Welcome to February’s PU Monthly Report! There’s a huge amount of content coming to ‘verse in the next few weeks, including new and returning missions, the latest ships from RSI, and thrilling activities and locations around Nyx. Read on for everything done toward this exciting upcoming release.
AI Content
The Social AI team began the month bug fixing in support of Alpha 4.6 before looking to future releases.
AI Content worked alongside Mission Design to set up characters that players will meet in some of the new game loops. They also provided the initial setup and placeholder lines so the designers and directors can test the game flow with sample lines in place. This allows the writers to react to and refine the dialogue, ensuring it’s working in context and providing appropriate information.
The team also continued to outline their prospective goals for the upcoming year and defined what would be needed from other teams to facilitate their implementation.
AI (Features & Tech)
Last month, AI Features & Tech improved underground traversal for the valakkar, prototyping its future speeds. The creature’s behavior was also updated, including linear acceleration and deceleration when traversing during combat.
An issue was fixed with toy guns triggering weapon-fire and bullet-hit sound effects, which caused NPCs to cower. Accuracy calculations were also modified to give Design better control over them.
The team then improved how safe zones function within the global perception system, designated areas where players can rest or regroup without being detected by NPCs.
Work was also done on integrating the voxel grid, which is currently in extensive QATR testing. Finally, the team began supporting refueling missions on the AI side.
Animation
Animation spent February improving assets for the kopion, while Facial Animation focused on the first performance-capture shoot of the year. This was held at the end of February and captured numerous new characters.
Art (Characters)
February saw Character Art polishing assets for Alpha 4.7 alongside working through art debt in preparation for StarWear. The team also continued to work on new gang outfits and Subscriber Flair items.
The Concept Art team explored new combat armors and prepared handoff sheets for upcoming mandates.
Art (Ships)
In the UK, the Ships team completed the art phases for the Aegis Hammerhead gold standard, with the ship moving to downstream teams for close-out. They then moved on to a related ship, which is approaching whitebox.
The Gatac Railen passed its whitebox gate review and moved into greybox ahead of its planned release at Alien Week this year, with more artists joining the project to help build out assets for future Gatac ships.
Work also continued on the Greycat UTV, which had freshly captured enter and exit animations implemented. It’s currently with downstream teams for completion.
MISC’s upcoming hauler, the Hull-B, continued toward its LOD0 gate review. Tech Art is currently finalizing the highly intricate spindle deploy and retract animations.
The Drake Ironclad, Ironclad Assault, and Command Module each passed their greybox gate reviews. The team then moved on to LOD0 tasks, quickly progressing thanks to the time invested during whitebox on the modular kit.
Three unannounced vehicles progressed too. The first is approaching its greybox gate review, while the second passed greybox following minor functionality requests from the director. The third passed its white box review, though it is currently receiving tweaks to the layout before greybox.
In North America, an unannounced ship passed its whitebox gate review, with the team talking feedback regarding some of the interactions with elements in the rear half.
Finally, the Drake Kraken had its whitebox review rescheduled to early March after further concept time resolved areas that didn’t hit current standards. The team also reviewed traversal throughout the ship. Following this, they removed and reduced the scale of some rooms that offered no benefit to players (without compromising the scale of the interior hero rooms, like Engineering). The ship remains on track for its planned release next year.
Community
The Community team began the month by publishing the January PU Monthly Report and preparing for February’s seasonal and community-driven events.
The team supported the annual return of Coramor, Star Citizen’s equivalent of Valentine’s Day, with an informative catch-all post detailing everything this yearly celebration has to offer. This also included a Referral Bonus and the Love, Actually: Stories of the 'Verse 2956 contest showcasing some of the community’s most memorable moments. Coramor also welcomed the new Argo MOTH salvage ship, and the Community team provided a comprehensive Q&A and published a guide to the new Industrial missions.
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Additionally, the Community team provided support for Red Festival, which celebrates the new lunisolar year in the ‘verse. They published a catch-all thread for the event, along with the Earned Fortune screenshot contest highlighting how intrepid players personify the agile rat. The team’s contributions for both Coramor and the Red Festival also included updates to the Welcome Hub, New Player Guide, and Welcome Back, Pilot pages, ensuring that new and returning players had the latest info on everything happening in the ‘verse.
Throughout February, the team kept a close eye on player feedback across Spectrum and social media, pulling together sentiment reports and passing key findings on to the relevant development teams to keep them in the loop on what the community was saying.
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February also marked the return of one of the largest community-created racing events, Enter ATMOSPHERE presented by ATMO Esports. Held in Sydney, Australia, this event featured top racers competing head-to-head in a variety of challenges, as well as exclusive prizes and CIG staff in attendance, including Chris and Sandi Roberts. The Community team also supported this premier event through Spectrum and social media.
