CSC December Update #1
Hi Commanders!
Welcome back! In this post we are going to cover development progress & updates, details on our first sustained Alpha client - scheduled and on track to release later this month - and a brief overview of Events & Competitions we have coming up.
MEA Updates
After several months of running, we have finally retired MEA (Mining Expedition Alpha) in preparation for our public Alphas. Thanks to all who participated and got a jump start on the future CSC economy. All in all, CSC players ran 26,000+ MEA missions, spent just over 300,000 hours of gameplay flying between stars, traveled approximately 1 million light years, and mined exactly 36,638,530 tons of refined ore! Congrats again to all MEA players. The ore collected from MEA and the bonus ore earned from pre-Alpha will be credited and usable for crafting in our Q1 2019 builds.
Q4 Build (Alpha 0.5)
We are coming in hot, but all systems look green for Alpha 0.5. Our tentative launch date for Alpha 0.5 is December 19th, barring any major last minute issues. I am happy to say we were able to squeeze in a bit more than we had planned for and we look forward to you checking out CSC later this month.
The following are high level notes for Alpha 0.5 (Detailed build notes and feature list will come out around the release date):
- To play Alpha 0.5 you will need a ship. Any ship will do, but you will only be able to fly ships you own. Ships will respawn if destroyed, as no assets can be lost in these first few Alphas.
- You will be able to equip modules and adjust load-outs to your ships. Basic modules will be available in most stations via the marketplace interface (Note this is a placeholder interface just to facilitate module distribution in 0.5 Alpha). In 0.6 and beyond, we will introduce persistent modules based on what you have acquired via in-game actions or purchases on the marketplace.
- Multiplayer is a go! This will be the first live test of our new MMO architecture, so expect bugs and dropped connections. The good news is that drop connections will only affect NPC and Player interactions. Your ship will continue to persist and you won’t be booted out of the universe (most of the time). Gameplay will still require an internet connection and won’t be completely offline. We do expect to have lots of downtime these first few weeks so we appreciate your patience and feedback as we work out these bugs.
- Mining… nuf said. Yes, mining is back and better than ever! You will be able to explore belts for resources (with scanners) and loot (with exploration lights). With the inclusion of multiplayer, you will also be able to run mining operations with your clan mates or go solo and horde the riches for yourself. Though, as we are still in development and in the process of balancing the game economy, expect ore concentrations to be light and of the more common variety. We do plan to have rare resources seeded and announced on an event basis to allow for coordinated mining operations among players. For this initial release (0.5) you will need to store your raw ore at stations as ore refining won’t be available initially, but will be coming online in our next builds.
- Combat is back. During Alpha, player combat will exist. However, in these early days it will have little regulation from the Galactic Federation. We will depend on the community and a small fleet of devs to keep the peace until Galactic Federation automated defense fleets come online to secure Core Space. That said, if you’re interested in joining the volunteer Galactic Federation Security Service, reach out to our community mods on Discord and we will get back to you with details in the coming weeks as the need arises.
- NPCs in 0.5 will be light as we are in the middle of a feature push on a new system that will manage them. Expect more NPCs and NPC activities in the following builds.
Events and Competitions
To conclude, I wanted to touch on some of the community growth plans we will be rolling out this month and through the rest of CSC Development. One thing we have enjoyed a lot internally during developing and testing CSC has been mini-events and competitions we hold between staff. It all started as just a fun way for our developers to test features, but we ended up with these activities being one of the more compelling gaming aspects of CSC. That said, we thought it would be a great idea to encourage the same kind of competition with our current players and promote these events to help spread the word of CSC: the best blockchain space MMO out there! ;) Ok I am little biased.
I am very happy to announce the creation of a CSC Competition Rewards Pool. This pool will start at the launch of our next sale and will be funded with a percentage of ETH collected from sold CSC items. Those funds will then be distributed as player rewards for tournaments and events that the Galactic Federation will hold over the next few weeks and months. The following are some of the events we have planned for the coming weeks:
- Players will need to outfit and race their fastest ship (new control scheme will add pilot skill as a factor)
- Find a Rare or Hidden Item spread around the EtherVerse.
- Battle it out in a solo and team arena Deathmatch.
- Mine the most of a resource in a limited time.
- Deliver the most goods in a limited time.
- Destroy the most NPCs in a limited time.
- Find and Destroy a specific high level NPC.
More specifics and details about these events and rewards will come out in the next few weeks as we work out the kinks from this 0.5 launch.
Finally enjoy these next few videos showcasing the Pre-Alpha Track that will be available in the upcoming release. Added a fun twist if you happen to leave the course early ;).
That’s all for now and I hope you enjoyed this read.
Safe flying commanders!
Ship Sales Update
Don’t have a ship yet and want to play in our upcoming Alpha? Don’t worry, we have more ships will be coming soon! Until then, you can learn more about CSC and check out our past ships sales at https://www.csc-game.com/sale.
