PU Monthly Report

Welcome to March’s Monthly Report. As usual, there was a huge amount of work going on across CIG’s global studios, from the final touches of Alpha 4.7: Welcome to the Rock to exciting content coming soon and later in the year. Read on for all the details!

AI Content

Last month saw AI make numerous fixes while continuing to build for the future. With Alpha 4.7 releasing at the end of March, the team fixed a series of bugs, including an elusive issue where station NPCs were offset from their benches.

At the same time, support was provided for upcoming mission content, with the team incorporating placeholder script recordings and setting up comm calls. This will allow the directors and designers to have a better understanding of the intended experience while also allowing the writers to hear and adjust the script as needed.

AI then continued to look at building behaviors for new initiatives that they’re excited to announce soon.

AI (Features & Tech)

For Alpha 4.7, AI Features & Tech solved issues caused by inclusions after breaching and looked into various bugs. In particular, civilians getting stuck in the cower position. They also restored the intended de-escalation when combat NPCs exit combat.

Various crash fixes were implemented, while updates were made to navigation-link generation to connect them closer to individual navigational mesh edges. The team updated the behavior used by NPCs moving through doors with manual controls alongside general improvements to the functionality of NPCs requesting a path-to-end location to check whether a location is traversable.

On the development side, additional work was done on the apex valakkar. Now, the creature will be limited to moving within its arena, will emerge after X number of seconds, and will request a despawn if not damaged sufficiently within a set number of seconds.

The kopion now uses ‘motive patterns’ that have been upgraded with a pack-like growling and circling behavior when attacking. The juvenile valakkar can also use this motive pattern.

For Star Paws, improvements were made to the motive behavior parameter usability. Elsewhere, numerous general PU crashes were fixed.

Animation

March saw the Animation team working on snake and worm-type enemies, including creating new behavior animations.

The Facial Animation team began processing the content from February’s performance capture shoot. This includes content for Alpha 4.8’s new mission (where players will meet two new characters) as well as a news broadcast for Levski.

Art (Characters)

The Character Art team progressed with projects for Alpha 4.8 alongside in-game assets. They also continued to work on new gang outfits and support Star Wear.

The Concept Art team spent the month exploring new heavy combat armors.

Art (Ships)

In the UK, the Ships team progressed with the Gatac Railen, preparing it for its greybox gate review at the end of March. As part of this, the team brought up some areas of the ship to later pipeline standards to help set the tone for larger Gatac-style spaces.

The Greycat UTV wrapped up testing and is awaiting its release into the PU.

“We’re hoping players will have as much fun with this little vehicle as we did making it!” Ships Team

The MISC Hull B had its combined LOD0 and final gate review. This was due to some teams coming onto aspects late, which would cause the earlier gate to technically not be passed. However, all other teams’ work was done for the later stage.

The Drake Ironclad, Ironclad Assault, and Command Module all progressed through their LOD0 phases, with the team starting a full lighting and detail pass across all three to unify the visuals. Alongside this, the team returned to the Caterpillar to set it up for the Command Module.

Several devs moved back on to the RSI Galaxy after a small hiatus helping other projects out. Like other ships in pre-production, they went over the original layout and made adjustments, both for flow and to make use of the ever-growing asset library, all while keeping true to the role and intent of the ship. This involved adjusting the front half of the lower deck to be less isolated and prevent it from leading to a dead end. Other areas were also adjusted to current metrics using suitable assets from other RSI ships.

Five unannounced vehicles also progressed throughout March. The first successfully passed both its whitebox and greybox reviews and is on track for its LOD0 review shortly. The team has made great progress on this ship, as it has grown from an initially simple idea into something much more complex.

The second approached its LOD0 review, with the devs moving through the interior while other teams, such as UI, started work on the required updates. The third passed its greybox gate review and is approaching its LOD0 review at the start of April. The team made some minor adjustments to the cockpit to give the player a better view alongside more refined inputs on the control stick.

As mentioned in last month’s report, the fourth ship had its greybox gate review following review and feedback implementation. Although this delayed the progress slightly, it will result in a much stronger end result.

The UK team’s final unannounced ship progressed toward its whitebox review. This is turning out to be quite complex in terms of animations and states, but the end result will be worth it.

In North America, the team continued with the Drake Kraken. The capital ship successfully passed its whitebox gate review, which was a major milestone for what will be the largest player-flyable ship on release. The team then concentrated their efforts on the main hero rooms, such as engineering, core traversal routes through the ship, and implementing the new bespoke manned turrets and weapons.

Alongside final support for the release of the RSI Aurora Mk II, an unannounced vehicle continued through the greybox phase. Minor adjustments were made to the flow to aid traversal in the rear half of the ship and additional windows were added throughout.

