Star Citizen Live: EU PU Gameplay Features

The EU PU feature team is responsible for, I'd like to say, a lot of things. A lot of other feature teams have very strict areas of responsibility, like the Actor Feature Team. They really focus on the actor and everything the actor can do, or the Vehicle Feature Team, everything about ships. We tend to take a bit of everything and a bit of the things that don't fall into those categories. So you guys saw us do mining; while that you could consider a vehicle feature team thing, it was something completely working on its own. It worked for FPS, it worked for ships, it worked for vehicles like ground vehicles. So it wasn't falling in any of the other teams. So we took it, we made it, and hopefully you guys enjoyed it. Other things that are falling into here are continuations from mining: all the mining gadgets, stuff like this, refining stations, any type of refining on a ship. We're also going to be looking into things like long distance probing. We're going to be looking into making the Starfarer into a refueling ship. So again, it's not how a ship flies exactly, but there's stuff that a ship can do. It's closer to the gameplay element of that ship rather than the second-to-second flight controls or AFCS and stuff like this. So yeah, there's a lot of things. Besides that, we're doing a lot of the work that's going to go into what we call the overarching thing here called environmental gameplay. These are smaller things that happen in the environment that make the environment feel alive. One of the tiny little things that we're looking into right now is a laser tripmine. Yeah, it is a gadget and it can be considered a weapon, but initially we're going to be using level designers who will place it in various places, or mission designers, and be able to create a blockage for the player. The player has to circumvent it in a different way, or maybe use a crate, push it with a tractor beam into the laser's path, that trips the mine and then you can pass, stuff like this. It's a lot of small little things like traps, things like this, that allow us to make the world richer and make the player not just walk from A to B. They have to be cautious. This is a hostile environment. It's been rigged by other people. It's been trapped. It's unstable. When you walk in a wreck, you expect that wreck to start squeaking and collapsing on you. When you go into a cave, it shouldn't just be a walk in the park. There should be things that happen. There's things that fall on you. You have to be careful. So all of this environmental gameplay is a big umbrella under which a lot of smaller little things fall. As part of environmental gameplay also, you could call it, is loot generation. How do we generate loot in the world? We generated mineables and harvestables and stuff like this, but we never generated, like, how do I spawn a shotgun in a crate? And how do I make sure that every time I open that crate, there's something else in there? It's not the same crate with the same shotgun. It's going to be, I don't know, money, it's going to be an armor, it's going to be a bottle of vodka, it's going to be dirty underwear, whatever you happen to find when you open a crate. And that also is something that I think we'll be having a bit more discussions on, because it's one of the subjects we put on the forum and hopefully someone has some valid questions on that subject. So again, there's a lot of things that make gameplay work properly and fun for the players.

Well, long distance probing is basically a system that we want to introduce where players have a ship somewhere in space and they can send out probes and place them anywhere in the same system. And those probes will ping and reveal basically objects that are of interest there, or anything that might be there. And those objects could be mining places, derelict stations, ships, anything that we could imagine that you could find there and we could spawn. And yeah, so you find something, then what you have to do there is triangulate. So you have to bring the probes into position so you get a more precise signal on that. And once the signal strength is enough, you can either decide to generate a quantum beacon that you can basically jump to. You could store that information and sell it to other players. Or what we aim to have there is an analysis gameplay where you basically have a signature, a unique signature of what you found there, and then you compare it on your ship. The drone or the probe sends back the signature and you sit at your PC on the ship and you compare the signature with everything that you either bought or you collected yourself in the library. And then you get an idea: OK, this might be a Gladius, this could be a mining field. And then you can still decide: OK, I jump there and I look at it, or the risk is too high, I don't jump there. So that's the rough rundown of it.

