Today Cloud Imperium Games had a pair of reveals for both its online space simulator Star Citizen and its single-player counterpart Squadron 42.
The first reveal is the Drake Golem, an entry level mining ship designed to be used by new players to start their industrial career basically immediately as they start the games.
It comes with detachable ore containers and a brand new mining arm that uses a proprietary mining head with a cheap (it’s Drake, after all) and unstable mining laser on top of a rather fancy animation.
You can check it out in action below, alongside developer commentary. It’ll come out with version Alpha 4.1, which is currently being tested on the PTU and will soon be implemented on the live servers.It’ll certainly be an interesting complement for the Argo ATLS Geo, which will release at the same time and is a mining mech.
The second release is perhaps even more interesting, and it comes in the form of new artwork portraying the mysterious Vanduul, the alien race which will serve as the main enemy in the Squadron 42 single-player campaign.
If you’re wondering, they’re basically Klingons (or Kilrathi, if you’re familiar with Wing Commander) on steroids.
They have suddenly attacked humanity 300 years before the game. Their homeworld is unknown, their command structure is obscure, and all diplomatic efforts to establish relations with them have failed. All they seem to care about is war and violence. You can check them out below.
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’s available exclusively for PC.
The crowdfunding total has recently passed $795 million and it’s currently at $795,422,107. The game also has 5,570,603 registered users, albeit not all of them are paid customers. Many simply create an account to enjoy the occasional free-to-play periods.
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.
The single-player campaign titled Squadron 42 is also in active 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 has evolved since its first reveals.
Full disclosure: the author of this article has backed Star Citizen’s crowdfunding campaign.