Audio

Last month, the Audio team successfully delivered their work for Alpha 4.7. This involved producing an engaging sound experience to support the visually stunning new dungeon experience.

“We’re proud of our rock-cracking sound design and the more immersive ambient experiences we’re now adding to each release. Of course, it must be said that the Music Design team are expanding the universe with the sweet notes from our composer, Pedro, who provides that extra layer of magic to the universe. Indeed, we are expanding the value of musical input and will be bringing more composed music within the game than previous years.” Audio Team

The team also provided the new Claw Salamander enemies with a unique language, adding more threat and value to NPC conflict. Following this, they began designing further language packs for future builds.

Some of the Vehicle Audio devs visited Jared on Star Citizen Live to discuss the increasingly elevated vehicle experience that's been happening over the last year. As more new vehicles approach, the team are continuing to lift the soundscape and care they put into the flight experience.

Community

The Community team kicked off March by publishing the February PU Monthly Report and laying the groundwork for an eventful month ahead. They also announced the winners of the Coramor Love Story and Red Festival Earned Fortune contests.

The team then supported Stella Fortuna with a helpful Catch-All thread and a video contest dedicated to those daring racers willing to tempt fate and chase fortune.

The Community team also supported the release of Alpha 4.7: Welcome to the Rock. They began by publishing a Patch Watch highlighting what players could look forward to and continued with a thread detailing the major features. They also published an Operation Breaker Stations FAQ to familiarize players with this new activity and a Crafting Guide on the first implementation of this game-changing new mechanic. With this release premiering the RSI Aurora Mk II, Community created an informative Q&A for this reimagining of a classic ship. The team also provided updates to the New Player Guide and Welcome Back, Pilot page, keeping both new and returning players informed of everything Alpha 4.7 introduced to the ‘verse.

The Community team continued to plan and attend Bar Citizen events around the world, including publishing a comm-link for the LVL UP EXPO in Las Vegas. "We're looking forward to connecting with so many of you face-to-face in Vegas! Find us on the LVL UP EXPO show floor or meet up later at the Bar Citizen Afterparty. We hope to see you there!" Community Team

Between the Alpha 4.7 release and a full slate of community and official events, the team stayed closely connected with players and attendees, with community sentiment shared directly with developers.

Finally, the team continued their usual evergreen tasks, such as This Week in Star Citizen and bi-weekly updates to the Roadmap and Roundups, Monthly Reports like this one, and more.

Core Gameplay

The Core Gameplay team spent part of March progressing hacking, with the devs polishing items, improving the tutorial, and ensuring the UI is always correctly aligned to the player.

Various improvements were made to weapon handling, such as switching back to the previously held weapon after using a MedPen. And now, when equipping a new knife from the ground, the player character will store their currently held weapon or entity unless it can’t be stored.

Significant work was done toward Crafting, which debuted in Alpha 4.7. March’s tasks included implementing minimum quality requirements for blueprint aspects and the ability to dismantle items that weren’t previously crafted. Various additions were implemented too, including the ability to define which blueprints are entitled to the player by default, a HUD notification when a player receives a blueprint, material and quality information to the tractor-beam display, and the ability to stack resource containers with the same quality. Players can now also view owned and unowned blueprints in the Crafting UI.

Paging support was given for the crafting machine instead of infinite scrolling for better performance, and new resource thumbnails were added to the crafting machine, freight elevator, and inventory. Resource and quality tracking for freight elevators and inventories was standardized too.

For Engineering, the devs added collapsing headers to the diagnostics MFD, specific warnings to the notifications panel, and color ranges for damaged components on the engineering screen.

Updates were made to the refueling mechanic. These involved various changes to the docking flow, such as allowing any ship to initiate the docking procedure. This means that the refueling ship (such as a Starfarer) can initiate docking and back up to dock with the ship that needs refueling. Auto-docking now triggers when the two ships are close enough. The ships also automatically undock whenever the refueling process is complete to smooth the overall flow.

Progress continued on Drake’s Command Module, with the team integrating the Resource Network into the module’s hand-off procedure, making sure that the host and parasite ship properly connect to the same network. Functionality was also implemented to ensure that the shield faces correctly update when the Command Module is docked and undocked.

The Transport system is now largely feature complete and going through iteration with the Design teams for workflow improvements and additional changes to robustness and scalability. March’s tasks involved improving various debug tooling for easier bug identification by the developers and QA team. The setup for Area18 was completed, which will be used for the initial Tech Preview tests alongside other locations. The team also addressed major issues that caused doors to open into the void and laid the foundation for self-repair functionality. For example, if carriages get into a bad state, the transport system can fully reset the network as needed.

