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Is there anything we want to add ship customization-wise? We've kind of talked about the future and about what we planned for it.

TL;DRShip loadout persistence was pushed into 3.5.1; insurance deductibles based on equipment value are calculated but still lack UI, ship rental isn't quite in 3.6, and wipes should stop once server-side persistence is working.

Tony ZurovecPersistent Universe Director

Well, a big one in 3.5.1, we snuck it into 3.5.1 rather than holding it for 3.6 where it was originally planned, was basically the persistence of your ship's loadout. That came about specifically because one of our designers, Rob Reininger, was making the point that there was just tons of chatter from the community, that that was one of the most often requested features. And so we basically slotted that to the top of the list. And then the next step of this just didn't roll out with the initial feature. The initial thing was just whatever your configuration is, it will persist that. So when your ship gets destroyed, lost, you go claim another one, you get a carbon copy of it. In the future, it'll look at the base value of your ship...

Chris RobertsCEO / Game Director

The deductible will be different based on the value of the items.

Tony ZurovecPersistent Universe Director

The accounting service part of that is done. We're already calculating the appropriate prices. What we're really missing is all the UI, the player-facing feedback. Once we've got those elements, we'll roll them in, and then players will start to see, oh, well, I've got LTI insurance on this ship up to this amount of value. And so if I add additional value beyond that, then I pay some percentage of that on a recurring basis in order to guarantee that all of that extra stuff will be outfitted on my ship when I go...

Chris RobertsCEO / Game Director

Yeah, and I think what we'll do is, because we were originally thinking, well, you'd buy additional insurance for the extra weapons, but it's better to do it this way, which is your insurance covers whatever your ship's on, but there'll be some adjustment in the deductible or the expediting fees based on the value of all the equipment. And then on the cargo insurance, what we really should do is you would have the opportunity, just like if I buy something online right now, do I want to have travel insurance? So if I'm at the commodities kiosk or whatever, and I'm going, give me 100 SCU of... It's that player choice again: do you want to basically live on the edge, take the chance, go out there?

Tony ZurovecPersistent Universe Director

If you lose your cargo, you literally lost all of it.

Chris RobertsCEO / Game Director

All of that value. Speaking of rentals, it's not going to be quite there with 3.6, but we'll also have ship rental. Kind of cool, because ships just inherently are expensive. They have to be for the economics to work. But that means it's a fair amount of earning money in the game, which is always problematic when we reset.

Tony ZurovecPersistent Universe Director

You can only save up for a couple of months and then we reset things. It's very difficult to save up.

Chris RobertsCEO / Game Director

And to be clear, that will be fixed. Server-side OCS, when that is working, then you'll have true persistence. To have server OCS, we have to have true persistence in the game, because the server has to know exactly the state when it throws it out of memory, and then it restores from that state. So once we're persisting the state of the universe to a database, when things are going on a server, that means we have true persistence. Probably around about that point in time is where we'll stop resetting everyone's database, so people can earn money towards accumulating ships and everything. But until then, ship rental is pretty cool because it's a way to get into an expensive ship much sooner. And even in the final game, it will be useful because if you're playing a game and you want to try something, you could rent it, or you could get into a bigger, better ship and have a higher earning potential before you have the money to necessarily buy it outright.