Star Citizen Live: Mining, Salvage, Tractors, OH MY!

Okay, the short version is everything. So I will probably forget some things, because the list is actually quite a bit bigger than I was imagining. I even wrote the summary for our Live Experience team of what actually changed, and that list got bigger than I expected, to be honest. But let's start with the resources. I think that is the biggest change, because it not only affects the mining itself, but it also has an impact on trading. Because right now resources have distinct locations in Stanton. That means we defined now seven standard materials that have seven different locations, or there can be a combination of those in those locations. And those standard materials or those standard resources you only find in those particular locations. For example, the standard is copper and iron. So those you will only find in dedicated locations throughout Stanton. And in addition to that, we introduced rarity to some resources. We have a common one, we have an uncommon one, and we have one rare one, which is Quantanium. So those are now more sparse in their general appearance. So that is the thing that you will notice at first sight. Another thing that is more hidden behind is that each resource now has its distinct density. So that means that even though the rocks look very similar in size in comparison to before, they will have now drastically different masses. So heavier elements will have a huge impact on the mass of the rock. And that actually helped us a bit, because that made certain materials now more viable for bigger ships or bigger lasers, while others are now better suited for smaller ships or single-player ships and smaller lasers. So that was already a big win for us. In addition to that, we also introduced a new mineable that is called Janalite. That is something that we introduced for FPS mining solely, and it's located in the new caves. Basically we wanted to make mining outside of prison more attractive, and now we have this super rare mineable there that will earn you a fortune if you find it. And on the resource side, not only did we update the distribution of the standard materials and the materials in general, we also adjusted all the probabilities of each of the sub-elements. Well, for us, we have a better overview of what resources are where. But for players, I think it's more fun to actually look for certain materials than it was before.

They'll have to discover a completely new distribution, and it might be annoying or exciting depending on everyone's perspective on life. One thing I wanted to add, one thing that we definitely added, and I hope this helps, is a lot of improvements on the mining UI and UX. So there's a lot of small little things that just added together make it more user-friendly. They make it easier for a beginner to understand exactly what's happening, why is it happening, and all.

On the resources there are even things or rule sets that are still uncovered. So I leave it up to the community to uncover those rule sets, because there might be some things that would help you to look for certain materials in a more targeted way. But that's all for the resources. Dan already talked about the UI changes, so actually a shout-out to a person that is ruling all our UI work in our team, that is Bastian. So Bastian did an amazing job with all the UI work that we now have done for the update. So for the UI, as Dan stated, it's now more user-friendly. So we have clear indicators for what you actually have equipped. We now have a dedicated helper that tells you if you should actually try out the rock that you are facing or you should call in a friend, because it says impossible, and impossible means impossible for your current setup. So you definitely will need some help there. One more thing that I forgot, it's actually a huge list. One more thing I forgot is that we now have even different scaling for the resources. So beforehand we had very limited scaling for the size of the rocks you find on those planets. So now, if you're lucky, you even find those little nuggets that you don't even have to break. You can just scoop them up. So even if you were unlucky and didn't have the matching mining heads equipped, you at least got away with something. And that directly leads to the next big update, which was the mining heads. So what we did there is we basically started from scratch. So we mapped out all the resources and defined their own individual parameters, meaning each resource has its own way of affecting the resistance and its own way of affecting the optimal window or the instability and all those parameters that you know from the mining heads. And we mapped that against the mining heads. And then what we did was make some values exclusive for some of the sub-items, and basically did a full cleanup of all the items that we had and then mapped certain types of combinations and the mining heads towards those properties of the resources. So what we did is have one mining head where we calculated on our Excel sheets that it will work better with certain resources, while others won't have such a benefit there. Doesn't mean that they won't work, but it will be more challenging for players with certain laser combinations to crack open certain types of rocks.

So there are definitely some next steps that are already planned out, some that I don't want to talk about yet, but others that we can definitely talk about, which is crafting and refining. This distribution of the resources helps us drastically to already plan out all the next steps. As Dan so nicely always mentions, we really want to close out the loop, right? So you start mining, you pick up the resources, may it be mining, may it be salvage, then you bring it to your refinery, you refine it to the processed goods, and once you have it in the processed goods, you bring it to your crafting facility, crafting ship, crafting whatever, and then you create the requested items out of them, and then you can even circle back to recycling the goods that you created and bring them back into the loop. This is the ultimate goal. And with the current mining update, we are one step closer to achieving that, while I think we already mentioned that we are already working on the next steps in our team. So yeah, it's in active development. But now, talking about mining in particular, no, that's not the end of it. And the reason is because there are still some ships missing that were announced, and they should have their own treatment of how you play mining with those.