Toward the mission system, the team fixed various issues causing rewards to not be correctly attributed or progress for event trackers to be incorrectly calculated. Progress began on implementing Mission v2 functionality into Starchitect, including the ability to dynamically create mission locations without designer intervention, greatly improving the speed of development.

The inventory rework continued too, with the team finalizing the remaining elements and fixing as many bugs as possible, both from what was found internally and feedback from the PTU.

‘Ship hangar servicing’ had its first playable gate, which was met favorably. The team is now working on preparing it for the content teams.

Finally for Core Gameplay, the team is preparing to move onto social features.

Creature Content

March saw the formation of a new team, Creature Content, to focus on the ongoing development of ‘Star Paws’ features. Alongside focusing on improvements to the technical pipeline, the team progressed with a number of new creatures.

Alpha 4.7 introduced some early results of these technical pipeline upgrades, with variants of the valakkar that have grown accustomed to their icy environment.

In March, additional design work went toward upcoming creatures while looking ahead to plan in additional improvements for existing creatures, including mesh and behavior updates and additional variants.

Economy

March saw the Economy team moving onto features for Alpha 4.8, which will bring new item crafting, commodity trading, and item recovery systems to the ‘verse.

“It is important to note that the current Alpha 4.7 crafting implementation is transitional. For example, we are being generous with high-end savrilium ore to pull players into the mining and fabrication pipeline. Our goal is to move away from a ‘credits-only’ mindset and toward alternate progression systems, such as crafting, reputation, and more.” Economy Team

Operation Breaker Stations serves as a key example of this transition. While it currently offers a high UEC profit margin to encourage players to engage with the new crafting materials, its true purpose is to function as a resource hub. By paying a buy-in, players trade currency for the convenience of guaranteed high-value material gathering. This allows them to quickly secure the requirements for high-end personal armor and FPS-weapon production.

As the economy stabilizes, shop pricing for crafted goods will begin to reflect the quality of the materials used. Consequently, the team will keep a close eye on all the mission buy-ins and resource yields to move away from a profitable NPC sell loop and toward a gear and player-centric economic model. In the final state, these locations will be the go-to spots for high-end crafters to convert credits into the exact materials they need, prioritizing material acquisition and quality over raw UEC profit.

Game Intelligence Development

In March 2026, the Game Intelligence Development team primarily focused on the ongoing design and planning work for Mission System v2. They spent the first half of the month collaborating with Mission Designers to refine how the new system would work in practice and how to best expose the scripting tools to the designers. They also iterated on a UI prototype for the mission interface and made several refinements.

Game Intelligence Development also began work on a new tool to facilitate the development of the new mission system. Throughout the month, they continued deeper investigation and design work around its implementation, refining the architecture based on stakeholder feedback. This work will serve as a foundation whenever the team returns to the system.

Level Design (UK & DE)

While March saw the Level Design teams progressing on a variety of locations, the primary focus was on Nyx’s social stations and QV Breaker Station locations, which went live in Alpha 4.7.

Elsewhere, the team worked toward multiple future deliverables, including Tactical Strike Groups and the Siege of Orison rework. They also began to prepare for a major new location.

Finally, the devs fixed some legacy bugs in Stanton and Pyro while also supporting new technical initiatives, including helping set up the level requirements for the transport refactor and working toward future content for Starchitect.

Mission Design

Mission Design completed the second Nyx mission pack, which expands the amount of content for players, including moving some factions to utilize a reputation scope.

The team also brought back the courier system, which currently exists in Stanton and Pyro, along with adding delivery contracts to bridge the gap between hauling and courier missions. This included modifying rooftop deliveries in New Babbage and ArcCorp to allow players to drop off 1-SCU boxes. Mission support was also added to the new QV Breaker Stations.

Tactical Strike Groups continued to be polished alongside refueling and defend-location missions.

With the recent changes to ship armor, the team kicked off a major rebalancing of ship-based mission combat alongside a design idea to give players information upfront on what ships they might encounter so they can choose an appropriate loadout.

Finally, the team are approaching the first playable state of the new Battaglia missions, which include modular mission parts that can be used as standalone missions for other factions.

Narrative

In March, the Narrative team continued tasks for a whole host of upcoming gameplay operations and missions. Alongside refining the narrative of Tactical Strike Groups, they crafted storylines for several new engaging missions that will be released alongside upcoming patches; one of which will see the return of an old foe.

The team also prepared for their next capture session in April, which will see the story mission script mentioned in last month’s report being recorded. This script went through revisions and refinement thanks to placeholder testing to help identify potential issues before the final session.

The Narrative team also began planning an eventual overhaul of the current item descriptions to accommodate new changes that are coming with future revisions of the inventory and fabrication systems.

Finally, Narrative continued to work with the Starchitect team to develop how the mission system will evolve once the tool comes online to add more locations to planet surfaces.

