::: spoiler Gameplay: Siege of Orison - Recco Battaglia - Persistent Ore Pods & Commodity Containers
Siege of Orison V2
Siege of Orison returns as our first Instancing on Demand mission. The CDF is recruiting players to break the Nine Tails' grip on the Orison Inspiration Park Cluster, and this time you will do it inside a closed instance locked to you and your party, up to four players. A one-time introduction mission points you to the instance elevators near the Crusader showroom in Orison, and from then on the main mission accepts itself as you arrive.
The encounter is now a pure FPS mission. All three platforms have been reworked for tighter combat flow and clearer sightlines, and the Nine Tails have a new visual identity running from grunts through masked elites to bespoke boss armor.
Respawn checkpoints will help you keep progress throughout Siege of Orison and return you to your last checkpoint inside the instance rather than sending you back to Orison General. These medical bed respawn checkpoints are unlimited, so medgel is not consumed.
The Nine Tails have a full armor refresh supporting the updated Siege, giving the faction a clear visual hierarchy from grunt to commander: three unique heavy designs for the bosses, two captain and elite variants sharing a masked helmet across two colorways, and rebuilt grunt loadouts mixing existing light, medium and heavy pieces with civilian clothing, some now carrying Nine Tails tattoos
Completion of SoO pays aUEC, blueprints and a bespoke weapon skin, with further caches lootable in-mission.
Recco Battaglia Returns
Recco Battaglia arrives in the Persistent Universe as an in-person mission giver in Levski. A former miner who lost part of a leg saving coworkers in a dig site accident, she now runs resource logistics from behind a desk while missing life out in the field. Meet with her to start uncovering the pressures facing independent miners across Nyx.
Recco opens with three story missions that introduce you to the system, with further tiers of repeatable contracts unlocking as you work through them, spanning rock cracking, miner defense, missing persons and item recovery. Her rewards lean toward hardware and blueprints rather than straight credits, including mining modules, containers and ore pod blueprints you can take into the fabricator.
Wikelo Exchange Updates
Wikelo has three new exchanges available at his Emporium, offering a snow camo variant of the new BUL-H4 Super Heavy Armor, a matching skin for the Vendetta HMG, and a ship.
The ship exchange works differently than before. Wikelo now asks you to craft a special item for him rather than simply fetch and hand in many different items. To start this, read the signs in his showroom to see what he is offering and the specific item he wants in return, then take the contract from the sign itself. Wikelo then hands over a single-use blueprint for that item you will need to craft using a fabricator. Bring the finished article to his freight elevator and send it down. Once turned in, Wikelo's terminal asks whether you want the ship now or later. Choose later and it goes to your home hangar. Choose now and the landing pad lowers, sends your current ship home, and rises again with the new one. Note that you cannot store ships in Wikelo's hangar, and anything left there will be returned to your own.
Armor and weapon exchanges work the way they always have: gather what he asks for, load the elevator, and the reward comes back up on it. The difference is that you now keep a blueprint for whatever you earned, so you can make more of it yourself later.
Loot Generation & Drop Rates
There has been a full pass on loot boxes, weapon caches, and rarities around the PU. Weapon caches now hold more than double as much as before. Large weapon attachments have gone from a rare curiosity in common caches to a routine find, and rare caches can now drop the heavy machine gun with two to four magazines of matching ammunition, which previously could not appear at all.
General containers saw the largest change, now holding vastly much more than their old contents across every size preset. Rarity tables have been tightened so lower-tier junk no longer dilutes higher-tier pulls. MedGel now appears in medical loot and is close to guaranteed in rare medical containers, fuses are guaranteed in repair boxes, and the multitool in common medical loot has been weighted down.
Additional Gameplay Updates
- Added ore and commodity containers to the Long Term Persistence. This will not affect these going into 4.10 but any cargo obtained after 4.10 will persist into future builds. Currently, ore pods that come with ships are part of item recovery and not LTP so these will not persist contained ore but in-game purchased ones will. :::
::: spoiler Ships & Vehicles: Hydrogen & Quantum Fuel Rebalance - Vehicle Armor/Weapon Updates - Pricing, Claims, & Availability
Hydrogen & Quantum Fuel Rebalance
Implementing balance updates for Quantum and Hydrogen fuel tanks, adjusting fuel capacities and consumption rates to better align with ship sizes and roles.
Hydrogen tank capacity is now considerably smaller across the fleet, and hydrogen consumption has been reduced alongside it, so effective flight time should be close to what it was before. Fuel prices have also substantially increased for both hydrogen quantum.
This update also rebalances refualling missions around the new tank values, with refuelling size tags added to ships and the spawn pools updated.
Vehicle Armor Update
Vehicle armor has changed in two ways. Destroyed armor no longer mitigates damage: the reduction multiplier had been applying unconditionally, so armor sitting at zero health still absorbed a share of every hit, amounting to a flat quarter of all incoming damage on the Gladius. Reduction now only applies while armor health is above zero. Damage dealt to the armor itself also now runs through the health component's own resistance rather than bypassing it, so how much punishment armor absorbs scales with its condition.
