Star Citizen 4.7 introduces a crafting system allowing players to create enhanced weapons, armor, and ammunition by mining specific high-quality resources and using the Readymake Fabricator, with resource quality directly affecting item stats. Players acquire blueprints through targeted contracts and missions, while community tools assist in efficient resource gathering despite some bugs, marking a major gameplay enhancement focused on exploration, mining, and customization.
Star Citizen 4.7 introduces crafting, enabling players to create enhanced FPS weapons, armor, and ammunition. The update also brings significant changes to mining, which is essential for gathering crafting materials. Players start with default blueprints for basic items like the S38 pistol, P4 assault rifle, and field recon light armor, but creating favorite or custom gear requires effort and resource collection. The crafting process is managed via the Readymake Fabricator, purchasable for 95,000 alpha UEC at refinery decks, where players can load mined materials and monitor crafting progress.
Mining has been streamlined, with asteroids and resource nodes now named after their primary resources, simplifying the search for materials. Each deposit contains fixed primary, secondary, and sometimes tertiary minerals, each with unique radar signature (RS) values. For example, crafting the RP4 weapon requires iron, heresite, and aluminum, which are found in different locations within the Stanton system. Players need to understand RS values and scan carefully, despite occasional bugs affecting the scanning interface, to locate and harvest high-quality materials for crafting.
Resource quality directly impacts the stats of crafted items. Armor benefits from materials that affect damage mitigation, temperature, and radiation resistance, while weapons gain improvements in stability, rate of fire, and impact strength. Materials below 500 quality result in negative stat effects, so players are encouraged to seek higher-quality resources. Refining materials leads to about a 50% loss in quantity, making efficient mining and resource management crucial for successful crafting.
Blueprint acquisition involves an element of RNG but can be targeted through specific contracts in the game. Different contracts offer blueprint pools for various weapons and armor, including vault weapons and Palutino armor variants. For instance, vault weapon blueprints come from storyline missions and repeaters, while bounty hunter contracts are key for Palutino armor. Blueprints are character-bound and currently reset with each patch, and crafted items do not persist on the Public Test Universe (PTU), though changes may come before the live release.
To aid players in navigating crafting and resource hunting, community tools and databases have emerged, providing detailed information on blueprints, materials, and contract rewards. These resources help reduce blind grinding and improve efficiency in acquiring desired crafting components. Despite some bugs and limitations, the crafting system in Star Citizen 4.7 marks a significant step forward, offering new gameplay depth and encouraging exploration, mining, and mission-running in pursuit of custom gear.