Rob Reininger · Assistant Director, Systemic Gameplay Services

As long as you can access it, whether it be through their cargo grid, getting into their ship somehow, if you can disable the ship without blowing it up and can get in, sneak onto their ship, you can maybe get off with some valuable packages. So yeah, and I guess one of the things that we kind of missed talking about with the refactor here is that the way that the Prospector bags, for instance, were set up was that they were all kind of part of the ship, right? It was just an animated pod, but this will set us up to allow us to detach those for other people to come and pick them up, taking them to a refinery so that the mining ship can keep going. So it is kind of all-inclusive. It's just an item like any other item at this point, whether it's attached to the outside of a ship or placed inside of a ship.

Ben Dorsey · Senior Systems Designer, US PU

It's kind of cool. And for clarity, when that first started even getting discussed within the team, within the first five seconds, people were talking about how cool it would be to run a heist and break into someone's ship and take their stuff, or force them to give you stuff because you've threatened to blow them up if they don't. That is 100%.

Chad McKinney · Lead Gameplay Engineer, US PU Gameplay team

And on the technical side, if I could just clarify a little bit, previously cargo and cargo grids were really just some data and some persistent representation. And we're changing it to be represented as entities. And for anyone that's not familiar with game dev terminology, an entity is this really generic term for just something that a player might see in the game. So what that means is that the cargo boxes, those Prospector bag things, these are going to be things that we have a lot more ability to allow to simulate independently, so that they can attach, detach, you can interact with them individually. So that gives us a lot of leeway to open up new gameplay opportunities like actually stealing the sacks and putting them onto your ship, or putting them inside another ship, or just getting creative and letting the players do very interesting things. But yeah, a big part of this is just making them actually interactable objects in the world individually, as opposed to these static fixed things.