#sc-news

Alpha 4.0.1: Current Issues & Updates

We wanted to take a moment to update you on the current experience and where our focus is as we work toward rolling out 4.0.1 and beyond.

As we mentioned in the Letter from the Chairman in December, our top priority is playability - ensuring that your experience in the ‘verse is as smooth and enjoyable as possible. That means dedicating all our resources to improving stability, addressing critical issues, and delivering meaningful quality-of-life updates.

With that in mind, we’ve made the decision to forgo the Red Festival Free Fly. This reinforces what we said in December: Star Citizen needs to work, and it needs to work well. Right now, our focus is on continued hotfixes and subsequent patches to bring the experience to a much better place.

While there’s no single patch that will instantly get us to where we want to be, 4.0.1 was an important first step. It included a massive list of fixes, but some of the nastier issues impacting your experience remain. Below, you’ll find a list of some of our top-priority issues currently being worked on.

Overarching Topics:

  • Elevator in the Room
  • Character Stowing and Repair
  • Hangar Woes
  • Load Times and Initial Load
  • Mission Issues
  • Quantum Travel and Starmap
  • LTP and Keeping What You Earn

Further to this, next Thursday, Feb 6th on a special two-hour SCL, Jared Huckaby will be joined by CTO Benoit Beausejour to go deeper into these issues covered above, what’s causing them, what’s being done, and how our feature and stability plans for 2025 will build over the year to restore the functionality and quality of life to the persistent universe that we all want.

This week in Star Citizen:

  • **Tuesday: ** Phase 2 of Fight For Pyro
  • **Wednesday: ** January PU Monthly Report
  • Thursday: <:Twitch:884999004394500128> Star Citizen Live special 2 hour episode with CTO Benoit Beauséjour <:Bault:337681686764716033> at 9 AM Pacific / 5 PM UTC

Inside Star Citizen and Behind the Ships will return next week.

@GeneralNews

Fight for Pyro: Phase 2

Citizens for Prosperity

  • Mission A: Retake Pyro Outpost
  • Mission B: Defend CFP Server Ship

Headhunters

  • Mission A: Infiltrate Frontier Fighter Base
  • Mission B: Cripple Frontier Fighter Base

Frontier Fighters

  • Mission A: Destroy CFP Servers
  • Mission B: Destroy CFP Server Ship

Complete a total of 6 missions

February 2025 Subscriber Promotions

In-game flairs:

  • Centurion subs: Red Heart Plushie Cushion Set
  • Imperator subs: Coramor '55 Loveseat + Red Heart Plushie Cushion Set
  • Subscriber-Exclusive Store: Heartseeker Double Bed

Ships of the Month:

  • Centurion ship: Zeus Mk II ES
  • Imperator ships: Zeus Mk II ES + CL


RSI Launcher 2.2.0 Release Notes

New Features:

  • Game location V2 – You can download your game in different location and manage it.

Fixed Issues:

  • Settings: When typing on additional settings field, there is no delay to save the information
  • Minor text adjustment on error text and 2F4
  • LCH-90/231/333/877/1014 - Checking infinite game file
  • Fix on edge case when uninstalling game
  • LCH - 1528 - typo in change location text
  • Added dialog to alert users of impact when changing default library or used library

PU Monthly Report January 2025

AI (Content):

  • The AI Content team began the year prototyping an upcoming NPC that will utilize an amalgamation of several behavior types.
  • Work was done on a proprietary tool that will allow the designers to generate a script of the in-engine dialogue flow to ensure the lines work as intended.
  • The team then began updating Stanton’s landing zones with bespoke air traffic controllers that better represent the city. While there is still some required technical validation, these characters will start appearing soon.

AI (Features):

  • For Human combat behavior, friendly-fire checks were updated to not consider the large bounding boxes of vehicles as ‘friendly,’ which could block firing.
  • For creatures, the team focused on improving the valakkar’s behavior. We are working hard to make sure this creature arrives in your hands in the best possible way!”

AI (Tech):

  • Planning was done for the work still required to fully synchronize AI components with the Server Meshing authority transition and other features and systems planned for development this year.

Animation:

  • The Gameplay Animation team began the year working on the kopion hound and various sizes of the valakkar.

Art (Characters):

  • The Character team continued working on StarWear art debt. They also modified the Duster armor, progressed with a stealth armor, designed a new backpack, and developed additional creature variants for future patch releases.
  • The Concept art team explored ideas for various new items and are currently looking into paint schemes for existing armors.

