Back to search

What is the plan to make industrial multi-crew gameplay more impactful as a force multiplier, i.e. mining and salvage?

TL;DRMining multi-crew already improved through instability, salvage is harder to make multi-crew, and the goal is to tie roles together through crafting so players rely on each other or pay others.

Thorsten LeimannLead Systems Designer

We did already a lot to improve the multi-crew experience there. I think we did more on the mining side than we did on the salvage side. So one thing we did was making use of the instability, for example, for mining. Multiple lasers being able to shore up the rock. So if you are in different ships, multiple lasers will increase the instability. If you're on the same ship, multiple lasers actually won't affect it too much. So that encouraged players to use the Mole, especially for the instability rocks or the harder-to-crack instability rocks. At least that was our intention back then. And it somehow worked. There's definitely still room for improvements in regards to true multiplayer gameplay. I think not industrial, but engineering gameplay also already moves into that segment. For salvage it's a bit harder to achieve, because of just the mechanics that we have for salvage, because either you point a scraper beam on the surface or you basically align a ship into a deconstruction field. So there it's a bit harder to find meaningful multi-crew or multiplayer gameplay mechanics. But especially on the salvage side, we have huge ships where it's very, very beneficial if you have a lot of players on the ship. Talking about the Reclaimer, it is very useful if you have someone in the cargo hold already unpacking the filler stations. But moving forward, what our goal is here is also less being in these island features where we want to have the multi-crew, because we really want to tie all the features together with crafting. And that means that players will have to rely more on other players to do their job in a very, very good way, so that they also can benefit from it. What I'm talking about is, if you have a miner that basically is very effective in finding and mining the high-quality resources, and then in the far future, or in the not so far future, you have then the refiner that then brings in the refining process they have on their ship and then refines it, even increases the quality or retains the quality, or does something that helps the crafter to actually be able to craft the perfect gun, the perfect ship component for you. So sure, you can do it alone, but that time and effort you have to put in alone is just tremendously lower if you have friends, or if you even don't have friends and you just pay people in the 'verse to do your job.

Star Citizen Live›Q&A Industrial Gameplay·
Published on this date.19 Feb 2026