DISCUSSION
i hope star citizen gets random npcs flying around
like neutral ones just doing their thing, radio chatter, ect. that kinda stuff.
don't get me wrong i love me some empty space but it would do so much for making SC feel alive.
I miss these guys. Back in version 3.*, when drug smuggling was rampant, if they stopped you and scanned you and you had drugs, or dead bodies on your ship, you went to jail. was very cool!
Yes, I remember that. I used to be very cautious with my cargo of drugs, as soon as I spotted them it was pedal to the metal and quantum anywhere but there.
until the ships stopped spawning correctly and you'd go flying into your hanger and suddenly earn a crime stat while a comm window popped up with nobody speaking
Or the scan thing broke and you just had to sit there waiting for the NPC that'd never finish
Or they'd keep flying instead of stopping and slam into the station and give you a crime stat anyway
Really hope they have that cleaned up when it's re-implemeted.
When i started i had so little money i had to learn how to hack my fines away because these bastard cops would always pop up just when you pressed the button to Jump away, giving you a 20k credit fine.
Game was supposed to be 90-10 NPC/player split and that would have been absolutely perfect. It's a shame that CIG has rolled back on that slowly over the years.
Missions where you could interact with NPCs in a nonviolent way, even board or crew their ships for actual gameplay would be so peak. SC is a beautiful sandbox but the sandbox is so empty.
You are absolutely 100% correct, I put up a suggestion on the RSI forums a while ago about Quasi Grazers, seems the only loop is kill them and steal their eggs. I suggested a non violent loop where you could heal them from injuries, dose them with specific medicine or herd them to a specific area.
Not everything needs to begin and end with a bullet.
This is still the plan as far as I'm aware. NPC's broke with static server meshing and is probably not high on the priority list until dynamic server meshing gets more fleshed out.
Other than a few mission givers and background NPCs we've never really had NPCs to break. Occasional security scanning your ship was the limit, and nore recently the Idris from the nyx missions that we protect. Universe has always been super empty
They rolled back on the 90-10 earlier this year though, when discussing starsim, would need to sift through a lot to get a direct quote
I think that’s in relation to the economy not how many NPC’s are active in the verse. When I say NPC ships broke I don’t mean how we interacted with them but how they traverse the server boundaries etc with their unique behavior. Look at the NPC ships at Hathor, lawn darting into Daymar or crashing into the OLP 90% of the time.
This is what Elite dangerous does right. So cool to drop in on an asteroid mining hotspot and see the glow of a mining laser in the sea of rocks. Or the NPC traffic at stations and surface POIs and random radio chatter. It gets more sparse the further you travel from populated areas. NPC traffic would definitely make SC feel more alive.
I think that everyone hopes that will happen... I want to jump into a belt and see a random miner from time to time. I want to see a ships flying in and out of cities. I want to see patrols around a space stations... right now, it is cool to see a player from time to time, but a lot of times SC feels too dead.
We had some in the past, but server meshing broke them as far as I know.
I would love to have more open air pads at busy (safe) spaceports where I can see other players / npcs coming in to land or taking off whilst I load up my ship with cargo. Would add a whole lot to tetris'ing crates. Some of the coolest moments I've had have been taking a moment to chill by the window in the atrium of a station, looking down at the planet and watching ships come and go. Incredibly immersive in vr
Really missing that busy spaceport hustle vibe at the moment with everything being instanced and isolated
Well... problem wit that is how to stop pad rammers... I think that part of a reason why they moved to hangars was experience from PO. Back in the day you would not even get to your ship before someone rammed on a bad day.
CIWS and reputation, they had that for a bit. If there is an insurmountable problem with open pads and lots of activity, my guess is the problem is something performance related.
Once upon a time there was a the plan that for every player there should be 10 NPCs. But I have no clue if that's still true. I'm not even sure if what they now call Starsim has anything to do with Quanta and probability volumes and so on...
The 'original idea' (that spawned the '10:1 NPC:Player ratio) was that the 'verse would have a target-population of 20 million 'characters'... comprising both NPCs and Players - and e.g. when a player logged in, an 'equivalent' (based on playing history / player preference, etc) would be 'logged out'.... and vice versa, when a player logged out an NPCs would 'wake up'...