Core Gameplay:

  • Core Gameplay also began planning for the rest of the year, laying the groundwork for upcoming patches and planned features and content.
  • Technical documentation was created for fundamental improvements or rewrites to some of the core systems, including the transit and hangar flows.

Mission Design:

  • The team continued to create new, unannounced content that will improve the quality of all missions, including retroactively improving all existing missions.

Online Technology:

  • In the last week of January, both teams met in the Montreal office to establish and plan their 2025/2026 roadmaps. “This planning session resulted in more surprises we will share with you in the coming months!”

R&D:

  • Work started on prototyping a new method for large-scale soft-terrain shadow generation. This will improve quality while reducing the fairly high cost of generating the needed shadow maps.
  • Work on rain volumes inspired a prototype for improved ground-fog rendering. This will be cheaper to evaluate and render and improve the modeling aspect of ground fog and its lighting by self-shadowing and casting shadows (like rain volumes and clouds). Work began on transforming the prototype into production code.

@GeneralNews

Tracking the Most Impactful Bugs & Issues - Zyloh-CIG

With our big push for playability, we want to leave no stone unturned, so we want to hear from you directly - what’s the most frustrating, game-breaking, or immersion-shattering issue you’re running into in Star Citizen right now?

This isn’t about feature requests or wishlists—this is about the rough edges, the pain points, the things that may not always rise to the top of Issue Council reports but, if addressed, would make a huge difference in playability.

Drop your most pressing issue (in the spectrum thread) and let us know why fixing it would make a big impact on your experience.

Jared on SCL:

  • Star Citizen patches will be monthly and have “storyline” updates using existing features

  • New features will release a lot slower and have work done in the background - as such, ISCs and SCLs will be moving into a single show on Thursdays.

  • “Behind The Ship” episodes will continue, the SH Mk 2 will get its show next Tuesday

Survey Rewards are going out

Star Citizen Live summary:

In 2025, we’re making stability and quality of life improvements a top priority.

While monthly patches will continue to bring new content, our focus this year is on fixing long-standing issues and making Star Citizen a smoother, more reliable experience. We’ve made a significant internal shift to prioritize fixes over features, and while this won’t happen overnight, you’ll see clear improvements throughout the year.

A few notes:

  • Weekly episodes of Inside Star Citizen and Star Citizen Live continue, with the addition of a new Behind the Ships series, offering in-depth discussions on ships. Next week, we will talk about the Super Hornet Mk II! Note that SCL and ISC will alternate every Thursday now.
  • We’re deeply investigating server instability, with shard locks and server responsiveness issues. We’re also exploring an official maintenance window, allowing us to make structural changes and refresh servers at the same time.
  • The main issue with the elevators and transit systems comes from streaming assets in and out depending on their uses by players. We’ve identified key reproduction steps and are actively working on a refactor for the transit system.
  • Issues like hangars not opening, ships jumping on the platform, ships states causing issues: We’re already working on improving these systems and we’ll get back to you soon.
  • Shared rewards in missions: Yes. It’s coming.
  • And more, as we discussed for 3 hours with Jared & Benoit, about making Star Citizen a greater experience in 2025. Use the Youtube timestamps to discover the subjects covered

From Nicou-CIG

Sneak peek of the week:

ANVIL F7C-M Super Hornet Mk2 Heartseeker

Quote: This is a code red alert.

Live Services Disruption

The Team is currently working to mitigate elevated error rates in the Live Environment.
The 60015 and 60016 errors are the most frequent symptom of the issues currently being addressed.
Successful entry to the PU will remain inconsistent until corrective measures can be applied.

[2025-02-09 Updates]

  • 2230 UTC - Initial Notice, investigation is still ongoing.

[2025-02-10 Updates]

  • 0100 UTC - A maintenance window has been scheduled to begin on 2025-02-10 at 1200 UTC (12:00 PM) and is not expected to take longer than 4 hours.
  • 1525 UTC - Servers online, Matchmaking enabled, Maintenance complete.

