In the latest episode of Around The Verse for Star Citizen, they discuss some of the advancements being made with the user beacons, as well as the updates in the pipeline for 3.2 and 3.3.

The video starts off covering some of the updates for the visual upgrades still being implemented for Star Citizen, as well as the mechanical functionality for features coming down the line, such as mining.

You can check out the video below.

Proprietary GPU rendering effects have been put into place to take advantage of successful and unsuccessful mining attempts, ship explosions and environmental sparks and effects. What this means is that you’ll have very clear visual cues when you successfully or unsuccessfully mine a rock in space.

Procedural outpost layouts have been updated and are continually being refined for the next major content rollout. The art teams have also finalized outpost billboards and visual advertisements so that the truck stops and outposts look more lived-in, corporate, and active.

Large scale forest rendering is also coming along, which will allow players to finally visit planets with large forested areas to add diverse biomes to the planets in alpha 3.3.0.

The biome updates won’t be limited to just 3.3.0. In fact, alpha 3.2 will feature some improved topographical channel scaling to allow for different types of surfaces and also adding more differing visual tapestries to the topographical layout.

The rest of the video covers a lot of details on how they’re planning on expanding the beacon feature, adding more ways for players to customize the beacons. The next major update for the beacon will be assassination and escorts. The two options will allow players to create group escort crews, allowing marauders and bandits to help smugglers ship cargo from one place to another. There’s also going to be the ability to utilize points of interests as a beacon, which will allow for slightly different types of adventures.

In future updates, Cloud Imperium Games have plans to make the AI take part in beacon missions as well in order to create a competitive and properly priced economy for beacons, keeping prices balanced and enabling beacons to be answered in a timely enough manner.

The last piece of the Around The Verse episode covers a bug that gets smashed by the Bugsmashers. For more info you can visit the official Star Citizen website.