Star Citizen’s 3.17 alpha update out today, Fueling Fortunes, is designed to expand both economic and career opportunities, along with new locations, new ships, new functionality for NPC vendors and storefronts to allow for easier selling, and other ways to earn some credits.
The update also introduces the first interactive river that contains plants and harvestable resources. Overall, the update is designed to change and improve features in the economic system. This extends to mining equipment, ship to ship refueling so that you can refill your ships in space, and if you are enterprising enough, refuel other people's ships and charge them for the convenience. This new feature will only work with specific ships, and the fuel source will be the Starfarer, which has six fuel pods that can be used to offer fuel of your choice.
General performance also got some updates including for ship to ship desync reduction and GPU particle performance pass. Additional parts of this update build upon prior releases, including with the addition of a new hospital, Lorville Maria Pure of Heart, where you can get your character patched up, regenerate, and buy medical supplies. This and the new space station clinic module options in 3.17 expand upon the initial medical gameplay update from several months ago that added additional functionality and allowed for building hospitals and clinics.
Of course any major update will have its share of bug fixes and improvements, and 3.17 has a lot of that. From additional polish and balance tweaks to things like hunger and thirst to fixing bugs with incorrect damage, unintended instant death, making repair services actually repair destroyed engines, and making sure reloading and medical systems work as expected.
For those who might enjoy their coffee virtual style, there’s also been a new AI coffee shop vendor added to Area18. It might be useful for those impacted by the following bug fix, “Players should no longer experience being teleported back into bed shortly after getting out of it”.
See the full patch notes over at Star Citizen.