I think what's important here, what we're going to try to introduce here, is that uncertainty. You'll be able to see the graph of... it's like seeing the drive signature of a ship. You kind of know the EM, you know the IR, you'll get the curve of how strong each part is. And you might look at it and go like, this looks very similar to an Idris. And when you jump there, you might have a surprise that it's a lot of smaller ships or a fleet or something like this. Or it might look like a hauler that you might want to pirate. And you get there and, oh, no, it's actually an Idris with a lot of its stuff turned off, waiting for prey to jump in, because its signature, once they turn off some of the things on the ship, might look a lot smaller than what it actually is. So it opens up a lot of exploration for a lot of players. It also opens up a lot of options for traps and creating interesting scenarios where you're kind of going like, well, let's see what happens and who jumps for the bait here. And it's up to the players, once they get the full analysis, to figure out what that thing is. They can jump, they cannot jump, they can sell the information, they can sell it as, oh, I found this very rich asteroid field. And when that person buys it, looks over the analysis, they go, oh, yeah, that looks like an asteroid field. But when they jump there, it's not an asteroid field. I don't know, it's a booby trap. There's a turret on every rock there. And as soon as you jump in, it goes up. Because the guy that did the analysis didn't go all the way to figure out everything and actually jump there and see himself what is in that space.

What is important for us is definitely that it's player skill based. The more data you collected, the more precise your predictions are. So the longer you have been doing that already, the more precise your data is, the higher the value is that you can ask for if you sell that.

And the risk-reward goes both ways. Let's say you're scanning for something. No, it's not scanning, it's probing for something. And you find a thing and then you go like, oh, I want the last detail. I'm going to spend half an hour getting that. By the time you spend half an hour on it, it might be gone, because that might be a ship, it might be a player, it might be an NPC that just goes away. It's not going to wait there forever for you to get all the data about it. So it's up to you how much time you want to invest in that analysis part, or do you risk and jump, or do you risk it jumping away. It's all up to the player.

It's going to be localized to the solar system. And even then, you won't be able to just go like, yeah, do the entire solar system. You have to choose it. You'll look on the map and go like, well, there's been a lot of things happening here. I'm going to send my probes in that area and see if I narrow it down. It might go there. It might be nothing. Or it might be something you don't care about.

The probes still have traveling time and a defined amount of fuel they can take. So that is a restriction. But yeah, the goal is that one solar system is basically the entire range of one probe. So no going to another solar system with a probe. So you have to travel to another system and then probe there.

And also what will happen is we'll have different types of probes. So you might get a probe that covers almost the entire system, but the precision of that probe is going to be so bad, it's just going to give you an overview. So if you want to narrow it down, you're going to have to use very precise probes with a very limited range.

The system is generic enough that it can do that. But right now, we focus on that and make that work. And then we can think ahead.

But it's a valid question. But I think there's more of a problem of: do your engines actually function underwater? Because if you sink like a rock, you won't care about the atmospheric pressure if your engines are off. You're still going to sink eventually. There's no getting out of that. Unless we have a ship that has engines that are built for that.

A good thing is we have a system that can apply pressure damage, and it's built in a way that it could even create, in the future, some barotrauma damage effects. So it is actually aimed to have effects. The faster you have a switch of pressure, the more damage could happen, or different types of damage could happen.

So the idea came about as we noticed that the Actor Feature Team was working on looting. So the problem came that they were working on looting, but we didn't have anything to loot. They were thinking, yeah, loot from the character you just killed. But that is just a part of the puzzle. We would like to have a rich world in which, if I enter an underground facility, well, there's stuff there I can just pick up, I can just loot, I can steal. So there's the legal part of looting, where you go there and you find things that belong to no one; it's yours now. Then there's the stealing part of looting, as in this crate of goodies is in someone's house. He is there. If he sees you do it, that's theft. So the loot generation pretty much covers the generation of various types of items based on tags. And I think I can let Jacob talk a bit more about this part, because he's doing more of the engineering and how that works. So all I can say is that it just pretty much picks from a big pool of items that are tagged in a certain way, the ones that match that location. So if it's a desert medical outpost, I expect to find medical things. I expect to find crates that are, I don't know, refrigerated so they don't melt. If it's a beating heart inside, it doesn't melt in the desert. It needs to have medical brands on the crates, and the items inside there to be branded from any of our medical companies. So all of this stuff, we start with the location and we do various spawn points inside that location, like on a shelf, where it can spawn. We put a point, and that's where a crate can spawn, where we tag how big it can be. And we can choose how we do this, where I can choose a medical location where I just spawn military equipment, because that's what I want. That's what my scenario needs. But in general, we want to be like, well, this is a medical location. It has a medical tag. That tag is propagated to... let's say it's an outpost, the entire outpost. All the spawn points get that tag. Automatically, everything in there spawns medical things. Now, let's say I have a toilet in there. Generally, we don't want medical things to spawn in the toilet. So inside that room, I just go, hey, you are now a toilet. So everything gets a toilet tag now instead of the medical tag. Every crate that spawns in there will have to be toilet specific. I might find janitorial equipment. So when I open that crate, the UI will show me, well, there's a mop. There's whatever janitorial equipment is needed in that area.

