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One of the easiest ways for players to feel ownership of their vehicles in games is to paint them, to decorate them how they wish. Do we have any updates on the ship paint system, decorating the interior, anything like that?

TL;DRShip painting is low priority right now; the plan is first the pledged skins, then limited customization like decals and primary/secondary colors, with cargo and mining ahead of it.

Chris RobertsFounder, CEO and Chairman

So I would say that on the paint system, not particularly. That's lower priority for us right now. I'd rather get these base functionalities, stuff that I've talked about, like the item system and locking stuff down. But the way you'll be able to customize, say, your hangar is not different than the way you could maybe customize the interior of a spaceship. Oh, put a couch here. I'll not put a couch here. I'll put a picture on the wall. I'll not put a picture on the wall. In terms of the external livery, our plans are to allow you to place some decals around, put a name down, and then if the ship's set up correctly with the shaders, then you can change, say, your primary or secondary colors or something like that. But it becomes kind of complicated on the very big ships, because they all use modular parts. So at a certain level, we're probably going to restrict it to picking your primary and secondary colors and doing decals, rather than doing very custom paint jobs with flames left, right and center. I mean, that could be done with a decal, but I'm getting totally crazy. But right now the system's in there, right? You need a second UV set to be able to enable that. And if you play in Crusader, you'll meet some pirate ships, and they've got a different livery than other ships have. And that's done with the paint system. So what we really don't have is an ability to expose that to players, like, oh, I can get this skin and that skin. But we are going to implement the various skins, the Electro Skins that people pledged for quite a while ago. So that would be the first stage. The second stage would be to allow further customization by players. But again, there's a mountain of tasks and there's a whole bunch of stuff, and there's certain things like... I think people would rather have cargo working before they can paint their ship, right, I'm guessing, or mining working before they can paint the ship. So it really comes down to these choices that you just make. It's like VR. Oculus sent me my Kickstarter Oculus set, which I think you tweeted a picture of. The box. Of course, I'd like to get all that working, but the same brilliant graphics engineers that would have that all working, which we can because we already have code in it, are also the same ones that are working on things like getting a procedural planet in a shape that everyone in the community can use it. That's everybody can use that, versus just a subset that have the Oculus Rift. So that's the hard choice you make: well, let's get that base technology that everyone can use first, rather than something that's super, super awesome, super cool, but maybe 10% or 5% of our community can use. So it sucks, because I like all that stuff too.