Chris Roberts · Founder, CEO and Project Director

So yes, that's part of the plan. One of the big pushes we have, because obviously, if you look how long it's taking us to do Stanton and you figure out how many star systems we have... I want to be alive by the time we get them done. And I think most of our other backers do too. So no, it's kind of a tool issue and it's a bit of a content issue. So the more sets that we build, and we're fleshing some of them out in Stanton, but we've still got more to do, and the better the tools get... And that's one of our issues, is that we just don't have enough tools people. We don't have enough engineers. And even though I told you we have 500 people, everyone wants more people and we don't have enough to get all this stuff done. But we're making a sort of long term focus and investment, not just on the tech that enables this, but also then the creation and the tools. Because we need to be in a position where we can turn around a moon in a week, not in two months or three months. And the same on the planet. So longer term, we are looking at tools that would be much more like kind of city building or RTS building kind of stuff, where you can sort of paint and do stuff very quickly and build prototypes. And then once we have a whole set of biomes... so, for instance, the four moons that we're doing around Hurston utilize some of the biomes that we've done for our current three moons, right? And we've created some new stuff as well. But the more of that you have, the bigger palette you have, the quicker the turnaround. So we actually on 3.3 have said ourselves... I'd have to check with Ian, but I think he was trying to get all the four moons done in like a month with his team. So that would be way quicker than we did the previous stuff. And so we're working towards it. So we're very aware that the trajectory needs to be much faster on this. But it'll take a while. So I think that sort of stuff, you'll start to see the impact of it next year, not so much this year.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I think we've demonstrated a facet that exists in all game development, and that's exponential growth. If you produce this much in the first year, that allows you to produce this much in the second year, that allows you to produce this much in the third year, and so forth. And you see that borne out in ATV. Remember what ATV used to be in the early days, and then as we hit content phase.

Chris Roberts · Founder, CEO and Project Director

Well, when it was Wingman's Hangar, we basically showed nothing in the game, and it was just Eric goofing around. So it's very different. I totally agree. And also we've grown as an organization and we've got more of the processes now. So yeah, we have a plan to get there. I'm not going to lie to you and say, oh, it's going to be done in a year's time or two years' time. But the first thing is you've got to get the tech, and then you start working on the tools and you start working on the kind of pipeline and workflow, and then you can kind of get it down to something that works quite efficiently. So our ship production pipeline's gotten pretty efficient compared to what it used to be in the early days, especially on the size and the scale of all the stuff they're doing. And longer term, we need to get the planets and the moons and the environments all there. And also don't forget, it's all changed, because it used to be, oh, well, you would just ask for landing and then we'd have a little cinematic and then you land down in a very sort of constrained area where you could go and talk to a bartender or buy something. But now it's a whole planet, and it's a pretty big planet or a pretty big moon. And so now it's like, okay, what are we going to do to make that? So it's not just, well, there's going to be one landing area. It's like, oh, well, how are we going to get little towns around here? Or how are we going to get fauna and an ecosystem and resources you can do? So we're starting to lay all that stuff in. That's all in our minds. So yeah, look, as a player, you should be able to just hang out on one of the worlds and do that forever if you wanted to. So we are going for that level of detail that we never were going for before. And obviously that requires a lot of tech, a lot of tools, and obviously more content.