“With the gentle tap of a missile, the Vanduul fighter blocking my path shattered into a trillion pieces. I took a brief moment of satisfaction as the once-proud Blade’s atmosphere lit up with a distinctive, instantaneous flash. A bold attacker as any I’d encountered, for sure, and a sentient life cut short. But it was him or me, and I couldn’t stop to grieve over a monster set on pillaging my precious cargo. I punched my throttle, sending my Retaliator bomber ahead full and then glanced at my mission computer: blast damage to all my armor, a rear hull fracture preparing to become a breach, a loose missile on pylon three that needs to be ejected. Damn, they hit me harder than I realized. Then I saw the timer: five minutes, fifteen seconds. This was going to be a rough one: if I couldn’t make the drop on time, the pizza would be free.” -Captain Ronald “Dagger” Gourami, SS Pepperoni Princess

Greetings, Citizens!

One thing we’ve learned in the past three years is that Star Citizen backers have unstoppable hungers. We’re talking about an enduring hunger for space combat, for exploration, for trading, for building their own stories in the universe we’re creating. It’s that hunger that has made the game possible… and now we’re going one step further. Because when you really drill down, there’s one hunger that’s even more important than all of these others put together: a hunger for hunger. That’s why we’re proud to announce that Star Citizen’s next career will be: food.

Of course, that makes perfect sense, you say. But how do we introduce food into a game with a very specific set of existing mechanics, most of which are based on the far less interesting experiences of visceral space combat action and futuristic sci-fi adventure? The answer is that we need to change the status quo, and to do that we have invested significant time and energy into rebuilding how Star Citizen integrates food on the most base level. The result of this system is a magnificent new core mechanic: GRUBBY HANDS. Grubby Hands is a complete, immersive technology system that accounts for meal development, preparation, delivery and more. What’s more, Grubby Hands functions alongside our existing physics grid tech, meaning that the game has the ability to do everything from flip pancakes at zero G to broil a steak at the center of a neutron star.

ESTIMATED DELIVERY: 2944. 2945. 2946.

Sidebar : Useless Design Table

Sandwich Manipulation/Customization Technology

As many of you know, the stock CryEngine includes only limited built-in options for sandwich customization. And for an ordinary game, that’s fine. Titles like RISE: Son of Rome rarely need to render a sandwhich or a burger with more than four layers (a primary meat item, or PMI, a standard topping (ST) and two mirrored bread items (in game development parlance, Exterior Bakeslots.) For Star Citizen, however, we want to give players the immersive freedom to immerse themselves in limitless sandwich possibilities. Imagine a game in which you can build a hamburger with double the meat, an egg salad sandwich with two kinds of cheese or even roll your own wrap. Thanks to the efforts of our procedural technology team, it’s all possible.

What allows this immersive system to function is a highly complex (and very immersive) system of taste-nodes. No longer must a sandwich be built around a single PMI, or limited to inside a pair of Exterior Bakeslot containers. Instead, individual nodes featuring 64-bit precision will allow almost infinite combinations. Individual sub-items are given node markers and are then passed to the client to render on the fly; where previous games would have seen a sudden framerate drop trying to render, say, a slice of eggplant, Star Citizen shines. Thanks to an in-game mobiglas app tie-in, these infinite components can be classified, organized and positioned (with maximum immersion.)

And looking forward (and not to blow your mind all at once) we’re happy to say that this technology is NOT limited to sandwiches. Pizza toppings, fry frying, pancake mixing and even the French Toast Process (FTP) can be accurately simulated to within 1/100th of an immersion unit.

IMPORTANT NOTE: corn is not and will not be supported.

Delivery Career

Designing your own sandwiches is great, we know… but like the saying goes, a sandwich is meaningless until you do something with it. Star Citizen is a game about space travel, so it would not do to simply make you some sort of sandwich gardener. Space food must tie directly to the game’s overall economy system, and we must give our many culinary-minded players an endgame. To that point, we have created an immersive career concept that we believe will carry all of our work to the next level. The system, developed by our top designers over the course of months of debate and discussion to try and create the most immersive possible food career, is as follows:

1. You put the food in your spaceship.
2. You take the food somewhere and give it to someone.