Things like the Orion. And I think there's also a lot of the things that are going to change. As we said, eventually it all leads to crafting and making your own items out of nothing. You start out of nothing with a ship and you get this. But there's a few very interesting things along the way. One of the closest things right now are going to be those mining sacks. We need to be able to eject, collect, put into a refinery, process all that or turn it into refined materials, take that to a manufacturing ship or sell it or whatever you want to do. So the main thing is we're seeing this as a mining operation. We're seeing this as a mining, refining, hauling, production, crafting, manufacturing operation that you can run. You can run it with two, three people, or you can run it on a full scale where you have 20 Prospectors, five refinery ships, three haulers, escort for all of them. It's all that thing. Once that ecosystem starts going, you're going to see some amazing operations in Star Citizen.

All these loops connect to form a chain. They all link into one, into another, into another. Work to do mining is also work that will affect crafting, will affect refining and stuff. It's all building out this industrial way of life in the Persistent Universe.

Exactly. And pretty much all of these industrial professions are going to feed into some form of refining slash crafting. That's kind of the pinnacle of everything, whether you do it from mining, whether you do it from salvaging, or any other system that's going to be coming down the line, picking lovely flowers because they have some oil that you can extract from them and use that to lubricate your machine guns or whatever. So it all feeds into this thing where you can produce your own items and create property. Hopefully a very flourishing economy where people trade whatever they produce today with whatever someone else produced.

I thought I'd leave this one to Torsten. This is his baby. He started this, he brought it to completion. From mining, I have a lot of things to say, because I started it and then Torsten is bringing it to completion. But for this one, I'd rather let Torsten take it.

So the question was where we are with it and how happy we are, and I'm really happy with what we have, especially with the short time that we actually got to work on that. I know you all have been waiting for it for quite some time, but actually the timeframe it was thrown at us was quite short. So I'm really happy with what we pulled out or what we achieved in that timeframe. I think I mentioned it already at some point that what I like the most about the salvage that was introduced with 3.18, so the hull scraping, is that it is such a nice contrast to all the other gameplay loops that we have. We have an action-based combat, we have mining that is now even more than before challenging in terms of itemization, planning and preparation and stuff like that. While hull scraping right now is: you jump into your Vulture or into your Reclaimer, you drive past some debris pieces, and you can just put on some music and relax and just scrape off the hull. I think good games are made out of a variety of systems that deliver on certain demands that you as the player have. Sometimes you might have had a rough day, so what you need is just sit back, relax, and I think hull scraping is the perfect loop for that. I'm really happy with where we're at. What I'm also proud of is that we managed to deliver our first glimpse of crafting. So having that in there with a filler station is also a very nice thing to have. So it's already a glimpse for all of you players. But yeah, that's what's to come.

I just wanted to fill in on this. It's kind of funny, because when we started working on this, there was a bit of a clash of ideas, which always happens with anything you're designing. Torsten was always trying to deliver this more chilled experience, just you and your ship in the middle of nowhere, just scraping whatever you found. And I was like, no, no, it needs to be challenging. It needs to explode if you touch a wire or something like this. And indeed, you need to have the variety. If everything explodes the second you do something wrong, you always have that tension. So it's nice to have the ups and downs. There will be chances for explosions and stuff like this with other gameplay or maybe with other parts of salvage. But yeah, it's nice to have a mix of everything. And I do have to add to what Torsten just said: the team pulled off an amazing feature. There were a lot of dependencies on other teams, and it came at a time when a lot of heavy tech was coming and it kind of influenced the delivery, and they did an amazing job.

Actually on that, before it's forgotten, because without the weapon feature team that did the pre-phase work and the VFX team that pulled off the amazing damage map work that was required for that, we wouldn't be sitting here and talking about this. So also huge kudos to the weapon feature team and to the VFX team that really helped us achieve what we have now.

So hull scraping for now is, I want to say, at rest, but that's not entirely true, because it will get touched while we are working right now on the munching aspect. So some improvements will come with our munching release, but it will also affect the hull scraping part of it. So the next step for salvage was what was released right now in 3.19, which is the item stripping. So that is already a huge step forward for the salvage gameplay loop. And I think it was even one of the most requested, most waited for, however you want to phrase it. But I personally am really happy about it, because it ties in really nicely with all the features that we internally work on. So the synergy is really, really nice, even with refueling in the end, because you can switch out your fuel pods. There are still things that we need to do there. It was already called out in several points on Spectrum or in our community videos or in other channels that there are still a lot of things that we need to do to make it work perfectly. We are aware, and we are working on that. But then the next big step, and I think that will be the most fun, and I'm personally looking forward the most to that, is actually the munching. Every Reclaimer owner will be happy to actually be able to use their claw at some point on any debris ship. But not only is it important for those ship owners, it's also important now with PES. So I think that is even more important than any gameplay right now. We need cleanup. And there's no better way to do cleanup than to gamify it. Have it rewarding in the sense of, yeah, you destroy the ships. It's fun to destroy those ships or those debris pieces, and then you convert them into resources, and then you are either able to sell those for just profit or you use the resources you gather for crafting coming in the very far future.

