Chad McKinney · Senior Lead Gameplay Engineer

For the moment, mostly it's going to work the way that it does in-game now, with the caveat that hauling missions in particular are going to be different. If you just stole somebody else's cargo box and store it in your inventory, you're not necessarily going to get arrested. You won't be able to sell it somewhere, like in Area 18, for example. But you're not necessarily going to get arrested for that or fined or anything for just having it on your person. However, for the hauling missions, we want to make sure that players are incentivized, I'll say, to actually deliver the goods rather than just short circuit it. So if you were to, let's say, take a mission from Crusader and you get this big Hull C worth of cargo that you're intended to deliver, if you're going to take that to a location that's not the delivery destination, the system will know and it actually will flag it and say, okay, this is a high risk thing. You shouldn't have it. And you'll be notified. If you are trying to sell it, it's going to be flagged and actually you'll get fined for it. Even if you were to take it to, let's say, GrimHEX for example, a place that would normally take a no-questions-asked type terminal, and you were to sell it there, you can, but the price is going to be dramatically reduced because it's going to be considered higher risk. So the idea is that we don't want players to basically take these missions and just go to the nearest GrimHEX or something like that and just offload it and not actually take it to the place that it's intended to go. On the flip side, we don't want to overly punish pirates who don't necessarily always know the ships that they're trying to steal from. And while I know there's a lot of discussions about how much we favor or don't favor piracy as a loop in the game, we don't want to completely ice them out so that if they end up accidentally coming across, let's say, some boxes that were being delivered somewhere else, they just can't do anything with it. And then it becomes kind of just random about what you can and can't steal and sell reasonably. But they will be at a much lower cost. So it's not going to be the kind of thing where, oh, I can just steal the boxes from somebody else's hauling contract and then I'm just rich immediately because it's just so much and I didn't have to do anything for the time. And then that would just make it to where nobody could ever deliver these things, because people are just constantly camping the routes that they would be on. So the TL;DR is we don't want to necessarily overly restrict where you can store things, but some of the high security or high value items are going to have special casing for them.