The Star Citizen community has been waiting for the upcoming Alpha 3.18 update, and the developers at Cloud Imperium Games appeared in an extensive video to discuss it.
Alpha 3.18 is claimed to be the largest since 3.0 in 2017 and it comes with the highly anticipated Persistent Entity Streaming feature. Basically, the game's servers will save (up to a point), the position of objects that players leave, from coffee cups to spaceships, opening up a lot of interesting gameplay opportunities and providing players with the sensation of living in a world on which they can make a bigger impact.
Further features include multiple racing tracks, more rivers, the first iteration of salvaging, an update to cargo gameplay, and much more.
In this video, live game director Todd Papy on top of Benoît Beauséjour and Guillaume Voghel from Turbulent, provide more color on what we can expect from the patch, also discussing the limits of Persistent Entity Streaming. Of course, we won't be able to litter the universe entirely and cleanup mechanics will exist.
In the meanwhile, Star Citizen's growing crowdfunding campaign isn't slowing down, and the game has received a whopping $547 million ($547,199,165 at the moment of this writing) from backers.
The number of registered users is now at 4,389,108, albeit not all of them are paying since many register accounts to access the popular free fly events that provide a chance to test the game without pledging any money. According to the latest information from creative director Chris Roberts himself in October 2022, 1.7 million players are actually paying customers.
Star Citizen just ended its best year ever in terms of crowdfunding, with a staggering $113 million pledged in 2022, marking a 31% increase over 2021. The tally has been consistently increasing year-on-year since 2018.
Full disclosure: the author of this post has backed Star Citizen all the way back when its crowdfunding was first launched in September 2012.