Online Technology

In March 2026, the Network team focused heavily on advancing the foundation for Server Meshing. A central part of this work involved Quasi-Dynamic Server Meshing (QDSM), which intelligently distributes areas of the game world across dedicated servers based on their current load. The team completed a second round of testing for the initial version, resolving a bug where multiple game zones were incorrectly assigned to the same server. They also made the system more efficient by removing a global performance bottleneck that was causing thread contention.

On the stability side, several crashes and thread-safety issues in the server management system were resolved, including a crash that could occur when a game server disconnected at the wrong moment. The team also made solid progress on the next generation of the Territory Manager, which is responsible for dividing the game universe into distinct regions to be handled by separate servers. Multiple improvements were submitted for review throughout the month.

Finally, the team continued ongoing bug fixes and maintenance work and progressed with a technical design document for a new versioning and patching system. This will play an important role in how future game updates are delivered to players.

For the Live Tools team, the Bootstrap user interview phase is wrapping up, with the devs acting on findings to improve its reliability and day-to-day usability. Infrastructure cleanup and configuration improvements also began.

Panic Switch, the error-reporting tool, received several bug fixes and improved documentation for advanced users. Work is ongoing to improve crash handling robustness, including better resilience when errors occur and smarter automatic handling of known recurring crash patterns.

Hex, the game dashboard, continued its 4.0 modernization, with multiple new pages and features ready to ship or in active development. The Blueprint Viewer was delivered, while work on the new account detail page and tool integrations is progressing well.

The Online Services team spent time in March supporting and improving the Mission System, which powers in-game content like hauling and industrial missions alongside instanced content. A key bug was identified and fixed where objectives were completed but the mission itself wasn't always registering as finished.

Alongside the bug fix, the team made significant progress on a longer-term solution: moving mission completion logic (the and/or rules that determine when a multi-step mission is truly done) into the backend service, making it more reliable and futureproof. The mission system was also expanded to support entity-owned missions, meaning non-player objects can act as mission owners, which opens the door for new types of instanced content.

Online Services continued to advance the item-imprint feature, which is the underlying system that will allow players to truly ‘own’ the items in their ships and on their characters. Additional groundwork is also underway to ensure the system queries item ownership in a more robust and efficient way.

The team also worked on lazy inventory creation, a behind-the-scenes improvement that makes the game smarter about when and how it creates inventory records. Finally, technical design was done for regional chats.

R&D

In March, the ongoing ground-fog work continued. A test build was handed over to Tech Art for prototyping and to gather feedback. Time was also spent improving tooling. The ability to gather thread names was added to the dump log tool when extracting call stacks for crashes submitted via the PU. The shader compiler server that services the build pipeline was substantially refactored - a proper thread pool implementation was added, while load balancing was significantly improved when using remote compile slaves.

DXC/Clang-based compiler output is now properly parsed for the generation of error reports. A ‘least recently used’ (LRU) scheme was added to automatically evict outdated shaders in memory and on disk. Also, support for processing limits was added to terminate compile jobs exceeding the specified runtime and memory thresholds. All these should help improve server stability, which often run for months on end, as well as reduce their resource usage.

Tech Art/Animation

Over the past month, the Technical Animation team progressed with characters, creatures, interactables, cloth simulation, and the pipeline tools that support all of the above.

On the character side, head exports for two new named PU characters progressed through the DNA/RigLogic pipeline. Gate-five polish passes were done for two additional faces approaching their final quality bar too.

The devs reduced per-character RigLogic memory overheads, which directly improve NPC density and performance in populated locations, and resolved a critical DNA compilation blocker that would otherwise have stalled all head-related work in the Star Citizen patch branch.

On armor and weapons, the Super Heavy Combat Armor animation set is being brought from SQ42 across to the Persistent Universe player character, and binocular ADS and zoom-state transitions were finalized.

For interactables, the team is implementing the flaming-torch held animation, tightening the player interaction cone so usable objects feel precise and correctly aligned. They’re also completing food prop tech animation for Nyx-location content.

StarCloth, CIG's physics-based cloth simulation system, saw substantial improvements, including driver mesh validation, engine API alignment, a new bind offset parameter, and simulation pruning optimizations. The result is more performant and physically believable clothing on PU characters.

Ongoing pipeline work includes a male-to-female retargeting fix, a character tool featherblend bug fix, Maya 2026 plugin support, and an in-development dialogue events cleanup tool for NPC ambient conversation data.

VFX

For Alpha 4.7, VFX focused on finishing Nyx’s QV Breaker Station locations, such as the laser room and spacescaping, and hero moments, like the laser and asteroid interior.

Finally, the Greycat UTV and MISC Hull B received VFX pass and bug fixing.