This week in Star Citizen:

  • Monday: Star Citizen Comms-Dive #2
  • **Tuesday: ** Coramor 2025; Behind The Ships: Anvil Super Hornet Mk II; & Fight for Pyro Phase 3
  • Thursday: <:YouTube:1221916771267903489> Inside Star Citizen: The Fight For Pyro, a behind-the-scenes look at the development of the event

@GeneralNews

Star Citizen Comms-Dive #2 - February 10, 2025

Quantum Fuel Values

  • The Quantum Fuel capacity of ships has been carefully determined based on size groupings and the archetype classifications we use internally. Each ship falls into one of the following size categories: Snub, Light, Medium, Heavy, Dropship, Gunboat, Corvette, or Frigate.

Realistic Audio Progress Update

  • To deliver a more seamless and realistic audio experience, we’ve had to improve how we structure our sound mixing. This process is mostly complete, though a few edge cases still need attention.
  • While we can’t confirm a date, we’re just as eager to get this work fully integrated into the game as many of you are. It’s on good tracks so far, and we’ll share more with you as we progress through the development!

VOLT Weapons Progress Update

  • VOLT weapons bring a fresh new manufacturer aesthetic to the Star Citizen universe—something we don’t get to introduce often. This series will also debut new damage and ammo types, expanding combat options in fun new ways.
  • With most of the feature work for the new ammo and damage types wrapping up, our weapon artists are taking early 2025 to add the final polish to each asset. We’re targeting a Q2 rollout, with regular releases to follow.

Vehicles in Freight Elevators Progress Update

  • The team is prioritizing improvements related to vehicles on freight elevators, but first, the focus is on improving the quality-of-life aspects of freight elevators to make them more user-friendly, such as enabling mining bags to be sold directly from the warehouse, and the commodity redistribution feature, which will allow players to split and merge boxes more easily.

Capital Letters With Accents

  • We’re working to replace the 2D text renderer, and its replacement should handle accents and ligatures better than it does currently. We will let you know when we have more news to share.

Hornet Loadout Guide

Center Attachment Compatibility

  • Every Hornet variant comes with a Center Attachment slot, designed to hold components like scanners, ball turrets, or cargo modules. Within the same Mk series, these attachments are planned to become fully swappable, but they aren’t cross-compatible between Mk I and Mk II models.
  • For instance, you can take the WillsOp LongLook Radar from an F7C-R Hornet Mk II ‘Tracker’ and swap it out for a Stor*All Big Box H2 from an F7C Hornet Mk II.
  • Check out the table below for a breakdown of the planned compatibility so you know exactly what works where!

Nose Turret Compatibility

  • The F7A Mk II nose turret is only compatible with the F7A Mk II and F7C-M Mk II. It cannot be equipped on other Hornet Mk II variants.
  • However, the civilian F7C Mk II nose turret will be available in-game for the nose slots of all other Mk II variants.
  • For the Mk I series, the military C4-163F ball turret and F7A Mk I nose turret are exclusive to the F7A Mk I Hornet and cannot be mounted on other Mk I models.

Known Current Issues

  • We’re aware of an issue with the F7A Mk II nose turret that makes customization difficult or, in some cases, impossible.
  • Additionally, the F7A Hornet Mk I, F7C-M Super Hornet Mk I, and F7C-M Hornet Heartseeker Mk I currently cannot equip the CargoBox, radar, or Ghost’s center cap.
  • Our team is actively investigating these issues and will share updates as we work toward a fix.

F7C-M Hornet Heartseeker

  • Unlike the Mk I series, the new F7C-M Hornet Heartseeker Mk II is no longer a standalone variant. Instead, ‘Heartseeker’ refers to a specific weapons loadout on any Hornet Mk II, often paired with a distinctive, eye-catching paint job.

  • We hope this little Hornet Loadout Guide helps you customize your ship, whether Mk I or Mk II, to perfectly match your preferences and needs!

F7C-M Super Hornet MK2 Price USD (Pre-tax)

Heartseeker Upgrade Kit (This time in Euro)

Fight for Pyro: Phase 3

  • Mission A: Eliminate Frontier Fighter Holdouts
    Now that we have uncovered their despicable plot to pose as Frontier Fighters, it’s time to crush the last of the Slicers! Flush out the last remnants of these scum and let them know that it’s open season on their asses!

  • Mission B: Destroy Frontier Fighter Ships
    Today, the Slicers will feel the might and wrath of a united people because today is the day we make them answer for their heinous crimes against our systems! Obliterate every single Slicer ship, and let them feel the burn of justice!

-# you can also use the Superhornet Turret on the F7A