Cloud Imperium Games released a new update for its growing space simulator Star Citizen, numbered Alpha 4.3.2 and titled “Fractured Frontiers.”
The update introduces the climax of the fight against the Frontier Fighters with three phases.
Phase 1: “Recon” will prompt players to kill a high-ranking member of the Frontier Fighters and recover their datapad. The second mission will involve recovering another datapad from the corpse of an allied NPC.
Phase 2: “Siege” will request conducting an ambush mission against Frontier Fighter forces, while the second mission requires the destruction of the enemies’ regen medical storage canisters.
Phase 3: “Takedown” is a server-wide mission prompting players to team up and take down a Polaris that the Frontier Fighters stole at Invictus Launch Week.
As usual, you can decide to side with the Citizen for Prosperity or the Headhunters. Completing phase 1 will grant you an outfit, phase 2 will grant a skin for the Greycat MTC, while phase 3 will grant skins for the Anvil Arrow and Crusader Spirit.
There will be two versions of each reward, each themed after the faction you support.
The new content isn’t all there is to the update, as salvaging has been reworked quite deeply, with a rebalance between different salvaging ships, on top of the balance of structural salvage versus hull scraping. On top of that, yields will need to be refined.
These changes are foundational for the upcoming crafting and are intended to provide larger salvage ships with meaningful rewards while not making smaller ships irrelevant.
Some more changes have been made to the economy, Wikelo’s missions, weapons, and tractor beams.
On top of that, three new ships have been added following their introduction at the CitizenCon Direct, the Anvil Paladin, the Esperia Stinger, and Grey’s Market Shiv.
You can find more details on the official patch notes.
If you’re unfamiliar with Star Citizen, it’s a PC exclusive, 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.
In the meantime, the crowdfunding total continues to grow, and it has recently passed $878 million. To be precise, it’s currently at $878,703,671. The game also has 5,962,962 registered users, albeit not all of them are paying customers. Many simply create an account to enjoy the free-to-play periods.
A single-player campaign titled Squadron 42 is also in active development with a 2026 release window, starring an exceptional cast of famous actors, including Mark Hamill, Henry Cavill, Gary Oldman, Liam Cunningham, Gillian Anderson, and more.
Since the project has been in development for over a decade, you can see how Squadron 42 has evolved since its first reveal.
Full disclosure: the author of this article has backed Star Citizen’s crowdfunding campaign.
