and it was the first planet I worked on for Star Citizen. But also because it is a more deserty kind of planet with a mix of other stuff going on. And I like the color palette that it brings and the vibe in general.

And Max, why Pyro 4?

Like I said before, it has more biome diversity, which is nice. And I feel like it's a good mix between more alien-looking, otherworldly biomes, but it still feels grounded. And I like the colors of it.

Pyro 3. I liked working on the clouds and the moss, mostly, and the colors are great. I think black and yellow just works.

Pyro 3 was the one from the CitizenCon demo, right?

Yeah.