Rob Reininger · Assistant Director, Systemic Gameplay Services

Cargo can be refactored in many ways to help make the game play better. We've obviously got the cargo profession that we're working towards, but specifically the way cargo worked. So in the past, up till now, when you bought something from a shop, it got statically placed into your ship's cargo hold and you could not interact with it. When the ship exploded, we kind of jettisoned out smaller versions of the boxes that you could actually grab and take back to your ship, which could then be sold at a shop somewhere. But this refactor is going to give us kind of a clean slate as far as how we define what our commodities are. There was some stuff that was just legacy that caused problems that we wanted to fix. But the big thing for the players is that it's going to be physicalized in the cargo within the cargo grid. It also sets us up for some other stuff that we're going to talk about in a bit, persistent hangars and just the cargo gameplay as a whole. But from the player's perspective, it's the physicalization of the cargo. You can tractor beam stuff off the grid. You can also tractor beam stuff onto the grid. You're also going to be able to jettison larger size boxes, right? So it's not just going to be the small ones anymore. We can start doing the bigger ones. So as far as what I would expect to see in the first iteration of it, it would be generally that.

Chad McKinney · Lead Gameplay Engineer, US PU Gameplay team

If I could just add to that, one thing that I would say is I think, or hopefully, everyone's noticing that there's all this effort now with loot and inventory that's been coming out. Cargo is being refactored, just kind of re-imagined in this new world where we have localized inventory. What that means is that there are going to be commodities in certain kinds of containers that have various compositional contents for the various commodities that you'll want to trade, but there'll also be things that are inventory containers as well that can contain actual items, and they can nest the inventory as containers themselves or entities. So this can mean that you can be potentially trading and shipping in your cargo grid inventory as well as commodities, which means that looting is going to be available for the contents inside of the cargo grids as well. And the contents as you move them around, the localization of them is going to become much more important in the future, unlike right now.