Greetings Citizens,

To date, Star Citizen’s Arena Commander module has put much of the focus on pure action: the thrill of deep space dogfighting. While space battles are a core element of the Star Citizen experience, they are the beginning and not the end of creating a vast, interactive world. And one of the next, most important steps is developing a cargo system that allows players to more fully interact with their environment than any previous space game.

On first consideration, making cargo sexy might seem like a difficult challenge. The excitement of combat is self-explanatory, while shipping goods from star to star is a different kind of challenge, potentially more of a slow burn. The average pilot would be forgiven for having more interest in a dogfighting module than a cargo demo… but the reality is, cargo is deeply important to expanding Star Citizen’s gameplay. Whether you’re using it to customize your environment, to build a shipping empire or to run black market goods from Advocacy patrols, a comprehensive cargo system is going to enable Star Citizen to build a real world full of varied gameplay opportunities.

How do we do it? In the past, space games have solved this problem by separating the player from what was being transported. Shipping a load of tungsten in Privateer or hydrocarbons in Freelancer meant selecting an icon in a menu and being told your ship had been loaded with that particular good. For Star Citizen, we wanted to do more than just give you a cargo manifest; it stood to reason that in our First Person Universe, you would need to be able to fully interact with whatever you happen to be shipping! With this in mind, we’ve set out to create a system that allows for maximum interaction directly with in-game objects.

How Interaction Works

The Star Citizen design team has determined that there are five essential ‘use cases’ for cargo objects in the game environment. Each of these cases must be developed in the game to give you full control over your cargo and items. Uses cases are as follows: