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🛰️ PU Monthly Report – February 2026

Welcome to February’s PU Monthly Report! There’s a huge amount of content coming to the ’verse in the next few weeks, including new and returning missions, the latest ships from RSI, and thrilling activities and locations around Nyx. Read on for everything done toward this exciting upcoming release.

🤖 AI Content

The Social AI team began the month bug fixing in support of Alpha 4.6 before looking to future releases.

AI Content worked with Mission Design to set up characters players will meet in some of the new gameplay loops. They also provided initial setups and placeholder lines so designers and directors could test the game flow with sample dialogue in place. This lets writers react to and refine the dialogue, ensuring it works in context and provides the right information.

The team also continued outlining their goals for the year and defined what would be needed from other teams to support implementation.

🧠 AI (Features & Tech)

Following last month’s work improving underground traversal for the valakkar and prototyping future speeds, the creature’s behavior was further updated, including linear acceleration and deceleration during combat traversal.

Fixes and improvements included:

  • a fix for toy guns triggering weapon-fire and bullet-hit sound effects (causing NPCs to cower)
  • accuracy calculations adjusted to give Design better control
  • improvements to safe zones in the global perception system (areas where players can rest or regroup without being detected by NPCs)
  • continued work integrating the voxel grid, currently in extensive QATR testing
  • initial AI-side support for refueling missions

🎭 Animation

Animation spent February improving assets for the kopion, while Facial Animation focused on the year’s first performance-capture shoot. Held at the end of February, it captured numerous new characters.

🧑‍🎨 Art (Characters)

Character Art polished assets for Alpha 4.7 while working through art debt in preparation for StarWear. The team also continued work on new gang outfits and Subscriber Flair items.

The Concept Art team explored new combat armors and prepared handoff sheets for upcoming mandates.

🚀 Art (Ships)

UK Ships Team

  • Completed the art phases for the Aegis Hammerhead gold standard, moving the ship to downstream teams for close-out.
  • Moved on to a related ship that’s approaching whitebox.
  • The Gatac Railen passed its whitebox gate review and moved into greybox ahead of its planned release at Alien Week this year, with more artists joining to build assets for future Gatac ships.
  • Continued work on the Greycat UTV, implementing newly captured enter/exit animations; it’s currently with downstream teams for completion.
  • MISC Hull-B continued toward its LOD0 gate review; Tech Art is finalizing the intricate spindle deploy/retract animations.

Drake Ironclad / Ironclad Assault / Command Module

All three passed their greybox gate reviews and moved into LOD0 tasks, progressing quickly thanks to time invested during whitebox on the modular kit.

Additional vehicles

Three unannounced vehicles also progressed:

  • Vehicle 1 is approaching its greybox gate review.
  • Vehicle 2 passed greybox after minor functionality requests from the director.
  • Vehicle 3 passed its whitebox review but is receiving layout tweaks before greybox.

North America

An unannounced ship passed its whitebox gate review, with the team discussing feedback on interactions involving elements in the rear half of the ship.

Drake Kraken

The Drake Kraken had its whitebox review rescheduled to early March after additional concept time resolved areas that didn’t meet current standards. The team reviewed traversal across the ship and removed/reduced the scale of some rooms that provided no player benefit (without compromising interior hero rooms like Engineering). The ship remains on track for its planned release next year.

🌐 Community

The Community team began the month by publishing the January PU Monthly Report and preparing for February’s seasonal and community-driven events.

Coramor (annual return)

They supported the annual return of Coramor (Star Citizen’s Valentine’s equivalent) with:

  • an informative catch-all post covering everything the celebration offers
  • a Referral Bonus
  • the Love, Actually: Stories of the ’Verse 2956 contest showcasing memorable community moments
    Coramor also welcomed the new Argo MOTH salvage ship; Community provided a comprehensive Q&A and published a guide to the new Industrial missions.

Red Festival

Community also supported Red Festival (the new lunisolar year in the ’verse) with:

  • a catch-all event thread
  • the Earned Fortune screenshot contest
    They also updated the Welcome Hub, New Player Guide, and Welcome Back, Pilot pages so new and returning players had the latest info.

Feedback & sentiment

Throughout February, the team monitored feedback across Spectrum and social media, compiling sentiment reports and delivering key findings to relevant development teams.

Enter ATMOSPHERE (ATMO Esports)

February marked the return of Enter ATMOSPHERE, one of the largest community-created racing events, held in Sydney, Australia. It featured top racers, multiple challenges, exclusive prizes, and CIG staff in attendance (including Chris and Sandi Roberts). Community supported the event across Spectrum and social media.

