PU Monthly Report

The PU Monthly Report is back, this time detailing all the development progress made throughout June. Read on for the latest from AI Features & Tech, Ships, Community, Core Gameplay, Mission Design, Narrative, and more.

AI Content

In June, the AI Content team continued to support several initiatives for Alpha 4.9. They also worked alongside Mission Design to set up comms calls and NPCs for several upcoming missions and locations.

AI Content then supported a performance-capture shoot to ensure that the content will flow seamlessly once the audio is mastered and animations are solved. Alongside this, the team planned out some Narrative-driven initiatives for new behaviors and directions to explore.

AI (Features & Tech)

Last month saw AI Features & Tech fix an issue with Super Heavy NPCs not being able to use their miniguns. Some Human AI issues were fixed too, including NPCs continuing to fire at targets they could not see.

For the apex valakkar, the devs introduced the ability to constrain it to an area while avoiding another. It also received laser and EMP attacks, gained the ability to switch between attacks, and improvements were made to surface sound detection. For the Yormandi, a bug causing it to get stuck in reactions was fixed.

Although not yet integrated into the PU, improvements were made to the flight AI for fleeing behind objects and counter-chasing behaviors, and updates were made to the general Flight behavior.

Animation

The Animation team fleshed out animations for the apex valakkar while planning for the next round of creatures. They also worked on the mission-giver Battaglia, both in her physical location and when spoken to over comms.

Art (Characters)

The Character Art team spent the month working on a new armor set, mission rewards, updates to the Nine Tails gang, and other upcoming items. Support for the StarWear initiative continued too. Alongside this, the Concept Art team progressed with a new combat armor.

Art (Ships)

In the UK, the Ships team finalized and launched the Gatac Railen and Tyilui. They then turned their attention to another Grey's Market ship, which was parked last year due to other priorities, beginning by ensuring nothing had degraded since it was last worked on.

Further work was done for the Liberator, including integrating and repurposing numerous Anvil kit pieces from recent ships, such as the Asgard and Paladin, which significantly reduces the amount of required new content.

More artists moved onto the RSI Galaxy following the release of the recent alien ships, helping progress across all areas.

Two new ground vehicle variants progressed quickly down the pipeline. One successfully passed a combined whitebox and greybox gate review, while the other is rapidly approaching its whitebox gate review.

Four unannounced ships progressed too. The first, a new fighter, passed its whitebox gate review and will continue to have its geometry refined as part of the greybox phase, in preparation for November.

The second, a new ship from a Xi'an manufacturer designed to fulfill a generalist role, entered pre-production.

The third progressed toward its LOD0 gate. As part of this, the team added detail across the hull and ensured the animated parts don’t interfere with each other.

The fourth had its greybox gate review. Following this, adjustments were made to its component and weapon locations. The Mo-cap team is currently preparing to tackle the complicated animations required for this ship.

Finally, the North American team continued to move the Kraken toward its greybox gate review, with a focus on utilizing the finalized Drake kit from the Ironclad. The initial lighting pass was done to set the tone across the ship.

Art (Weapons)

In June, the Weapons team continued through the final phase of production on a new large-caliber weapon. In addition, they pushed forward with content for upcoming patches and numerous weapon paints for various upcoming events.

The team’s ongoing material polish passes and updates continued, too, and they’re looking forward to upcoming tech that will require cross-team collaboration.

Community

In June, the Community team kicked off Pride Month with the Show Us Your Colors Celebration contest, inviting players to express their creativity in honor of the myriad colorful ways our community shines. The team also published the May PU Monthly Report and prepared for the many events this month had in store.

The Community team then supported the release of Alpha 4.8.1, an update that introduced new missions and additional content to the game. They published a Player-to-Player Trade Update detailing recent changes designed to streamline in-game trading while limiting the potential for exploits. They also maintained a Known Issues thread to track which issues were being actively investigated, awaiting implementation, or already in progress. The thread was updated regularly as development addressed them. Throughout and after the release, the team kept a close eye on player feedback and sentiment, making sure development stayed informed of any emerging issues.

As Alien Week made its yearly return, the team provided a helpful Catch All thread highlighting the otherworldly experiences this event included. They published a Q&A for the new Gatac Tyilui and a Xeno Craft Challenge community contest, encouraging participants to show how the alien cultures of Star Citizen have inspired them.

The Bar Citizen World Tour shifted into high gear in June with International Bar Citizen Weekend, with the Community team hosting this year's events in Austin, Frankfurt, Montreal, and Manchester. Attendees received a Shattered Vanduul Lance to display in their hangar, with more chances to pick one up as the tour continues to new locations throughout the year.

