Today Cloud Imperium Games passed a major milestone with its crowdfunded space simulator Star Citizen, the “preview” release of the highly anticipated Alpha 4.0.
Likely the most visible addition is the debut on the live servers of Pyro, Star Citizen’s second playable star system.
Not only the addition of Pyro basically doubles the game’s real estate, but it also enables traveling between systems via jump points, which is one of the main elements of the game.
Pyro comes with several explorable planets and moons, space stations, settlements, and much more. It’s a lawless system governed by gangs, so it’ll be riskier to explore compared to the first system, Stanton.
The second big addition is the first phase of Server Meshing, which allows the game to distribute the load between multiple servers. This increase the player count per shard from 100 to 500 players.
Below you can check out a trailer of what you can expect from the update. As explained earlier today by Chris Roberts himself, it’s a “preview” as it’s still missing a few features, and parts of it are still being tested at scale. It’ll likely be fully deployed in the new year.
The plan is for progress to be persistent throughout the transition.
Of course, no big Star Citizen update comes without signature ship, and today we get the Mirai Guardian in its standard and QI versions, the latter having an additional Quantum Dampener.
They start at $230 and $240 respectively, but keep in mind that it’ll be purchasable in-game like the rest of Star Citizen’s ships at some point soon enough, so real money purchases should be done only with the purpose of supporting the game’s development.
You can see it in action in another trailer.
The update comes with plenty more features including new animals to populate the planets, an extensive economy overhaul, and much more. You can find the full list on the official patch notes.
If you’re unfamiliar with Star Citizen, it’s a crowdfunded project directed by Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame. It’s a multiplayer sandbox space simulator that will be released exclusively for PC.
Coincidentally, today we also get a new trailer titled “What is Star Citizen?” showcasing the game, and you can watch it below.
The crowdfunding total just passed $767 million ($767,261,410 at the moment of this writing) and the game has 5,471,227 registered users. Of course, many of them aren’t paying customers, as they register accounts to enjoy Free Fly Events like the one that ended recently.
A few weeks ago, we also got to see plenty of features and tech coming to the game, on top of the overall vision for version 1.0, which will be the full release of the game, albeit it doesn’t yet have a date.
A single-player campaign titled Squadron 42 is also in development, starring an exceptional cast of famous actors including Mark Hamill, Henry Cavill, Gary Oldman, Liam Cunningham, Gillian Anderson, and more. Recently we saw plenty of gameplay and learned that it’ll release in 2026.
Since the project has been in development for over a decade, you can also see how Squadron 42 evolved since its first reveals.
Full disclosure: the author of this article has backed Star Citizen’s crowdfunding campaign.
