Star Citizen Gets Alpha 3.8.1 Update, New Ship, and Video as Crowdfunding Passes $265 Million

Star Citizen got another update for its backer-only access alpha, numbered 3.8.1, and it brought the Drake Cutlass Red starship and a handful of changes.
Star citizen Drake Cutlass RED (3)

Star Citizen got another update for its backer-only access alpha, numbered 3.8.1, and it brought the Drake Cutlass Red starship and a handful of changes.

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The Drake Cutlass Red is the search & rescue varient of the popular Drake Cutlass chassis, and it comes with the first implementation of medical gameplay.

You can read all about that in our dedicated interview from earlier this week, and you can enjoy a few new images below.

Among the patch notes we find an additional description of the current implementation of medical gameplay, which will be expanded upon in the future.

“Medical beds can now be used for healing and respawn after death. Initial game login is still set by the menu selection, if it’s the first login, or by the last ATC landing at a major station.

After initial login, players can manually set their respawn to a medical bed by entering the bed and selecting the “Set as preferred ICU” interaction. Medical bed spawning can also be cleared in the same way by selecting “Clear as preferred ICU”. Upon death, the player will respawn at the desired medical bed if they died less than 4 million meters away.

Currently this functionality is only available on ships with medical beds (just the 890 and the Cutlass Red for this build) and will only work if the ship is available (not despawned or destroyed). If the ship is not available, players will instead respawn at their default location until they have manually set another medical bed.

Additionally, if the player is injured they can use a medical bed to heal by selecting the “Treat Injuries” interaction, which is only visible when the player has treatable wounds.”

The most relevant feature additions and changes are as follows.

  • Added a separate hostility activation under accidental fire threshold for party members.
  • Added wait and instruction objective and timer to patrol mission starts.
  • Added a checkbox in game options to disable film grain graphical effect.
  • Added target nearest friendly functionality and keybind.
  • Camera shake is now a slider option in the options menu.
  • Added auto zooming on selected target (default off).
  • Added basic “MedBed” gameplay functionality.
  • New Ship Available: Drake Cutlass Red
  • Added an entrance light ring to indicate where a player should stand to get the entrance interaction on the Mole.
  • Added weapon report audio for ship weapons in atmosphere.
  • There is now a cooldown on player bounties of the same player.
  • Rented ships in the persistent universe can no longer be modified.

We also get another extensive video showing off how points of interested are created on the surface of a planet.

In more Star Citizen news, the release of the Cutlass Red gave another bump to the crowdfunding total, which is now well over $265 million. 

To be more specific, it’s at $265,472,292 at the moment of this writing, with 2,513,160 registered accounts. 

As usual, it’s known that not all of them are paying players. The number includes free accounts created for a variety of reasons.

If you want to learn more about Star Citizen, you can take a look at a previous video focusing on the Cutlass red. You can also take a look at a recent trailer for the game’s single-player component, Squadron 42, which was released on Christmas.

If you’d rather see something a bit more whimsical, you can watch how exploring the top of ArcCorp’s skyscrapers turned into an adventure for yours truly.

For the sake of full disclosure, the author of this article has been a Star Citizen backer since the original Kickstarter campaign several years ago


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Author
Giuseppe Nelva
Proud weeb hailing from sunny (not as much as people think) Italy and long-standing gamer since the age of Mattel Intellivision and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Definitely a multi-platform gamer, he still holds the old dear PC nearest to his heart, while not disregarding any console on the market. RPGs (of any nationality), MMORPGs, and visual novels are his daily bread, but he enjoys almost every other genre, prominently racing simulators, action and sandbox games. He is also one of the few surviving fans on Earth of the flight simulator genre.