Yeah, very, very similar. In fact, in terms of generating the loot containers, it is the same system, just being used in a different way. And like Dan was saying, it's designed to be very, very flexible. The main goal with the implementation at the moment is to make sure that we give our level and mission designers all the flexibility they need to create whatever loot situation they want in a particular area. So yeah, the designers can define what we call a loot archetype, which is a collection of tags that the items should have, maybe some tags that they absolutely shouldn't have. And then from this, the system will generate a loot pool of all of the items that match that archetype, to put in any containers that the designers give that archetype. But yeah, this will be flexible enough that it can take injected tags from the environment around it, like Dan was saying. So you put one of these containers that's got a weapons archetype, that just by itself would be able to spawn any weapon. And if you put that in a high-tech container, it can get a high-tech tag and then only spawn high-tech weapons. You put it in a pirate place, it'll only spawn pirate stuff. That's the idea. But the real focus is on making it extremely flexible and customizable for our designers, so that whatever situation they want, they can have.

That's entirely down to the designers setting up the areas, setting up the missions. It can be as varied as they want it to be. At the moment, just early stages of development, we've got 2,600 items that can be looted. And yeah, the designers can use the tags to filter down which ones of them should spawn where, when, why, all sorts.

I think this is a major difference probably from what we get to see in other games, where you get a loot table: this is the loot table, it's the chance that each item has of spawning into that chest. We've gone a bit different here, where it's based on what the designer puts. A designer can actually put on a crate just 'Behring green pistol'. And pretty much that crate is only going to spawn green Behring pistols, if the pistols are tagged correctly with green and Behring and pistol. So those tags can be very detailed, again, from a color to the actual manufacturer, to the type of weapon, to whatever we want to say about that pistol. So semi-automatic: we can say only semi-automatic weapons in this way. Or we can just leave the containers like, yeah, spawn whatever. It's up to the guys building the content. The system is made in such a way to be very flexible for this. Generally, we're going to try to make sense of it. And we don't want beating hearts spawning in an underground manufacturing facility. It makes no sense. So this is up to us to filter out the things that don't make sense, because otherwise it's going to be silly. It's going to look like a circus if you can get, I don't know, guns in a kid's playground. It doesn't make any sense.

So, I don't want to speak for the Actor Feature Team, because they're doing the looting from the actor, but as far as I know, don't quote me on this, you loot what the guy is wearing. It might not be worth looting, because he might be wearing a shit armor that's super heavy that might not even fit in your backpack, but if it's better than the one you're wearing, yeah, no problem, swap them around and you get a better armor now. If he has a weapon that you need, get that weapon. The part where we come into this... because we don't want to generate what the guy is wearing. It's weird if he wears a sniper rifle and a green armor, and suddenly it's a pink armor with a pistol. It makes no sense. It needs to be a one-to-one relationship. We try to be as believable as possible. Otherwise, this makes no sense. Where we can come in is: if the guy has a backpack or pockets or something like this, we can generate the loot inside those pockets. So the guy might be wearing really poor armor with a shitty weapon, but maybe he's an undercover agent, and inside he has a high-spec suit for whatever, that has no emissions, a silenced gun and stuff like that. So inside, it depends on how that character is tagged. So he might be tagged for shitty equipment on the surface, but really good stuff in his backpack. I mean, this is an exception. Normally, if they have shitty equipment, they're going to have shitty loot in the backpack. But we generate what's in the backpack, what's in their pockets. We also can generate now stuff for a mission, as in a key card on him, or a tiny note that, if you actually bother to open and inspect, might have a key code that you could open some things adjacent to him with, and stuff like this. But that is stuff we can generate from loot generation.

