Where does the development of physical inventory currently stand?

The FPS combat loop for Star Citizen starts way before you get into combat, and that is the question "What am I going to bring". At the moment in Star Citizen you can change, equip and store as much as you like without many issues. But physical inventory will mean that players will need to consider every possibility when planning to do first-person combat. When you don't have access to all your equipment at the drop of a hat, that fundamentally is a game-changer, which really makes a difference when you move away from these larger built-up areas. You really have to think about the decisions you make when managing and bringing items with a finite inventory. You may end up killing someone, and want to take all their items with you, but because you've filled your backpack up already ,you may want to drag them to your ship, or instead take them alive. When considering all the things Physical Inventory adds to the game, you can really start to see its impact on the combat gameplay loop.

Physical Inventory by itself has been something we are adding little by little each patch, starting with the commodity pack, then the inner thought system. We are now in the act of changing it to what we are calling the "External Inventory", which isn't so much tetris but a grid system that will naturally mold around each item, much in the way apps change automatically when you move them around. So what that gives us is an overview of the character and the items you have as well as being able to interact with external inventories, player's backpacks, crates, and boxes, anything that may have a physical volume but not a physical representation. So that's very much in the end game when other tech comes online. At first, it'll be the commodities in the beginning, the things you can currently put in your backpack, but it means when we have the [REDACTED] you'll be able to interact with the cargo hold and put things in there or take FPS mineables out, and that'll be the next iteration. Which will eventually become full items you can put in there, and then interact with the character. And that gives you the idea of what physical inventory looks like on the character and the external UI, but you still need the storage in ships and habs.