Star Citizen | Alpha 3.20 Patch Watch | Mission Featured!

Hello everyone,

In our Patch Watch series, we highlight upcoming features, improvements, and fixes not presented on the Public Roadmap. This time, as we approach the release of Star Citizen Alpha 3.20, the Mission Feature team is taking us through some of the new additions they’ve brought to the latest builds.

As a side-note, we’re currently rallying behind a global initiative to focus on a variety of quality-of-life changes/fixes, which many of you have probably noticed in recent PTU patch notes. This is a trend we’d like to continue – we’ll share more information on those QoL bits in upcoming Patch Watch posts!

Destroy Stash – Previously, this mission spawned hundreds of individual boxes, but with the help of new code, we now spawn pallets that come with drug box ‘loadouts.’ Alongside significantly improved performance and reliability, this method allows the team to control the number of pallets spawned for different mission difficulties.

Cargo Manifests – In Alpha 3.19, we added cargo manifests to bounty, assassination, and salvage missions. However, there was a bug that stopped these from achieving their full potential. This has been fixed for Alpha 3.20.

Foe Variety – For combat missions, most quantum-travel-capable ships were added to the pool of spawnable vehicles. However, some that don’t make narrative sense were omitted. For example, criminals won’t use a Drake Cutlass Blue. As part of this work, the game’s ships were divided into difficulty bands derived from data gathered by pitting every ship against each other 1000 times.

Fingers off the Keyboard! – The hack-prevention counter mission can now be accepted by more than one player. This should see more people coming to stop hacking without allied players being able to softlock them.

Takeaway Food – We fixed an issue where players couldn’t store food/drink items when they were inspecting them or when they were settled on the ground.

Ledge Grab – Mission Features worked with Actor Features to enable the ‘ledge grab’ feature in the PU, seeing it through the QA and go/no-go processes. This allows players to grab onto ledges while in mid-air, significantly improving climbing and allowing players to reach ship entrances that were previously out of reach. They also made a pass on the Prison Escape mission alongside the NAPU team to ensure the new feature could be used to its fullest.

This Stays Between Friends – Players will not be classed as ‘hostile’ to all when attacking their own party members. This will prevent things like security and turrets from opening fire on parties just playing around.

No Need to Run – We made impound timers less lenient since the removal of Olisar means there are no longer ATC-controlled landing pads right next to each other. The time spent trespassing in landing areas is also remembered for a time to prevent it from being reset by constantly dipping in and out.

Done for Today – Salvage missions can now be abandoned per player without the mission being pulled from party members.

50% Scraped – Salvage missions can now be abandoned and, as long as more than 50% of the target ship’s hull has been scraped, they will count as completed. This allows players to only have to salvage half of the smaller ships to unlock the medium ships.

Ruto Returns – We fixed an issue that blocked players from getting missions from Ruto.

But You’re Not Guilty! – Changes have been made to the start of the prison escape route to ensure players cannot break into the main prison via conventional means.