Are there any natural disasters in Star Citizen lore, such as a tsunami, an asteroid fall, disease or an insect invasion, and is it planned to have them in game as a dynamic event?

Historically, we have the Oretani jump point collapse, which is technically kind of a natural event, a disaster too, because there are trapped people back there. I have to double-check the history. I think we had talked about, in the early days before we terraformed Mars, that there were a couple of natural disasters that happened on Earth during the overpopulation era, where it was really starting to get dangerous.

Yeah, we've had massive clay dust storms affecting whole planets. Insects, like the cicada-like ones, which I'm forgetting the specifics of.

It's on Oberon. They were brought there because a lot of the residents of Oberon lived in the passages underneath, and it was brought there as a food source, but it ended up turning into an invasive species that has kind of wrecked that planet.

Tale as old as time. And we do want certain planets to be riskier to travel on, and these kinds of natural phenomena would be a big part of that.

Disease too: we actually called out a couple of diseases, I think, in the sort of threats of pandemic in some of the news updates. I think it was like Lynch fever or something like that.

Yeah, we were talking to the character team. This isn't to say this is in the works right now, but about the potential, down the road in the future, of doing shaders for when people have the space measles or whatever it is that we want to push forward, being able to turn that on your character so you can get sick that way, which is a fun potential for way down the road. And then we had the dust storms on Leir III, the sandworm demo. So that was our first kind of blush at playing around with that as something that we want to include and have as gameplay.

I think it's very easy to say that we would like to have dynamic events like these. Everybody remembers the plague that swept through World of Warcraft back when. We'd love to have those dynamic events. It may be too early in our development still to commit to them.

And there's always that thing too, where we have that distinction between what's happened historically, which doesn't affect the game, to set up the background of the universe in which a lot of things can happen. But we always run that weird gambit of not wanting to imply that some of the historical stuff could be in-game, so we have to kind of ride that line.

Yeah, because we have a couple of worlds that have had bad terraforming, where the terraforming hasn't quite stuck all the way and they're having problems, so it would be kind of cool to figure out how we can show that ongoing, rather than just having the planet itself looking kind of messed up. microTech had some terraforming issues. That's why it ended up so cold.

Yeah, and there's other ways too. There are certain planets also that may have suffered from drought, or just not have an abundance of water, which may be reflected in not seeing massive lakes or oceans on the planet, but also in being able to haul stuff in. So it might affect the economy in that way, where this planet just doesn't naturally have a lot of water, so you won't necessarily see it directly in game, but it'll affect gameplay, or how you maybe want to run your routes, or certain things like that.

Yeah, doing those kinds of relief missions and stuff like that would be really cool.