Sorry, one thing, this is an important... it's not a shift in mentality, it's a good mentality that we've always had, but I think it shows, especially with PES. Yes, we filled up the universe with a lot of wrecks and a lot of junk, but what we're doing right now, we're starting to introduce the gameplay that's going to clean it up, and munching is just one of those things. We know there's a big mess happening on the space stations, on the landing zones. So we will be introducing systems that also will tackle that. But we don't want to just clean it up faster, just remove it and basically destroy PES. What we're going to do is involve the player in it. So if the location is cleaning, then the players will have a chance to do that and gain some rewards from that.

Not at all. There are several issues that we were facing, right? So I think the biggest one is actually how do we get items comfortably out of the inventory and then place them on your ships, right? So your station inventory, how do you get the items out of there and then have them accessible. And there we had a lot of painful sessions. I was talking, I think in our last ISC, that we had the Cutlass Black prepared with all the mining heads in there. Yeah, we can do that. We can cheat. We can spawn items. We don't have to do the annoying part of actually equipping one of your ships and then pulling the items off. So this is something that we uncovered. But I think the most drastic one is, and me as a player, I'm really not so happy about this decision, but me sitting here with my CIG hat on, I think that's the only decision we could come up with: deactivating tractor beams again in the green zones. Because in one of our earliest Fleet Week test sessions, we had players basically ripping out all the items, and the entire Fleet Week hall was just impassable because everything was lying around. And that's not fun for players, even though you couldn't even carry the big weapons out through the elevator, so you didn't even have a benefit from it. It was just bringing havoc to the world and making everyone else's lives miserable. So yeah, we had to jump in and come up with this temporary solution and deactivate the tractor beam in the green zones. But yesterday we activated it at least again in the hangars. Shout-out to Jaro, who just jumped in and did a quick fix for that.

I think people were going into the showroom and pulling the components out of the display ships. Is that what I saw?

Yeah. Even from the display stands, shops weren't secure anymore. They'd tear apart every shop and every item in every shop. And also because in Fleet Week we always allow you to enter those ships and explore the ships that you don't own, and that also means you can sit in their pilot seat. A crucial aspect of the tractor beam functionality is that you first have to unlock the items, so that we don't have players griefing one another and just basically tearing your ship apart even though you don't want it. So in Fleet Week you could sit in the pilot seat, unlock the items, and then basically strip every item away, and then another person would come in and be like, why does the ship look so empty?

This is what we always do. We add new things into a very complex environment and set of systems, and there will be some points of failure. And then we look at those, we try to fix them. With the tractor beams being usable in green zones, there will have to be some updates to the law system that needs to support some things. As Torsten said, the shops will need some updating. This is what always happens. You try something and then you realize there's a lot of things that get set in motion. It's an avalanche, and then you have to kind of get all the pieces fixed.

And that's because we build everything systemically, though.

No unscripting here.

All as functionally and diegetically within the universe as possible, so that those mysterious interactions are what generate emergent gameplay, but they also generate a lot of the, oh, okay, we're going to need something to address that. Turning them off in green zones is a temporary thing.

Yeah, it's always emergent gameplay for the players and headaches for us. We'll get them done, and we'll move on to the next one.

So we cannot fix it for all the items right now, but today we got it working internally that you can move at least the sub-items for the mining heads more comfortably out of your station inventory onto the ground, pick them up, carry them, and bring them over to your ship. But there are some issues that we still have to solve. Once we get that sorted, we will probably push it out. But for the other items, especially for the bigger ones, it's more complicated. There is no way right now, even with the tractor beam deactivated in the green zones, to prevent players from messing up your spaces or even the stations. So if you have a giant power plant and you just drop it in Grim HEX, you could basically block all the ASOP terminals, and then no one would be able to access them, because tractor beams won't work and you cannot push them around. So this is definitely not something that we can do, with all the issues that we pointed out with the tractor beam being activated in the green zones. So sadly, we cannot do that. But also we want to do it right, which means that we are dependent on the freight elevators, because the freight elevators are basically the proper connection between your virtual inventories and your real space. Because pulling something out of thin air is weird, put it this way. So you definitely want to have the freight elevators there.

So dropping, no, but using the freight elevator to pull them out and then using them or storing them in the cargo hold, yes. Because as described, we don't want this magic appearance of items, so we really want to wait for the proper system, which is the freight elevator, to pull out those entities into the real world.