“Meeting the community in person and coming together over our shared love of the ‘verse is what Bar Citizen is all about. With many stops planned across the globe for 2026, we hope to see you there!” Community Team

The team also kept up their regular cadence of This Week in Star Citizen and bi-weekly Roadmap updates to round out the month’s many activities.

Core Gameplay

In June, the Core Gameplay team shifted focus to a dedicated bug-fixing push alongside the Player Experience and QA teams. Much of the month was spent identifying the root causes of issues affecting day-to-day gameplay, including problems with hangar and freight-elevator flow, quantum travel, Starmap routing, and vehicles being falsely destroyed or flagged for claim.

Alongside this, the team kept moving forward on a range of content, technology, and feature initiatives.

The upcoming Apocalypse Arms heavy machine gun received support for magazines mounted to the Super Heavy suit's backpack. Players can now load magazines into the backpack by hand, even when it's worn by another player, and empty magazines now eject automatically. This work also prompted a smaller rework of explosion damage so that it spreads more evenly across body parts, plus fixes for the ammo count display and magazines failing to eject correctly.

Supporting the HMG also required changes to the melee system to handle different buttstock-strike damage values, which fixed a bug where they weren't dealing damage at all. Separately, holographic previews for tractor-beamed items now use each item's attachable offset where available, making their appearance more accurate.

For Item Recovery, the team finished a basic version of the Individual Item Claim mode and began work on the full version. Ship paints can now be bricked and recovered like other components. Fixes went in for bricked ships that remained flyable after a full component swap, and for loadouts not being respected after a claim. Claim timer improvements also continued. To cut down on unnecessary claims, ships destroyed while inside a hangar can now be claimed for free.

For StarWear, a new tool validates and repairs player and NPC loadouts, catching the setup errors that would otherwise break compatibility. The team also added clothing prerequisites for certain armors. For example, the Caldera Novikov suit may require a specific clothing item to be worn first. Work also began on StarWear's UI, which took several iterations with UX Design to get right given the complexity of the equipment rules. New additions include a blocked state that tells players when an item can't be equipped because another item is in the way, indicators for whether a piece is spaceworthy, and an improved weight bar at the top of the inventory.

Updates to several core systems were made for Starchitect, which will fundamentally change how designers place locations and sandbox content across planets. Now, harvestables and loot are context-aware of their surrounding location and environment, so designers can match loot to the environment more easily. For instance, instead of manually placing outlaw-specific loot boxes, the system will now detect that a location is outlaw-controlled and select the right loot type automatically. Crafting is undergoing similar changes for Starchitect compatibility, and the Mission System required significant rework so the designers can set up mission locations and contracts at a much larger scale. Freight elevators and security systems are now Starchitect-compatible as well.

This procedural shift also triggered a broader review of core gameplay systems, so the team rewrote how nav-points are handled and accessed to ensure any system reading that data keeps working even when a location is fully streamed out. This will allow Starchitect locations to appear correctly on the Starmap, be routed to, show up in the quantum travel HUD, and support location inventories for freight elevators,

For the Command Module, the team provided heavy post-release support, addressing player-reported bugs across hangar and air-traffic control interactions, damage handling, quantum travel markers, locked doors, camera override, Starmap routing, physics collisions, server transition issues, room atmosphere, and more.

Ahead of Tech Preview and player testing, the team fixed critical instancing bugs, including players losing ownership of their instance (causing it to despawn) and players being incorrectly moved into someone else's instance. Eviction logic was also added so a player kicked from a party gets teleported to a safe location outside the instance.

To support the reworked Siege of Orison, Core Gameplay gave the designers a way to assign NPCs to defend specific areas, removing the need for complex spawn-closet setups inside instances. The designers can now also set custom respawn locations. For example, sending a player to the nearest medical facility after completing an objective, functioning as a checkpoint system. This is especially valuable for long-form content like Siege of Orison.

For Transport, shuttles can now be gated behind mission logic, matching functionality already available in the legacy system. The team cleaned up code for elevator carriages with a single door and completed the major work to bring vehicle elevators under the Transport system, replacing the convoluted elevator setups many vehicles currently rely on.

Work then continued on the toolset the designers use to build mission content, with numerous workflow fixes and optimizations. The devs also began building a Mission Board UI Provider component to support local interactable mission boards, first planned for use at new Starchitect locations. Progress also continued on bringing back physical mission givers. Players can now receive a one-time comms call from a mission giver when they meet certain conditions, such as entering a specific star system. Mission delivery directly to an instance is now supported and is used by various Battaglia missions.

To close out some of the work on the Ship Hangar Services feature, the team added support for missile containers when stacking missiles on a cargo grid.

Finally, for Social and Orgs, chat was re-implemented with more robust customizable tabs. A new location-based channel lets players near a planet chat with others in the vicinity, automatically switching channels as they move between areas. The team also entered the discovery phase for a reworked Friends app.

