Roberts Space Industries and Cloud Imperium Games released the latest Around The Verse episode covering more of Star Citizen’s updates and developmental progress.

The latest episode centers around a lot of the advancements of mining, as well as how far along the team is with implementing the mining functionality, which will add a rather large layer of replayability and all new gameplay loops to Star Citizen. You can check out the latest episode of Around The Verse below.

Mining is still an ongoing progress. The team are still implementing tractor beams for mining, as well as UI for scanning and switching between weapons mode and mining mode. One interesting thing is that you won’t be able to use your weapons while in mining mode because mining will take up all of your ship’s energy. So there’s going to be a fine balance between combat vehicles and mining-based vehicles.

Mining still appears to be a long ways off from release, especially since they still haven’t finalized rock physics and rock destruction just yet.

On the planet side of things, they’re also working on improving the persistent universe with an all new savannah biome and acid biomes. Yes, you read that right… there’s a planet that produces acid pools. I shouldn’t have to tell you exactly what the acid pools will do to you if you step in them, but the planet surface itself looks pretty cool.

The savannah, in particular, looks quite spectacular if I must say so myself, and the team seems to be making rapid progress on bringing the biome to life in a fairly significant way.

The team is also upgrading the kiosks in the game… more particular the branding and UI.

Cloud Imperium Games want different kiosks with different types of items available at different shops scattered across the galaxy. The purpose for this is to create a more immersive sense of setting up player-driven economies as well as forcing travel around the galaxy and interaction with different shops.

The new global inventory overhaul also ties into the upcoming mining system that will be featured in Star Citizen. Essentially this is designed so that players who mine and sell resources in a particular area will flood the economy in that area with cheaply priced materials, forcing players to travel to that sector to get those materials.

The new kiosk overhaul will make its early gray box-quality implementation in alpha 3.2. So you’ll be able to see it in action soon.

Ahead of the release of 3.2.0, there was a recent update rolled out in the form of 3.1.4. This includes lots of refinements for the spaceships, with better landing and orbital physics enhancements.

According to a video update from Bored Gamer, he notes that ship combat has been improved, ground combat has been improved, atmospheric gravity has been adjusted, optimizations have been added to smooth out the frame-rates, and CIG have squashed a couple of game-crashing bugs that would cause the client to crash.

You can check out the video review of 3.1.4 below.

Lastly, the hover mode for the grav bikes have been greatly improved. A lot of people have been noting that the bikes now have some very fun and fluid physics.

It will definitely be interesting seeing how well people will adapt to the game when the mining finally arrives, along with the new flora-based biomes.

You can learn more about Star Citizen by visiting the official RSI website.