Star Citizen Alpha 3.8.0 goes live with the microTech planet, weather effects, and more

Star Citizen, the crowd-funded behemoth that recently broke through the $250 million milestone, is back with another major update to its Alpha build with version 3.8.0. Sticking to the schedule, this new update pushed out by Cloud Imperium Games carries another planet, first pass of server-side object container streaming, weather effects, a new ship, and more.

microTech is the brand new planet that has arrived to the game, a massive frozen body - caused by a terraforming accident - that has frequent snowstorms rolling around. The sole city structure on the surface currently is New Babbage, but expanding its innards and adding moons to the planet is planned for the Alpha 3.9.0 update.

Moreover, alongside microTech's rollout, the developer has updated all the previously released planets and moons with vastly improved visuals as well as various weather systems, including the dust, sand, and aforementioned snowstorms, that will affect how ships fly.

Another major feature of this update is the first implementation of server-side object container streaming, where only the relevant data to a player is streamed out from the server instead of simulating the entire universe all the time. The developer says that as the tech gets expanded upon, it can give it much more room to grow the game in terms of content, improve performance, increase server frame rates to improve stability, and more.

This being a space game, there's also a new ship available to use now. It is the Argo Mole, a multi-crew laser miner, which allows up to four players to use the ship's individual laser turrets to mine at the same time. New missions, orbital stations, a new sniper rifle and a missile launcher for first-person gameplay, melee combat with fists and knives, stealth takedowns, AI improvements, and a whole lot more have been added in this Alpha update as well. See the massive changelog over here.

Looking towards the future, the CitizenCon 2019 presentation by Cloud Imperium Games can be seen here. It showed off incoming additions to Star Citizen's alpha in 2020 such as a whole new solar system, wormhole travel, and more.