Evergreen work continued as well, including This Week in Star Citizen, plus bi-weekly Roadmap updates and Roundups.

🎮 Core Gameplay

As seen by Evocati players during recent tech previews, Core Gameplay made solid progress on the Inventory Rework. Final polish and bug fixes are underway as the team prepares it for release.

Capital Ship Services also progressed well and will be delivered to downstream teams soon. The team also focused on social features demonstrated during CitizenCon 2954.

💰 Economy

The Economy team spent part of February tracking exploits, especially those enabling:

  • item duplication
  • generation of large quantities of aUEC

While many loopholes have been closed, additional patches are planned for Alpha 4.7. After that, the team will add further guardrails and monitoring systems to reduce the impact of illicit aUEC on the wider economy.

They also continued balancing commodity pricing and trade routes, while laying groundwork for future systems like Item Recovery and Crafting.

“We were glad to see the positive community response to the Clear The Air live event. We are currently working on upcoming mission balancing and rewards while also looking back at our past content and performing an additional pass on Wikelo-related content.”
— Economy Team

🧩 Mission Design

In February, Mission Design continued work on the Alpha 4.7 mission pack, adding more Nyx content and reviving courier missions waiting on a refactor since Alpha 4.0 (with small design changes).

Examples of the updated structure:

  • Courier missions now range from one-handed items to two-handed boxes
  • Delivery missions range from 1 SCU box up to 6× 1 SCU boxes
  • Hauling begins from 6 SCU and up

Other updates:

  • Defend Ship missions: updated health tracking to prevent ships appearing nearly full health before dying
  • Ship Wave missions: expanded to contractors beyond Gilly, including a variation ending with a large ship “boss”

✍️ Narrative

Narrative focused heavily on Alpha 4.7 and expanding Nyx content:

  • extensive work on new locations, including QV Breaker Stations (home of the Rock Cracker mission)
  • People’s Service Stations, new refueling centers operated by the People’s Alliance
    These locations required signage, environmental storytelling, public address audio, and missions that use the spaces.

In parallel, the team worked with Design to create dozens of new contracts to significantly expand player options in the system.

Looking ahead:

  • scripts and a capture session for multiple new NPCs tied to an upcoming gameplay loop later this year (including a new faction representative)
  • additional content for the Tactical Strike Group mission featured at last year’s CitizenCon
  • a script for a new story mission, an important step toward establishing the pipeline for delivering 1.0 main story content
  • development of a future storyline that will pit players against an interesting new faction

🖧 Online Technology

In February, the Network team focused on improving stability and reliability across Hybrid/DGS:

  • resolved several high-impact crashes, watchdog timeouts, and replication errors
  • advanced integration of the new scp-network stack into patch branches (addressing build issues and conflicts)
  • continued QDSM V1/V2 development and testing to improve dynamic server scaling

They also implemented:

  • authority/replication improvements
  • refactored streaming bind/unbind logic
  • enhanced observability with new engine metrics
  • support for item-imprint development and mission markers
  • support for bootstrap and developer workflow issues

Following last year’s internal demo of Item Recovery T1, Online Services prepared a feature-complete internal demo and finalized remaining work ahead of its upcoming release.

Internal work continued on improving long-term database performance.

Together with Core Gameplay, Online Services planned for the social features mentioned above. Instancing is entering its final stage of technical work before being handed to downstream teams.

Live Tools:

  • conducted user interviews following the Bootstrap user survey to identify pain points and prioritize stability/performance improvements
  • continued active improvements to the Panic Switch error-reporting tool (deployment updates, improved access management, more consistent UI)
  • continued modernizing the Hex game dashboard, with the new architecture now in active implementation

🧪 R&D

Work on improved ground fog continued, including a dissipation model to simulate fog behavior across a full day/night cycle.

Elsewhere, a memory corruption in the engine’s internal name table code was identified. This led to a rewrite of the name table code and related functionality, resulting in a thread-safe and significantly more efficient implementation.

✨ VFX

VFX focused heavily on supporting Alpha 4.7, contributing to new locations, creatures, props, and vehicles as additional Nyx deliverables came online. One major 4.7.0 point of interest received extensive fine-tuning, resulting in a significantly improved final look.

Nyx creatures also received a dedicated VFX pass to ensure their visuals are up to date and properly integrated into their new environments. The team also helped bring several upcoming vehicles to life.

Author: Fhexy
Published 15:31 09.03.2026