As always, the team also continued their evergreen tasks, including This Week in Star Citizen, alongside bi-weekly updates to the Roadmap and Roundups.
Core Gameplay
As seen by Evocati players during recent Tech Previews, the Core Gameplay team made solid progress on the Inventory Rework. Final polish and bug fixes are underway as the team prepares it for release.
Capital Ship Services progressed well, too, and will be delivered to downstream teams soon. The team's focus was also on the social features demonstrated during CitizenCon 2954.
Economy
The Economy team spent part of February tracking exploits, in particular those that resulted in item duplication or large quantities of aUEC being generated. While many loopholes have been closed, further patches will be introduced in Alpha 4.7. Following this, the devs will create additional guardrails and monitoring systems to lessen the impact of illicit aUEC on the wider game economy.
Economy also undertook additional balancing and adjustments to commodity pricing and trade routes while laying the groundwork for future systems, such as Item Recovery and Crafting.
“We were glad to see the positive community response to the Clear The Air live event. We are currently working on upcoming mission balancing and rewards while also looking back at our past content and performing an additional pass on Wikelo-related content.” Economy Team
Mission Design
In February, the devs continued to work on the Alpha 4.7 mission pack, which adds more content to Nyx and revives the courier missions that have been waiting for a refactor since Alpha 4.0. These missions also have small design changes. For example, ‘courier’ missions now range from one-handed items to two-handed boxes, ‘delivery’ missions range from 1 SCU box to 6x 1 SCU boxes, and ‘hauling’ begins from 6 SCU upwards.
Defend Ship missions also received an update allowing the team to accurately track the health of the ship. This will prevent the ship from appearing at almost full health before dying.
Ship Wave missions have been expanded to other contractors outside of Gilly, including a variation that ends with a large ship ‘boss.’
Narrative
In February, the Narrative team focused their efforts on Alpha 4.7, which will expand the content available in Nyx. This involved extensive work on the new locations, including QV Breaker stations (home of the Rock Cracker mission) and the People’s Service Stations, which are new refueling centers operated by the People’s Alliance. These new locations required signage, environmental storytelling, public address audio, and missions that will utilize the spaces. Simultaneously, the team worked with Design to craft dozens of additional new contracts to greatly expand the options that will be available to players in the system.
Looking ahead, the team wrote scripts and completed a capture session for a variety of new NPCs. This work is related to an upcoming gameplay loop that will be released later this year and includes a new faction representative. The session also involved additional content for the Tactical Strike Group mission featured at last year’s CitizenCon.
Narrative also wrote a script for a new story mission that will be an important step toward establishing the pipeline needed for delivering the 1.0 main story content to players. Finally, the team have been developing a storyline that will be introduced in a future release that will see players face down an interesting new faction.
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Online Technology
In February, the Network team focused on improving stability and reliability across Hybrid/DGS, resolving several high‑impact crashes, watchdog timeouts, and replication errors. The team advanced integration of the new scp‑network stack into patch branches, addressing build issues and conflicts, and continued QDSM V1/V2 development and testing to improve dynamic server scaling.
Alongside this, the team implemented authority/replication improvements, refactored streaming bind/unbind logic, and enhanced observability with new engine metrics. Moreover, support was provided for item-imprint development and mission markers. Finally, the team also provided support for bootstrap and developer‑workflow issues.
Following last year’s internal demo of Item Recovery T1, the Online Services team prepared for a feature-complete internal demo and finalized the remaining work in preparation for its upcoming release.
Internal work was done on how the long-term database works, with the intention of improving its speed.
Alongside members of Core Gameplay, Online Services planned for the social features as mentioned above. Instancing is entering its final stage of technical work before being passed down to downstream teams.
Following the Bootstrap user survey, the Live Tools team conducted user interviews to better understand pain points and prioritize improvements to stability and performance.
The Panic Switch error-reporting tool saw active improvements in February, with new deployment updates, better access management, and a more consistent user interface across the application.
Live Tools continued to modernize the Hex game dashboard, with the new architecture now in active implementation.
R&D
In February, work on the improved ground fog continued; a dissipation model was implemented to simulate fog behavior during a full day/night cycle.
Elsewhere, a memory corruption in the engine’s internal name table code was identified. This led to a rewrite of the name table code and related functionality, which now provides a thread-safe and significantly more efficient implementation.
VFX
In February, the VFX team focused heavily on supporting Alpha 4.7, contributing to the development of new locations, creatures, props, and vehicles as additional deliverables for Nyx came online. For example, one of the major Points of Interest for 4.7.0 received extensive fine-tuning, resulting in a significantly improved final look.
Creatures for Nyx also received a dedicated VFX pass to ensure their visuals are up to date and properly integrated into their new environments. In addition, the team helped bring several upcoming vehicles to life.