They will definitely drop from the ship. So once you fill them in your Prospector, you'll be able to drop them at a refinery with a tractor beam. They'll just pick them up, take them, empty them, refine them, drop the empty one, you pick it up and put it in your Prospector, and so on.

So you can already detach the mining sacks from the Prospector and the MOLE. You can already put them on the cargo grid. So this is also something that we are actively working on: making them detectable by the commodity stores so that you can sell them, but also for the refinery, so that you place them on someone else's ship and then fly to a refinery, and that person is then able to start the refining process for the Prospector owner. So it's also important to us that it's all tying in with the group gameplay, that members of your group can actually do the same actions as you would as the owner.

So it should work that every person that you allow to handle the content should be able to handle that content. And this is something that we are working on, because what we also don't want is, if you're doing group trade routes and you have to split the content of your ship or whatever, that it has one dedicated owner; it can have multiple owners that are valid there.

So a way to designate: I'm giving this saddlebag full of Quantanium to this person and it is now theirs and they have full rights to it, versus somebody has taken it and now they would be a criminal.

Correct. I think the first step in this will be to allow party members basically to share ownership and not to get criminally charged; it's not theft if you're part of the same group.

And then for the criminals who get the CrimeStat for intercepting a saddlebag, they might have trouble selling it at a more reputable vendor. But as new locations come online that are less legally friendly, there might be other opportunities for them to sell their misbegotten goods.

Of course, that is always the plan.

So in our first iteration, the munching will not provide RMC. The explanation would take a bit longer, because what we actually need to have the proper materials is physicalized materials, so that each component the ship is made of is aware of which material it is made of. So if you break apart a ship, the piece knows exactly what it is made of, and then you munch it and you actually get the exact components of what it was made of. This is something that is more complicated to do than what we are currently working on. Currently we will be working on something where it converts it to a dedicated or defined mix of materials. So we don't know yet what the actual part is made of, but that will come once the physicalized materials come in. So with that, we don't plan to have RMC be part of that, because we want to leave it exclusive to the hull scraping. But for the future, even RMC as a material might look a bit different or get a bit more variety into it.

But ultimately what I heard is that it's really important to both strip and munch whenever possible.

Yes, but it's not a requisite, right? You can munch, but you lose some material or some profit.

It might be, with a Reclaimer, if you have enough things to munch, you're just going to skip the stripping, because you just have so much stuff to munch that it's maybe more lucrative. But if you have only one wreck, then it's worth it to squeeze every ounce of resources out of that.

So for now it is a single-target beam, and the reasons are more complex as well, because if we allowed the ownership of multiple items, that would get really complicated with physics and synchronizing those physics. So we decided for now that we will just go for one target per beam. But on the other side, we were talking about how we can utilize the technology that we have with the tractor beam to affect multiple objects. I think Dan brought it up at some point, these distortion fields or something like that, right?

Sorry, not much to say about that right now. It's still too early. Again, this is stuff where at this point it's in, I would call it ideation. It hasn't even been prototyped yet. So confirming anything at this point would be a bit premature. So let's see where we get to. We'll update as soon as we have more.

You don't want an honest answer from me on this one. But one thing I wanted to point out: it's not only the Argo MOLE, right? We didn't focus only on Argo MOLE multi-crew mining. We also had Prospector multi-crew mining and even multiple-MOLE mining in mind, right? There are areas in Stanton where it's more viable to have multiple Prospectors, versus areas in Stanton where it's more viable to have the MOLE running your mining business. So no, we didn't forget about the solo miners, and no, we didn't forget about the solo miners that from time to time want to work in a group with other solo miners. This is accounted for in our balancing update. It's not solely buffing the MOLE, as I've read so far. There was a decision behind that, which was basically buffing both ships in their own way. Let's put it this way.

In different ways.

So right now, how we originally designed mining, we just made all of our harvestables, which mineables are part of, static. And it was the simple thing to do back in those days. And I think now we're starting to get to the point where with the tractor beam and all these features, there is a point in making it dynamic. So until now, and even right now, if you just crash into a fresh mineable with your ship, it doesn't matter if you crash a Bengal carrier, that rock is not moving. But at this point, we can start looking into having them movable. If you have a tractor beam strong enough to move a ship of the same mass as the rock, there's no reason it couldn't move that rock. We already saw some things happening when lootable boxes were tractor-beamable. So we know there's some small problems there that we still need to overcome, but it is doable. So we're probably going to be heading in that direction.

I feel like, if I'm allowed to speak for you, I've known you and Torsten long enough to know that if there's a way to make towing asteroids around possible and relatively safe and not balance-breaking, we'll probably pursue it.

Wait until they tow them at really ludicrous speeds and crash them into stations. Just wait for that. That is the first thing everyone will do.

To see whether you can bring it with you into quantum.

We'll at least try it.