I was just going to say, yeah, it's what you see is what you get for the NPCs. If you see it, you can probably take it from them. But if you don't see it, in a backpack, then it'll get randomly generated according to all the loot archetypes, et cetera.

I would also like to mention something. As scanning comes online, this will be important, because you might figure out that guy has important loot in his backpack. He might look like a poor guy. He's worth killing, but you have to spend your time scanning him and figure out what he actually has rather than what he seems to have.

Well, right now they have the benefit of selling, which is not much of a benefit, sadly. We are working to correct that. They need to become more valuable. The other benefit is that you actually can consume some of them. You don't want to consume the Ranta dung or something like this. The goal is to start using them for manufacturing and science once we get to work on those parts. So once we get to work on those parts, the idea is that we start being able to extract certain materials from them that can be used to manufacture, I don't know, chemical drugs, explosives, things like this, oils for maintaining your weapon better, maybe removing some of the wear and tear, various things where it can improve gameplay. We never envisioned this to be a thing where you just go and you get the fruit and you can sell it for 10 UEC. No one wanted that. That's as far as we could go until our priorities shifted to something which was deemed more important. But the system is there to be used once the other puzzle pieces fall in place.

So basically, ship refining will be drastically different to the station refinery. On the station refinery, you bring in your materials, you wait for quite some time, and then you get the end product. For the ships, it is an active process, so the player that is basically running the refinery ship has to analyze the material that is coming in and then decide on the correct process. So imagine there's a scenario: the player has picked up minerals and metals and has a refinery where there is a furnace. And the furnace will destroy the minerals. So that results in the loss of the minerals. But the metal would be refined, and it would be of great quality. For the purity part, that's not something that we account for in our first iteration. We now go more in the sense of: if you are effective, you have less loss of material.

We'd rather go with the yield rather than purity, because it's easier for us to track, rather than adding a property on each... Let's say you've got gold at 57%, then you mix it with gold at 75%, then you need to average. We'd rather you get less gold out of it. You get pure gold, but it's less gold if you don't do it properly.

So the system is always working towards the highest purity. It's just a question of what the yield is.

Yes. It's similar to how you do station refining right now. What goes out is pure. And you can sell it as an actual gold commodity on the market, rather than selling it as unrefined ore, and then you lose a lot of the profits. So what refining kind of aims to do is close a bit that gameplay loop that we started right now with mining, where we have to go to the station and then you sell. We would like to be able to do all of this in the field, where I get five Prospectors, or a few MOLEs and Prospectors, and one refinery ship, and that refinery ship becomes like the hub where everyone kind of brings... I mined all these rocks, I come to my refinery ship, I dump my sacks. So the sacks on the Prospector become ejectable now. With a tractor beam, the refinery ship is able to pick them up, attach them to their own ports. They are able to scoop all that stuff into their storage, dump the empty sack, the Prospector picks it up, goes back to mining. Now the refinery ship is running, constantly churning. It's constantly running whatever the guys bring, and is trying to not mix the minerals with the metals and kind of separate, and trying to think, well, on this batch I'm going to run this process, because there's a higher chance of yielding, of getting this material that I'm interested in. I might not care about aluminum when I've got Agricium in there. Or I might dispose of some diamonds if I have some Hephaestanite or whatever high price material. So there's going to be this constant choice, like, oh, if I add this catalyst to this furnace or this tank, I get this reaction, I get to extract this and that. So it's going to be a lot of choices for the players. Obviously, as per usual with all of our systems, things can go awfully wrong. And if you add the wrong catalyst, or don't watch the pressure, don't watch the timers and what's supposed to happen for the reaction to happen, things might go boom. Or not only go boom, but you might just lose the material. You might just get a shit ton of slag. Sorry for my use of funny language. But that is what it will be. You'll be really annoyed at that point and you'll use those curse words. So that's pretty much the idea. The goal is to create this gameplay loop where at this point you add the trader, not the trader, the hauler. He's not a trader. He will help this mining operation. He will be coming every, whatever, five minutes, takes whatever was refined by the Starfarer, puts it in his cargo hold, goes, sells to the market, comes back. And that creates an entire operation that an organization can run for hours and just keep churning profit. The difference is the Starfarer might not be able to refine as well as the station does, with 95% yield, but it doesn't matter, because you might get 80% or 60%, it doesn't even matter, because what you're transporting is so much smaller and condensed in value. You don't have to transport unrefined ore ship by ship, and it takes forever. So you're transporting very high yield, going there, selling, ship comes back. And this is where another fun part comes in. You actually get pirates coming in and preying on this chain. They might destroy the Prospector. They might destroy the refinery. They might destroy the hauling ship that is transporting the refined stuff to the station. And this is where you hire mercenaries or get your organization people to come in and protect your operation. Some will have to fly with the transport ship. Some will have to protect the refinery ship. So it creates this entire ecosystem where you have people preying on each other, helping each other, trying to make as much money as possible in as little time as possible, rather than waiting for an entire day for the station to refine stuff.

