How Re-Installing Star Citizen will help you:

After 2 years of development Star Citizen has grown and matured considerably. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been the case with installing or patching.

However, today with the release of the 1.1.0 build, we are attempting to clean up some of the problems players have been seeing when trying to download and play the game.

We have released a new installer and switched our CDN to Amazon Cloudfront. Over 80% of our Metafile issues will be fixed with this, and it’s also the foundation for a future update to eliminate the notorious “Delete your USER folder” fix.

On a more technical level:

The new installer fixes many small installation bugs, crashes, and bad data errors players were seeing.

The installer no longer defaults a player’s install to the “My Documents” folder, but the standard Program Files folder.

With the new CDN , we have done away with the hundreds of incremental patches that were stored on our old provider. These hundreds of patches represented almost 600gigs of possible problems that players could encounter, leading to Metafile errors, Manifest errors, and other squirrely behavior.

After today, there will only be two patches on our CDN; 1.0.3 -> 1.1.0 and Nothing -> 1.1.0. Also, download speed should have been significantly improved with this switch to Cloudfront, as well as many closer locations to download from.

We hope the relatively clean slate and lower error rate will make up for the inconvenience of having to reinstall the game. There are more improvements on the horizon as well. We are working towards a new and significantly cleaner launcher that should make this whole experience more seemless.

We strongly advise players follow these instructions step-by-step to minimize the chance of any unexpected technical issues.

INSTRUCTIONS :

Below are the instructions for how to uninstall and reinstall Star Citizen using the new launcher. These instructions work for both Windows 7 and Windows 8.

Click the Start button at the bottom left of Windows.

Click on All Programs, then click on the Star Citizen folder.

Click Uninstall.

At this point, a User Account Control window will pop up asking:

“Do you want to allow the following program from an unknown publisher to make changes to this computer?”

Click Yes. A Star Citizen Uninstall window will pop up asking:

“Are you sure you want to completely remove StarCitizen and all of its components?

Click Yes and the Star Citizen Uninstall Wizard will start. Click Uninstall and the previous version of the launcher and the client will be completely removed. You will see the last window informing you “Star Citizen has been removed from this computer.”

Now we’re ready to get the new launcher from our new CDN!

IMPORTANT: You’ll need to use Firefox or Chrome to download the new installer. Using Firefox or Chrome, head to https://robertsspaceindustries.com/download to grab the newest version of the launcher. Once downloaded, run the installer to install the launcher. We recommend (but not require) that you install to the default directory provided.

As part of the install, you’ll be asked to install and setup DirectX. DirectX is required to play games on Windows.

Please note: As part of the DirectX installation, Microsoft will offer you an option to install Bing Bar. Please know you do NOT need install Bing Bar to play Star Citizen.

You may get a popup at this point asking to Repair or Remove Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 ×64 Redistributable. This is normal… select Repair and click Next and your DirectX install will be complete.

At this point, the Star Citizen launcher is installed, so make sure the checkbox is checked, click Finish, and the launcher will run.

Once the launcher is up on your screen, use your normal RSI login and password to log in and begin patching!