Hello and welcome back for another installment of Lore Builder, where we work with you, the community, to flesh out previously unexplored areas of the Star Citizen lore. As always, if you are new to this feature, we highly recommend reviewing the updated caveats and suggested background reading described in this previous issue, so you can get a clear understanding of what’s already been established.

Let’s get right into last week’s post:

CHURCH OF THE JOURNEY

We were seriously impressed by all the fantastic suggestions provided as to what the guiding principles of the Church of the Journey should be. Before we get into the specific tenets, there were a couple of broader concepts we thought worth highlighting.

A few people (SimonJax for example) suggested that the Church would be a movement based on guiding philosophies as opposed to strict rules and commandments. We thought this fitted well with the feel we were going for with the Church and have revised our original suggestions to match.

Bombero11B2O mused on how there would be no buildings or any permanent structures that function as conventional churches. ‘Church’ instead would serve as a word to described communal storytelling, anywhere, any time (a ship’s mess, a bar or around a cooking pit in the wilderness). In this way, the belief system would be as mobile and fluid as the members themselves.

Adrastos42 brought up the notion that there could be followers who thought that a Journey might be interpreted as more than traveling between two points but also as an exploration of knowledge, thoughts and feelings in a ‘journey of the mind.’ This way a person could be a true follower of the Journey without ever leaving their home system.

Selbie also had the suggestion that instead of being referred to as Journeymen, a follower of the Church could be called a Sojourn (Sojourner). We also like the name Traveler. So rather than being Journeyman Dave, he could be Sojourn Dave or Traveler Dave. The idea was intriguing and we wondered what you all thought? We’ve attached a survey so you can voice your opinion.

As for the tenets themselves, this list is not intended to be complete. There were a lot of similar suggestions along common themes, so we combined where we could and tried to give credit where due (apologies if you provided a similar thought and weren’t mentioned). We are still assessing and tweaking the role the Church of the Journey will play in our universe, but these guiding principles captured the spirit of what we think the Church represents.

THE JOURNEY’S PATH

• Home is where the Journey takes you.
• Life is a Journey to be celebrated; every moment, an opportunity to explore. (Moarginplz, Vormund505)
• The Church is not made of stone but story. (Bombero11B2O)
• For the Journey to have value, one must reflect on where the Journey has brought you and how the path has changed along the way. (Melevorn, AwesomeAD)
• Talk to anyone, any time; share your knowledge and experience with any who ask, but never forget to listen to the stories of others whose path’s you cross. (Bombero11B2O, wombat)
• Truth is the most exciting tale there is. (Revive)
• Give more than you take. If you take a stone, you should leave a boulder behind. (Tem-Barone, Adrastos42)
• Enjoy that which is set before you, but never take what isn’t offered. (Vormund505, wombat)
• When you leave, do so knowing you are leaving that place as you found it, or better for your having been there. (Adrastos42, Shadow Knight)
• Though the route may be the same, one’s Journey never is. (Moarginplz, Vormund505)
• The path less traveled is the path more treasured. (aintaer)
• There is always a new path to find. (Hammerklau, MistahKurtz)
• You are never lost, just someplace you didn’t know you were going to. (Cypher_Kaldarese, Hex_Kodo)
• Sometimes to gain experience one must also gain scars. (Cypher_Kaldarese)
• Be courteous, compassionate and constructive. (SOAR, Hammerklau)

Also, a special shoutout to Trooper_Thorn for the A.P.B. and to Baragoon for the song.

Moving on to this week’s topic, we’re going to start a discussion that’s been on continual rotation over on our Ask A Dev thread. That’s right, people, gear up because we’re going to talk about:

GRAVITY GENERATORS

We’ve established from an early point that the ships in Star Citizen have artificial gravity, allowing crewmembers to walk around the interior of their Constellation without the need for magboots. Although, as we learned from the Multi-Crew Demo at Gamescom, it does pay to wear them anyway. Regardless, it’s been an ongoing debate to try and figure out exactly how this artificial gravity works.

That’s where you come in.

For the next few weeks, we’re going to open up the discussion to try and lock down a handful of potential approaches to explain how artificial gravity works in the game and present these approaches to the design team.

Several rules to help guide the discussion:

• Any suggested approach has to fit into the current set-up of the game (or require minimal tweaking). In a nutshell, we can’t completely reimagine already-established aspects of the game to accommodate this explanation.
• It must be able to be turned on and off.
• It needs to apply to focused/directed areas (we don’t want to have gravity ‘leaking’ outside of a ship).
• It should be interchangeable/identical to actual gravity.
• Using real science is nice, but ‘handwavium’ is completely acceptable if it makes sense.

So please, submit your ideas into the comments below and next week we’ll get started.

That will do it for this week’s Lore Builder. Please submit your ideas in the comments below. Next week, we’ll review your submissions and present a brand new topic for discussion.

Until next time …