There's no AFK refining. No AFK refining anywhere.

You have to pay attention to all the tidbits of the refining process, like the temperature. It's similar to mining, but a little bit more complex, because there on the refining ship, you have the reactor that could have various methods. So as already mentioned, there could be a furnace, there could be an electrolyte system that could grow, or help grow, or separate crystals. You could add in some solvents like acids that would help you, and the entire reactor is built around that. So in the end, our goal is to have you, as the owner of the refining ship, tailor the refining process to your demands. So for example, imagine a situation where you or your friend is mining, focusing on mining just minerals. So you wouldn't have a furnace there, right? You would prepare your reactor in a way that the reactor is more efficient with minerals than with metals. So this is basically our goal, that you customize it to your demands.

Now, one more thing to add to that. You customize it to what you want to refine, but the idea is also to allow the player to customize the Starfarer. Because the Starfarer was a ship that's supposed to do refueling, and it was also supposed to do refining. So it's up to the players how many tanks for storing stuff, for storing solids, for storing liquids and gas, for storing fuel, or how many reactors they equip on that ship. So it's up to him how much he wants to store, and maybe the Starfarer is the one that sells, because you don't have a hauling ship and he just comes back, keeps refining, because then he needs a lot more transporting capacity. So yeah, we're trying to offer all these options, and it's up to the player to play however he sees fit, whatever the situation needs.

In what sense?

You know, the 737s with the little nose cone, and somebody comes up and they attach. What are we doing?

Yeah, that's exactly what we are talking about. So for the Starfarer refueling, which is the one that we are working on right now, we have a boom arm where the player in need has to dock to, and then the refueling process can start. Yeah, so I think I saw the question where it was about, will we have drone refueling there? That's not yet the plan of the system. The plan right now is to have a very direct system, because from my personal point of view, it's even the more interesting one. Because imagine a ship that is docked to the boom arm: you do want slight movement, and it's something that both players have to pay attention to in this process, right? Active on both sides. For the drone part, it would be more passive on one side or even passive on both sides. So for me personally, this one is the most interesting one.

Because we are using right now the docking system that we already have, like the Merlin to Connie docking, we rely on that rule set right now. But actually, it's a good point, because we have to pay attention to it. It wouldn't make sense for some ships to... So we have to adapt the rules as it goes. But yeah, for the first iteration, we definitely will just have the well-known docking.

Yeah, we will use exactly what the docking system offers. This was a nice surprise for us, because we were looking initially at doing it a bit more simplistic, where you're just fairly close and there's a fuel transfer. But then docking came online and we're like, wait, we can just use this and we get the connection between two ships for free. So now the Starfarer is going to... same as with docking, we're going to try to do this where, if you maintain heading and velocity on the mothership, let's call it the mothership, the child ship can come and attach. Basically, as long as this ship is not flying left, right, up, down, and it's constant heading and velocity, you'll be able to... pretty much from your perspective, you'll be more or less static. And you just come, you're attached to it, and then you're basically attached and flying at the same speed. The problem comes, because this is a thing we bumped into, and we're like, oh, how do we do this? What happens when someone runs out of fuel? Because generally when you need refueling, you're out of fuel. So that is the moment where you are not going to be able to do in-motion refueling, because you cannot catch up to the other ship. So first of all, what we did was allow the ship that needs refueling to still move very, very slowly, only during the refueling maneuver. Basically the ship maintains a very little amount of fuel to get you out of trouble for the refueling process. It doesn't allow you to use that fuel for flying or dogfighting or something like this. But once you go into refueling mode and you're attached to a Starfarer, it allows you to very slowly drag yourself to that fuel port. Now, if that Starfarer was moving at even 100 meters per second, you're not going to catch up. So yeah, honestly, if you're asking whether you're going to see refueling in atmosphere, flying through the clouds, in the middle of a dogfight? Probably not.

