Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

So the intended goal, I guess, from my point of view is, yeah, we want players to be able to customize their ships to their heart's content. Part of what Erwin and I want to try and tick off the list this year is getting our customization plans fully developed and committed to. When it comes to a release ship, you get a ship all done and you start walking around it and looking at it and it's like, cool, it's great, but it looks empty because there's no dressing in it. And then we start to dress it, and then we get the, oh, this is cool, but we want players to be able to do this. And we're not quite at that point where we can support that fully yet. You'll notice on some of the more recent ships, we started to give a few freebies: when you get your ship, you get your bottle of beer in the fridge and some space snacks to keep you tided over. But yeah, we do want to allow much more customization of the interior of ships. We just can't fully support it just yet. And we've dipped our toe in, lukewarm. So we'll jump in fully hopefully by the end of the year or at some point soon.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yeah, we're in a weird middle ground of tech as well that will help us. PES, Persistent Entity Streaming, will in theory allow you to grab anything, put it in your ship, and it will stay there till the end of time for that ship's life. So that will give you a way to customize your ship, and that goes back to what Ben said. Maybe at that point we will start not bringing in ships with all this dressing and allow people to do it, or you'll be able to buy all the cute fluffy bunnies to put in the corner from shops in game, or there'll be subscriber ones. Recently we've done the bobbleheads, and that uses the current item port system. And that's why it doesn't work across all the ships, because there's a lot of ships where there is nowhere to put them that's in a nice place. But with PES, people can just shove them anywhere they want. You could have 50 stuck on a table in the back of the ship somewhere. So PES will help do that as well. Resource Network, again, will add a level of interactivity to those things. The team working on that showed a nice little demo, I want to say Tuesday, but maybe it was last Tuesday, where it's really simple, but it shows the promise of it. So there is a desk lamp that you could pick up and move around. And depending on the power state of that room, it's wirelessly connected into that room state. So your cool little custom desk lamp that can change color turns on and off depending on where it is in the ship. If that area of the ship has gone down with power, it turns off. It's not this nuclear-powered desk lamp. So there's lots of things coming, and we've tested the water in various ways, like the 300 series one. And when we settle on it, we'll make sure we hoover up all the changes to work, like anyone that's got their coffee machine in the 300i. That item as it stands will probably get changed to a different item, but it behaves the same way and looks the same way, to allow it to function with whatever the final system is.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

And I think when we have experimented with this stuff so far, there's been a number of bugs where you can drop a water bottle in your ship and it explodes. Or we had a rogue beer bottle that would cause lots of physics issues because it would never go to sleep. So there's a lot of things to work out. Forever rattling.