Pricing, Claims, & Availability
ASOP terminals handle claims and deliveries on a reclaim timer that scales with the value of the vehicle, so a light fighter comes back quickly while a capital hull takes considerably longer. Weapons and weapon racks now carry prices of their own, so what is fitted to a ship contributes to its claim cost. Terminals now also offer a paid expedite on both claims and deliveries, which accrues at twice the standard rate per aUEC spent and caps the fee at a tenth of the standard claim cost rate, making it a convenience charge rather than a way to buy past the system entirely. Repeat claims on the same ship will not cost progressively more.
Ordnance is markedly more expensive, with bombs up between 44 and roughly 310 percent depending on the munition and the smaller ones taking the steepest rises.
Shop stock has widened too: railguns are now carried at some item shops, Vendetta special ballistic magazines have been added to several layouts, and cargo containers can now be reclaimed through global item recovery.
Vehicle Weapon Rebalance
We have rebalanced and categorized the Size 4 ballistic gatlings which should now hit roughly 68 percent harder per round. Previously it had been inheriting the Size 3 gatling's ammunition and balancing class, which left it underpowered and, more importantly, unable to defeat armor a Size 4 weapon should defeat. Both are now corrected.
The Size 4 Ballistic Combine Cannon splash was reaching far wider than intended, so the explosive component has been removed outright, making it a direct-hit weapon. Direct damage has also been reduced by roughly 10%.
Additional Vehicle Updates
- The Kruger P-52 Merlin's center gun mount now has a gimbal and is now editable
- The Kruger L-22 Alphawolf was added to Astro Armada in Area18 along with the bespoke laser repeater
- The RSI Aurora Mk II has replaced the Mk I across shop inventories, on the showfloor at Teach's and New Deal along with adding the cargo and missile modules to shops.
- The MISC Hull B can now be purchased in New Deal and Teach's
- Drake Golem OX is now sold in Pyro station dealerships and New Deal
- GRIN UTV can be purchased from Astro Armada and Pyro station dealerships :::
::: spoiler Weapons & Items: BUL-H4 Super heavy Amor and Weapon - New Arlington Rifle
BUL-H4 Super Heavy Armor & Vendetta HMG
A new armor class and the weapon it was built around have arrived in the PU along with Siege of Orison. The BUL-H4 set is a single one-piece super heavy armor along with a BUL-H4 Helmet, and the H4-PBF Ammo Carrier backpack. This new armor trades mobility for defense and the ability to carry the heaviest weapon a player can yield.
That new weapon is Apocalypse Arms' Vendetta heavy machine gun. The Vendetta works together with the BUL-H4 armor and backpack to carry large amounts of munitions. The backpack is only capable of storing the new ammo munitions for the weapon. These can be reloaded by another player in your party by tractor beaming or hand placing a new one into the backpack.
Both the armor and the weapon can be obtained in game through Wikelo exchange rewards and through Siege of Orison. .
New FPS Weapon: HDGW Arlington Rifle
A new ballistic lever action rifle has been added to the PU. Its defining feature is a switchable fire mode, giving you two very distinct weapon gameplay options on the same frame with a DMR and shotgun mode. In DMR configuration it fires a single high damage round at 550 m/s, rewarding accuracy at range. In shotgun mode it fires eight pellets at 300 m/s, trading reach and precision for a higher total damage ceiling up close if every pellet connects. A new HDGW optic joins the attachment roster alongside it.
- Firemodes Single (DMR) Single (Shotgun)
- Damage 70 / 12.5 (8 Pellets)
- Projectile Velocity 550 (DMR) / 300 (Shotgun)
- Aim Down Sight Time 0.15 seconds
- RPM 85
- Mag Size 20
Additional Item and Shop Updates
- Commodity kiosks were removed from Platinum Bay and Dumpers Depot and replaced with item kiosks.
- Jump drives also gained shop display shelves at Dumper's Depot in Area18 and AR shopping cards
- HDTC clothing was added to the Makau and Aparelli shops, with shop inventories and mannequin displays updated to match :::
::: spoiler Core Tech & Audio: Instancing - Server Load Scaling - Audio & Score - Experimental VR Updates
Instancing
Instancing arrives in the Persistent Universe, creating closed gameplay spaces that only you and your party occupy. Where content supports it, entering places you into a private copy of that space rather than the shared world. Siege of Orison is the first mission built on it, with Recco Battaglia's office as the second.
When going to enter an instance, the player will encounter a barrier that will mark the instance loading and will open up when ready. The party leader owns the instance. Entry checks that you meet its prerequisites, and players who are not eligible are prevented from entering or removed if they end up inside one. Respawn and checkpoint behavior is handled by the instance itself, so dying returns you to your last checkpoint inside it. If an instance cannot be created, you will now get a banner notification rather than the request silently failing.
