The newer episodes of Around The Verse have kind of stalled when it comes to rolling out really interesting new content. I suppose this is due to the fact that a lot of the resources for Star Citizen’s development right now are focused on finishing up the mining tools and ensuring that they’re functional.
The episode starts by giving gamers a quick rundown of the updates being made to the persistent universe, which includes the new mining feature. As you can see in the video below, the mining tool now allows you to actually utilize the tool to crack open rocks and siphon resources out of them.
Based on the video, the resource extraction tool actually seems to work pretty decently. In fact, over the last couple of weeks, the progress that they’ve made is rather remarkable, with dynamic physics and particle effects working properly when breaking rocks open, and the visual beam effects for extracting minerals giving gamers the impression that they’re really sucking up those sweet, sweet minerals through the extraction tool. The mining beam and its effects looks proper from the first-person perspective as well.
However, according to Bored Gamer, the mining is still a little glitchy at the moment due to imprecision when it comes to mining rocks effectively. Thus, it isn’t quite as polished as it needs to be for public release, but it’s getting closer to full and proper functionality. The mining is definitely better than where it was a few weeks ago, but it still seems to have a ways to go, according to some alpha 3.2.0 reports.
The new and improved derelicts are being implemented for launch in alpha 3.2.0, with better ambient sound effects to help the derelicts feel a lot more atmospheric.
The team is also working on the party and group chat is also being worked on, but the party chat isn’t quite finished just yet. This will tie into the new group and party features, where you’ll be able to interact other players and add them to your party. The group features will allow players to form bandit groups, smuggling groups, escorts, enforcement patrols, or a group of space vigilantes if that strikes your fancy.
For future updates, beyond 3.2.0, will include an all new power dispersion feature for the ships. Now this is a really cool feature where players who have a bunch of energy weapons on their ship will be able to modify how the ship distributes energy. This is very similar to the way the heat allocation systems work in the MechWarrior games.
Star Citizen’s alpha 3.2.0 is currently in PTU testing. For more info on the roadmap, feel free to visit the developer roadmap.