At least not in the first version.

Yeah, but there's no logical reason why anyone would build a space refueling rig for something like that. It's needed in atmosphere for our F-15, whatever, fighters, but really in space, where everything is more or less relative to the guy you're flying with, it needs to be fairly stable.

It's not exactly a prerequisite. It's something that's going to help Pyro a lot. Finding fuel in Pyro is not going to be as easy as in Stanton. This is a torn-down place. Everyone has left the building a long time ago. [Those that] are there and want to sell you fuel either are going to try to rip you off, or you're going to pay everything you have to refuel. So you're going to be relying on players. You're going to be relying on other people to come in with fuel from Stanton and bring it in there and sell it to you at whatever price. So the problem also with Pyro is it's very hard to find a station to refuel. They're few and far between. So you might be, oh, I'm in the middle of nowhere now. There's no way for me to get back to that station where I know there's fuel. Hey, can someone come help me? 'Someone come help me' comes with a dose of risk, because someone coming to help you might come with guns. But yeah, this is where you have to trust other players. And this is where some of our reputation stuff is going to come in handy, as in you look over who you're dealing with. You go, well, this guy's been killing everyone that moves. I'm not refueling with you. I'm not telling you where I am.

I don't think they have fuel right now, do they? But the good thing is, once they would have it, we could have a solution to that.

It's not a problem. Once we do this, I think we will have to see how docking between two land-based vehicles will work, because that influences this, but once they start having proper fuel, I don't think it's a problem bringing your tank or whatever truck next to your friend's whatever tank and starting a refuel process. We'll have to see, because a lot of this refueling work means standardization of fuel ports throughout... right now, how many ships in Stanton, do you remember?

No, but I think it's above 160, is it?

Exactly, somewhere there. It's in the hundreds. By the time we get this, probably we'll have vehicles in the hundreds too. So that's where the problem comes. The system we can develop fairly quickly, especially if we have ship refueling already done. I'm not worried about doing this for land vehicles, but it will be retrofitting all of the land vehicles to have fuel ports. For example, for the ships, we're doing this right now, and we've gone, well, what does make sense? And where does it make sense on every ship? And we found a very good logic here: if it's pretty much facing forward, facing towards the same direction as ship forward, and when that boom arm comes it is in view of the pilot, that is pretty much the best position you can get. So you always get that view of the boom arm coming, approaching, you can kind of go left, left, right, right, okay, bam, I'm in. And it's always important to be forward, because if it's sideways, when you're flying, the ship is very hard to coordinate and touch two points that are not oriented to your forward direction. It's a mind-boggling thing, unless you rely on the UI, which helps you. But if anyone has tried to dock a ship where the docking port is off-axis, you will know what that means.

