How far down the hardcore survival rabbit hole are you planning to go? You want us to play with others, yet you are continually adding systems that make me even more fearful to trust other players. Where are we going with this, and how do you balance that?

Well, I think it's a rock and a hard place in some respects. I think strength in numbers, but then obviously that's the premise, that you should play together with other people and that helps you out. But to answer this question specifically, we've got actor status in terms of eating and drinking. We want the game to be around resources that players can collect, obviously homesteads eventually, and those homesteads will be areas that you can store your own things, and obviously there will be raiding and pirates and all of that kind of thing. So I suppose Chris has a vision in his mind of what he wants Star Citizen to be. Obviously there are elements of games like Valheim and Tarkov and Rust that tie into that, but Star Citizen is its own game. And it will set its own boundaries with how it executes those mechanics. So a good example is eating and drinking. Really, in terms of comparisons to other survival games, we're very, very light on eating and drinking. I think it's like 10, 12 hours if you just stood still in the PU before you have to eat anything. So if you play Ark, you have to eat every five minutes, whereas it's dependent. I think we want to have those mechanics that we're moving towards, which has always been the intention since way before I even joined Cloud Imperium. It's only now that we're delivering on them. So I think it's a hard answer to talk about, because fundamentally we're still getting everything in there, and the balance will really dictate that answer, because how hardcore do we want to be? It could take me five minutes to just change all the data to say you have to drink every half an hour. But that's not the game that we want. We want a game that is more realistic, probably the wrong word, but a game that is more cohesive to the Star Citizen experience, that you're this space explorer out in the verse, and you've got ships that have all these different functions, and you have beds in there. So eventually we will want players to have tiredness. Or we have showers. So do we want hygiene? Well, yeah, that's part of actor status. I think it's on the roadmap.

There's a couple of things to dissect there. Chris has always said, you take it to the point of realism and then you bring it back to the point of fun. There will be people that chastise it as, that's not real, like eating only every 10 hours or 12 hours or whatever. It is always about that balance. It is always take it to the point of realism, then bring it back to the point of fun. And that's the thing that we discover together. That is why we have a live environment in our alpha. We don't just set out with a number of anything, like, oh, this is the picture we want to build. We are truly developing this together. I know sometimes that sounds like a buzzword or whatever. But I would hope that anybody who's been watching me for the last six, seven years I've been here knows I'm going to be frank and honest with people, to the point that sometimes makes my bosses upset, that we are making this together. Your feedback gets incorporated into this stuff, and our ideas for the game evolve along with the experience and the feedback that you give us. So it can be a very difficult question to answer today, because the answer will be discovered together through our continual development and our continual testing, is what I was getting at.

And there's also, when you take into account, are we just a pure simulation? We're not. We're simulating a universe and all those things inside of that universe, but there are things in there that are what most people would expect to happen. So a good example is, what would you expect to happen if you walk up a mountain? You expect it to get colder. And the closer you get to outer space, people think, well, it should get colder. But if you actually look at the real science behind what happens to temperature between leaving the ground and entering space, it gets colder, then it gets hotter, because the atmosphere thins, and then it gets colder again and then it gets hotter again. And it's like this crazy graph that's hot, cold, hot, cold, hot, cold. And if we had implemented that as an absolute mirror, a pure simulation of temperature, which, to be fair, would have been incredibly complex, most people would have come back and said it was a bug, that that was happening. And we would have had to explain, no, no, no, that's real life. So we have to take into account that we want to simulate real life, but it's what people expect. It's people's expectations of what real life is. And I think that's a balance that we want to have. And we want to push for as much realism as we can where it makes sense. And by the way, 10 to 12 hours was 10 to 12 hours of our world time. That's not 10 to 12 hours of in-game time, which is much longer in-game time.