Creature Content

In June, the Creature team worked on various improvements to the existing behaviors of the valakkar family. Work on the apex sand variant is still underway, with the team refining the gameplay to provide a better experience to players in ships.

Pre-production for a brand-new creature family began, with exploration around visual identity, silhouettes, combat legibility, and gameplay archetypes going through various rounds of iteration.

Economy

Last month, the Economy team evaluated the economic data from the Alpha 4.8 release and worked to improve some of the underlying systems, such as repair and reclaim. This will allow outliers to be more reasonably priced and the systems to work more intuitively.

Mission Design

Progress continued on Siege of Orison, with the Mission team pushing the boundaries of the technology and working through limitations as they came up.

The upcoming Battaglia missions received polish throughout June, too, with improvement plans being made to ensure the devs achieve the experience they want.

Following the recent armor rebalance, which changed the tags ships use to spawn in combat missions, the team are now beginning to rebalance the mission content, with the first being the Defend Ship archetype.

Narrative

Narrative started the month working with Mission Design on several parallel events that are scattered across upcoming patches. This will be in tandem with the narrative designers, who will help generate placeholder versions of any scripted lines so reviews are more reflective of the final experience. This also includes initial passes on mission text, objectives, and markers to further provide context and direction.

Narrative also started to break down future patches to understand what additional content might be needed from a performance capture or voiceover perspective. In addition to this, the team continued their evergreen tasks of writing names and descriptions for new items, armor pieces, weapons, ships, and paints.

Online Technology

Over the past month, the Live Tools team made significant progress across all of their internal tools, wrapping up several long-running projects while shipping a steady stream of updates and fixes.

The biggest was the completion of two major overhauls to Hex, the internal platform used by Player Support and operations staff. The first was a full visual and experience redesign called Hex 4.0, which established a fresh look and feel that will guide all future development on the platform.

The second was an expanded set of player investigation tools, giving support teams richer information and faster ways to look into player accounts, track item ownership history, and manage entitlements. Multiple Hex releases also went out during this period, delivering new features, improvements, and critical fixes, including security patches to access management and backend components.

For Bootstrap (the tool that helps developers quickly set up and configure their local work environments), the team continued to resolve reliability issues. Moreover, they advanced the design phase of a larger overhaul aimed at making the overall developer experience significantly smoother.

The devs continued to improve how crashes are captured and reported. The improvements made the data richer and more actionable for those investigating issues. Panic Switch, the live incident management tool, also received ongoing polish and bug fixes. For instance, the completion of a configuration migration that had been in progress for some time. The team additionally began work on automatically handling crash reports tied to a known hardware issue affecting a specific generation of Intel processors. This will reduce the manual effort needed from operations staff to triage those incidents.

The Online Services team resolved over 30 bugs across two-weekly cycles and focused on a mix of upcoming player-facing features and live game stability work.

The biggest area of active development was Item Recovery (also known as Item Imprint), the long-awaited feature that will allow players to reclaim items lost due to bugs or crashes. Online Services completed a key alignment session with the UI team to nail down how the individual item claim flow will work. This includes how the game handles a player's full list of owned items and lets them selectively recover what's missing.

Significant work also went into addressing stability issues with the game's mission and contract systems. Dedicated design and technical review sessions were held, and a formal optimization effort was created to rebuild the contract generation process in a more efficient way.

The Global Database Sharding work, which improves how player data is distributed across servers at scale, was completed. The team also moved deeper into the discovery and design phase for the future Crafting and Refining system. They held multiple sessions to resolve complex questions around how crafted items interact with player-owned equipment, insurance, and persistent item upgrades.

R&D

In June, further progress was made to improve the look of gas clouds. Support for a density-based LUT to recolor gas clouds was added, and the phase function that controls how light is scattered was improved. Moreover, the min/max raymarch path was simplified and optimized.

Focus then switched back to ground fog. The new model, which was finalized earlier this year, was added into production. As a finishing touch, support for local height as well as density was added. This is cheaper to evaluate and render, extends the visible range, and improves the modelling aspect of ground fog and its lighting. It will also self-shadow as well as cast shadows like rain volumes and clouds. Part of this work includes optimizations for the atmosphere raymarcher. Lastly, broken sub-object culling was fixed.

VFX

In June, the VFX team finished the last of their Alpha 4.8 content work by giving the Railen and Tyilui a full pass.

“The alien visuals are always fun to work on and the images attached definitely show why!” VFX Team

Beyond Alpha 4.8, VFX also started their pass on Siege of Orison to provide high-impact atmospheric visuals to help elevate the already intense mission and locations. Work also began on upcoming weapons and vehicles.