Underpinning it is a new Instancing Broker backend service which creates, allocates and tears down instances, enforces per-instance player caps and manages how long an idle instance lives before it is reclaimed.
Server Load & Instance Scaling
Dynamic game server load balancing now calculates load from total frame time, which should reduce how often a server ends up overloaded or hits an out-of-memory condition, and mesh worker overflow capacity has been raised to handle instance scaling. Pyro and Stanton station exteriors were given a two hour override lifetime for stability, and inventory and stow context queries now run in parallel to help resolve the inventory data mismatches players have reported.
Performance & Streaming
A dedicated pass driven largely passby profiling Siege of Orison under load. The biggest single win came from removing a heavy contention stall between physics and rendering by writing physics meshes straight to the GPU buffer instead of through a staging buffer. A severe frame time spike in the AI event dispatcher has been resolved, and several expensive effects at the Orison locations, chiefly large refraction volumes and soft particles, have been reworked after profiling flagged them as significant drains.
On particles and streaming: CPU-driven effects have been moved to the GPU, fire hazard effects optimized, particle textures now stream as designed rather than loading at full resolution, particle library preloading fixed after silently failing on a bad path, blood decals reduced in size, and off-screen emitters now expire instead of accumulating in memory. Client performance at Levski has also undergone a performance polish pass.
Audio & Score
Siege of Orison has been given its own score, with separate ambient and combat layers, boss music, and a victory track on completion.
Refuelling has had a full audio pass covering the refuelling screen interface and spoken lines for the system. Hit marker audio has been refined following the vehicle armour feedback introduced in 4.9, the Grey's Market Basher has had its interior ambience implemented, and reverb has been corrected in several interiors where dialogue was sounding overly echoey.
On the technical side, audio processing bandwidth has been freed up so more queued commands get through, duplicate audio requests are now suppressed, and duplicate Air Traffic Control play events have been cleaned up.
VR Support Updates (Experimental)
Head tracking now works everywhere in the game rather than only in specific contexts, and it keeps working during level loads so headset actions like resetting tracking or switching to theater mode remain available while you wait. Leaning forward no longer pushes your character upward or drifts the camera off centre, and a new visual effect now triggers when your head meets geometry instead of letting you push through it. The head boundary stays out of the way when you are lying down or in fly mode.
The stereo cursor has had a broad pass. It is now aligned to your body, so it holds still while you are riding an elevator, standing on a moving train or being pushed around by water, and it no longer disappears when passed over radar elements. Kiosks no longer walk your character into position when you interact with them, which was disorienting in a headset, and they no longer drop out when the game decides you have looked away.
On the rendering side, holograms and holo volumes now display correctly in VR, and water simulation and caustics have been reworked so they match between both eyes. The underwater screen wobble was previously calculated per eye and is now driven by the wave surface itself. Sun shadows underwater have per pixel dithering to remove banding, and a long standing issue where shadows would flicker and swim with the camera at certain angles has been resolved. The G force blink effect now stays in sync across both eyes.
OpenXR has been updated to version 1.1.60. Changing your headset resolution in your runtime settings now applies in real time without a restart, and on runtimes that support it the game detects when you put the headset on or take it off and switches mode automatically. :::
::: spoiler Bug Fixes & Technical Updates (Overview) For a comprehensive up to date list of Known issues and Workarounds, please check out our Knowledge Base here!
This release closes 479 bug fixes along with 47 crash and stability issues and 17 exploits.
- Client crashes: 20
- Server crashes: 20
- Affecting both client and server: 2
- Server hangs and deadlocks: 2
- Back End Service Crashes: 3
Client crashes fixed
- Fixed a graphics driver crash that could occur during rendering
- Resolved a crash while world objects were streaming in and out
- Fixed a crash while setting up the area of the world kept loaded around the player
- Resolved a crash while working out which room or area the player was standing in
- Fixed a crash while resolving an object's place in the world hierarchy
- Fixed a crash while completing an object spawn during level load
- Fixed a crash when checking whether an object still existed
- Fixed a crash while textures were being bound during rendering
- Resolved a crash while particle effects were being drawn
- Fixed a crash when interacting with objects in the world
- Fixed a crash while the mining laser was highlighting a distant deposit
- Resolved a crash when a part detached from a vehicle
- Fixed a crash while reading the list of available cargo box sizes
- Fixed a crash while recording performance data in the background
- Fixed several crashes caused by internal memory handling errors
- Resolved several crashes caused by internal threading errors :::
Bug Fixes
Fixes reported through the Issue Council carry a link to the original report.
Thank you to everyone who filed and confirmed them!
See the complete list of reported bugs fixed on the original post (the entire thing is too long for a post on the Threadiverse). https://robertsspaceindustries.com/en/comm-link/Patch-Notes/21293-Star-Citizen-Alpha-410
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