There's been a lot of silence on that, and for very good reasons. The programmer that works on this has had to go into the bowels of the code and refactor pretty much everything with how our items work, when it comes to how they function, how they generate resources. There's been so much groundwork. We expected there to be probably about half a year of groundwork. It turned out to be a lot more. This is a thing that will affect everything from ships to vehicles to stations. It touches the core of how our game functions. And I think at this moment, we are at the point where we start working on the actual gameplay. I know already there were heavy discussions even this morning. Yeah, this morning or yesterday, there were heavy discussions of how we get the tanks on the Starfarer for refueling to transfer fuels between each other and the ship, because we want that to use the resource management and distribution. We don't want to build another system just for refueling, or another system just for putting ammo into weapons on a ship, or power, or all these things. There needs to be one system. All items in the game work with the system. We don't have 10 pieces of code that we need 10 programmers to oversee and maintain, where whenever one breaks, it's different from the other one. It's one system. If something breaks, you know exactly where to look. But we are getting to the point where we're starting to see this being used in gameplay. It's still going to be quite a bit till we see a full ship where you can start cutting power, rerouting power, sabotaging: if you remove this item, or this item runs out of fuel or out of power, this happens. We're still a bit out. Again, I don't want to give out any date, because I don't know it. As you can see, with our initial estimation of how much that groundwork of code needed to be, we estimated half of what it actually was. But this is also a good moment, because a lot of other programmers can start jumping in on this thing and start to integrate. Whoever works on weapons needs to integrate this. Well, how do you get your ammo from a general ammo supply crate? How do you power the weapon? Does it need CPU? Does it need all these things? And how are the shield guys going to do the same? The guy that builds the power supply needs to work with it. So we're at the point where we can slowly start to bring more people into this, as the groundwork has been completed.

I think mining is in a good place now. I mean, yeah, we can keep tweaking. I think we need a tweak of content and the difficulty, and bringing in more difficult rocks that require multiple players with super high-end gear to break, but also super high yield of resources from them. I think that is kind of missing from a content perspective. From a system perspective, when it comes to small... let's not call it small ship mining, it's pretty much medium ship mining, because a Prospector and a MOLE are not that small. We are in a good place now, where the people that were working on this are trying to help now with other systems in other parts of the game. So I don't want to say put it on hold, but it's going to slow down development on mining. Is it done? No, far from it. There's still the Orion. When we get that Orion out, and all the bells and whistles that come with it, that's probably when I'm going to say, yeah, that is mining, it's complete. There's still some stuff we can do on FPS mining. FPS mining was released and didn't receive much love for two years, more than two years, somewhere there. It's an integral part of the game, but it could use some love. We've expanded on the ship mining: we've done consumables, we've done components, we've done gadgets. This does not exist for FPS mining. So we would like to be able to take that multi-tool and equip it a bit more. I know the Actor Feature Team are also working on a specialized version of the mining tool, because they're doing the same for a lot of the tools, like the tractor beam and all these things. They're going to get specialized versions, more powerful, but they're not modular, where you can just change an attachment and use it for something else. Sorry, my voice is gone. Probably the Actor Feature guys are going to start talking about that. So that's the idea of bringing in some of that flavor that we have for ships into FPS mining. That is something we can still do now, and fairly easily. But there's other things that are way, way, way more important right now.

I'm kind of biased, because Loot Generation is what I've been working on mainly for the past six months, so I'm excited about Loot Generation. I'm really looking forward to populating the universe with stuff for players to find.

Also biased in that regard. So I'm a huge Starfarer fan, so I'm looking forward to finally having it full of more additional functions. But the feature that actually is more interesting for me in terms of gameplay is the atmospheric depth damage. So I can see already, like you already mentioned it, the Hunt for Red October situations. So that probably will be fun.

I'm going to be different. I'm going to choose the long distance probing stuff. I think that's going to open the game up so much. I think the problem with Star Citizen right now is we have the planets, we have the moons. There's some activity happening there. There's Lagrange points, some activity happening there. But if you look at the space we have in the solar system, that is 0.1% of the space we use. Once long distance probing comes in, we'll be able to dynamically spawn an asteroid cluster, a wreck, a bunch of pirates attacking a hauler, anything you can imagine, a small station where they're producing drugs or high-end weaponry. We spawn it. It's a temporary location. It might be there for this week or this month or this day. Whoever finds it first gets to, well, if they can tackle it, gets to get the rewards. I'm expecting a mining organization to have a dedicated probing division where they're just searching for things there. Oh, I found you guys a new asteroid cluster. Everyone just rush there, strip mining, and you make the profit. Whoever finds it first is going to make the money. Whoever finds it second pretty much makes nothing, unless they're pirates, and then they find some miners there and they make some money. So the pirates are going to have so much fun with this, because this is how you find other people mining, hauling, doing other things. So there's so much. It pretty much makes the entire solar system space our playground. And we can do stuff that we generate, stuff that players do there, that others can find. It just brings the entire solar system to life.