Cloud Imperium Games announced the plans to change the rules for looting and item recovery in Star Citizen quite radically.
At the moment, when you kill another player, you can loot everything they have on their body, including their weapons, armor, and inventory.
The new plans appear to shift things pretty radically in favor of those being looted, significantly reducing the benefits for the looter.
There will be three different tiers for the feature, to be implemented and tested in sequence starting with T0 with the next big update, alpha 4.1.0, which is currently being tested following the release of update 4.0.2.
There is no specific timeframe for Tier 1 and Tier 2’s implementation in Star Citizen, but they’re already being actively developed.
Tier 0 is pretty simple. Whatever is equipped besides ammo and consumables can’t be looted, while whatever is in the inventory can be looted, as follows:
- Items stored in your inventory (example: items in your backpack) will not be protected and will remain on your corpse upon death, available to be looted/stolen by other players, or retrieved by you.
- Items such as magazines and medpens that you have equipped can still be looted from your corpse. However, you will also respawn with these items, as duplication concerns for these types of consumable are less concerning at this stage.
- T0 Item Recovery applies to all forms of respawning, whether in a medbed on a ship or at your assigned landing zone.
- To ensure that your weapon in active use is secured as an “equipped” item, it will automatically be stowed to your holster upon death.
- If you die within a Landing Zone, you will respawn with both your equipped gear and your inventory (Example: belongings in your backpack). This is to help avoid you losing items of any kind, should a death outside of your control happen.
- With T0, you will respawn with your previously equipped gear already attached to your character.
Tier 1 introduces the ability to register (basically insure) your gear and ships. It’ll also remove the ability to use Backspace to get out of dangerous situations without losing gear.
Here’s the ruleset:
- Personal Loadout: Players can register their equipped items which can be reclaimed for a fee at specific kiosks or freight elevators.
- Ships & Interiors: Ships, along with their loadouts, decorations, and locker contents, can also be registered. They can then be reclaimed in the state they were previously registered at ASOP terminals for a price.
- Looting & “Bricked” Items: Once an item is looted, it remains usable until the original owner reclaims it or marks it as stolen. At that point, a Dead Man Switch is activated, meaning it will cease to function after a period of time.
- While a looted and/or stolen “bricked” item is no longer usable, you can still sell the item for credits.
- Pledge items are auto-registered and will never lose their registration status. They can always be claimed back, even if they were not manually registered.
- With T1, you will no longer respawn with your preserved gear already equipped. You will need to visit a location, such as your freight elevator, to reclaim your registered items. We are developing a quality-of-life feature to allow you to re-equip your previous full loadout with one “auto equip” button at this location.
Lastly, Tier 2 will introduce the ability to restore “bricked” items for a price. Here’s how it’ll work.
- Looting & “Bricked” Items: Once an item is looted, you will have the option to sell it, dismantle it for crafting materials, or restore it (with the potential cost of crafting materials and credits) to make it your own. This system creates a viable path for piracy, allowing you to claim another player’s belongings if you take the necessary steps to legitimize ownership.
- If an item had a cosmetic applied, restoring it will remove the cosmetic in the process.
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 has been in development for over a decade and in alpha for several years. It will be released exclusively for PC at some point in the future.
The crowdfunding total has recently passed $790 million and it’s currently at $790,810,243. The game also has 5,553,954 registered users, albeit not all of them are paid customers. Many simply create an account to enjoy the occasional free-to-play periods.
Incidentally, 2024 was the second-best year ever for Star Citizen’s crowdfunding campaign, missing the record only by roughly one million.
A few months ago, Cloud Imperium Games showcased plenty of features and tech coming to Star Citizen, 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.