CRAFTING YOUR UNIVERSE
The history of Star Citizen’s development has always been a symbiotic one, with players and developers working together to build a universe of unprecedented size and scope, and in Alpha 4.7, we take our next major step forward in allowing you to shape and conform the universe as you see fit. This starts with hundreds of blueprints, allowing you to create custom FPS items with improved handling and performance determined by the quality of your materials. A system that will continue to evolve intended to bolster individual agency and combine the efforts of all players throughout every aspect of Star Citizen’s gameplay.
Whether you're the miner who collects raw materials or the salvager collecting unique components, the refinement specialist producing the highest grade commodities or the long haul trucker delivering everything to where it's needed most; the mercenary who hunts for the latest and rarest blueprints or the combat specialist who serves as both client and protector: the crafting journey that begins here with Alpha 4.7 is an essential element to realizing the living, breathing, interconnected universe we're building, and is one of the most exciting additions to the universe this year.
Below we’ll share with you the first steps of this adventure that’s come online with Alpha 4.7, where item fabrication debuts giving you the ability to craft your own FPS items, improve base stats, and customize your Star Citizen experience like never before.
CRAFTING YOUR UNIVERSE
The history of Star Citizen’s development has always been a symbiotic one, with players and developers working together to build a universe of unprecedented size and scope, and in Alpha 4.7, we take our next major step forward in allowing you to shape and conform the universe as you see fit. This starts with hundreds of blueprints, allowing you to create custom FPS items with improved handling and performance determined by the quality of your materials. A system that will continue to evolve intended to bolster individual agency and combine the efforts of all players throughout every aspect of Star Citizen’s gameplay.
Whether you're the miner who collects raw materials or the salvager collecting unique components, the refinement specialist producing the highest grade commodities or the long haul trucker delivering everything to where it's needed most; the mercenary who hunts for the latest and rarest blueprints or the combat specialist who serves as both client and protector: the crafting journey that begins here with Alpha 4.7 is an essential element to realizing the living, breathing, interconnected universe we're building, and is one of the most exciting additions to the universe this year.
Below we’ll share with you the first steps of this adventure that’s come online with Alpha 4.7, where item fabrication debuts giving you the ability to craft your own FPS items, improve base stats, and customize your Star Citizen experience like never before.
Resources and Quality
This adventure starts with using resources first gathered from vehicle and FPS mining. Throughout the universe, these resources now have a quality value between 0 and 1000. This value is instrumental in determining the traits of any crafted item that uses it, so making the effort to search for high quality materials can be a valuable endeavour.
While every resource in the ‘verse now has this quality value, only some are used in blueprints for Alpha 4.7, with the intention that every resource in the game makes its way into the crafting loop in later iterations.
Blueprints to Collect and Craft
Blueprints are digital recipes for how to craft an item, and they inform you about the resources and quality requirements to create a given item. To begin your mission to manufacture, a small collection of blueprints is made automatically available to you immediately. You can access your collection of blueprints through the screen on any Item Fabricator. While this allows everyone to experience crafting almost immediately, the real adventure lies in collecting the majority of blueprints through mission contracts throughout the ‘verse.
In Alpha 4.7 the available blueprints focus on FPS weapons and armor, including many variants of base items you may already be familiar with. It is also important to note that like many aspects of the continuing development of Star Citizen, blueprints requirements are subject to changes in future patches as the system evolves and expands to include additional game loops like refining, salvage and research, as well as the inclusion of newer blueprints.
Item Fabricator
This is your crafting machine. It can be purchased from shops located at select shops in landing zones or space stations, and like all large inventory items, it can be retrieved and stored via the freight elevators. (Note: if you participated in the recent Lifeline for Levski event, you may already have one waiting for you.)
Moving an Item Fabricator can easily be done via tractor beam and attaches easily to cargo grids, allowing them to be placed in certain ships for crafting on the go, and serves as your primary interface for accessing your blueprint library and the crafting process as a whole.
Inside the Item Fabricator is a cargo grid which can be used for the input and output of resources and items, however when placed within your hangar, the unit has access to your local inventory as well.
At present, there are two key functions of an Item Fabricator: Crafting and Dismantling.
Crafting
To craft, select an option from the interface of available, previously collected blueprints. These will be highlighted amongst the unavailable ones still waiting for you to discover.
Once selected, you'll find the list of materials required but remember to consider their quality! Manually assigning materials from your local inventory with specific qualities will cause the displayed item stats to increase or decrease based on your choices or simply using the autofill function to let the system pick for you. Mixing qualities may result in an average quality value.
Once you have your item selected and materials set, you can begin your crafting job proper. Crafting times will vary depending on the size and quality of the item, and multiple jobs can be set up in the crafting queue. Once a job has been completed, you’ll see it in the history log tab within the queue screen.
Crafting and dismantling have their own distinct queues, allowing you to have multiple crafting and dismantle jobs running simultaneously.
Dismantling
As you might surmise, dismantle allows you to convert items back into resources. In this first release, you can dismantle most FPS items found in shops, loot or crafted by players.
For items found in loot or purchased in shops, dismantling these will provide materials of their default quality values.
For player-crafted items, dismantling will provide you with materials of the same quality used in the original construction, but at a reduced quantity due to the manufacturing and dismantling process.
Today and Tomorrow
We are tremendously excited by this addition to the game and what this step means for the universe as a whole. Like every feature in Star Citizen, crafting will continue to grow and evolve through subsequent releases, connecting as many aspects of life in the ‘verse as possible, and giving you as the player more agency and control of your experience than ever before.
That said, we also wanted to share with you a few select details about where the crafting system goes from here, and you can find those below.
The Future of Crafting
This is an inexhaustive list of select improvements already in development related to crafting.