Rob Reininger · Assistant Director, Systemic Gameplay Services

Yeah, so what we want to build is this concept of a freight elevator that is tied to whoever's using it. So when you use it, you see your local inventory stored at Area18. When I use it, I see mine. So now what you get is the ability for you to bring your cargo out into my hangar and load it on my ship. We can collectively work together as a group to then load the ship up with a series of goods, take it to another location, and then go and sell it. So we thought that was a really important factor to hit. Players want to play as a group. Putting the bill for 18 million UEC of goods on a ship is pretty daunting, right? So I think it's a huge win for players, not just for working together as a multi-crew ship, but also contributing together from a financial point of view, sharing the cost of trading. So I think that's a big one.

Chad McKinney · Lead Gameplay Engineer, US PU Gameplay team

Yeah, and I think Rob's burying the lede here a little bit. If you were paying really close attention, you will have noticed that there was quite a dramatic change to the way that cargo works implied in that, which is that we're not going to be magically spawning the cargo into your ship whenever you purchase cargo. Instead, it's going to be purchased into the hangar, and you will be calling it from the freight elevator, and then manually moving it in and out of the staging space into the ship. I mentioned before that we're trying to localize the cargo more. This is part of that. We're getting rid of the magic. No more popping in and out of existence. Instead, they're physical things. They have to be moved. Of course, in the future, this is going to set us up for systems such as maybe drones or NPCs that you hire to help you move these things. But for now, the idea is that you can move them yourself using the multi-tool, or you can bring in your friends. And so this is one way in which people that are playing together will have an advantage over players that are just playing by themselves, because there's a certain amount of throughput that you'll be able to achieve with a larger crew, which will increase your financials as opposed to a single player. So it's kind of bringing that multiplayer, interactive, diegetic, physical gameplay into the cargo system.