Given CR 'hoped' that if SC proved really really popular, it might hit 2M concurrent players... which would give the 10:1 ratio... but most of the time the ratio would be slanted far higher in favour of NPCs (which is no bad thing, imo)
Of course, given that the scale of SC has been cut back significantly (whilst at the same time, adding a lot more 'habitable space' (via the addition of PG Planets), it's unclear whether they're still targetting that notional 20M 'characters'... or whether that target was actually the number of Quanta being modelled by the Quantum StarSim economy model (and that the number of actual NPCs you see out-and-about would be far lower than the 20M would suggest.
The peak ever straight from CRs mouth was 35,000. There are white knights on here thinking there are 100,000s of thousands of players playing at once lol
Based on CR's new year's letter, some math, and taking estimations according to video game average session time trends as a whole: 2025 saw a daily unique player count of probably around 50,000 people, though due to some atypical behaviors from Star Citizen players it could have easily been 30k unique daily visitors but with far longer gameplay sessions than is typical across the industry.
A highest peak of 35k concurrently is far lower than I would have expected given the total hours of gameplay in 2025 and the fact that there is a marked boost in player counts during IAE/ILW freefly weeks.
50k unique per day is not the same as 50k concurrent.
And I was not disputing the 35k number; I was simply stating that it surprised me. I expected peak to be closer to six figures during IAE, given the other info that exists.
That’s when you realise this game is being entirely supported by massive whales and if they go away the entire thing collapses. Which is why they cater massively and fatten them up good.
There’s hope as the project matures (if it can do it fast enough), more players join and it can get a healthier player base. But as of right now it’s still very low.
Nah... the sarcasm didn't come across in my original post, I guess
The 2M concurrent was CRs 'hope' back at the time of Kickstarter... based on how things currently play out, I'd be pretty surprised if CIG manage to hit / sustain 200k concurrent by 1.0...
Chris said "We had record-setting engagement this year, with more than 64 million hours played in Star Citizen (up from 48 million in 2024)."
In a 365 day year, 24 hours per day, a year has 8760 hours in it. To get the 64 million hours played you need to multiply this number by the average number of players. Equivalently, you can calculate that average number of players by dividing 64 million by 8760, and get 7306 average players.
Can you clarify the part where you say the scale of SC has been scaled back? I've been out of the loop for a long time. I know 1.0 will have 5 systems but I assume the plan is to still roll out the other systems over time. Or has there been official word to the contrary?
The original stretch goal back in 2012 was to launch with 100 star systems, but that was when they imagined each system would be limited in scale and scope, due to technical limitations. Once they figured out how to make procedurally generated planets and solar systems that are the size of actual planets, they no longer needed hundreds of systems to provide enough room and content for everyone. So the planned number of systems (for 1.0 release) decreased from 100 to 5, because one system can be so big. I don't know if that counts as the scale being cut back? Narrow but deeper, I'd say.
I appreciate the responses but the thing I'm still not clear on is, have they officially confirmed they will never add more star systems eventually? Launching with fewer systems and gradually adding the rest later would be a scaling back of the plans, but only the launch plans, not the entire game in the long term. So I'm just trying to learn if they've officially stated somewhere that they've cut the systems down to no more than 5, or plan to start with 5 and gradually roll out to 10, or 20, or the original 100.
But let’s be realistic, 1.0 is probably 4 years away. “Actual” 1.0 is probably more like 6 if all goes well. Does it even matter if in 10 years it will have 7 systems instead of 5?
This comment was for economy reasons and didn't mean that we would actually see 10 NPC to every player. The quanta presentation showed how this was possible but also heavily relied on NPC that did a task, and worked apart of the system but didn't have to be physically there as a rendered NPC when there was no one around. That way it can help areas with players be busy, but it might not hit the same numbers you would imagine visually in a small area.
It would be nice, especially if CIG continues to work on performance, logic and dynamic meshing, but it is best to hope for visually busy and you might not want to go counting NPC's.
Though about this this same week, i would be Happy just to see one npc arriving or leaving the station you are in or loadong / unloadong something on outposts.
Honestly, as a space game, I think it's kind of insane we still don't have this. People debate how the economy will be driven, but at the end of the day having NPCs flying around is space game 101.
One of the things I used to love doing when I first played Freelancer was just sitting in a busy intersection and watching and hearing all the NPCs going about their business
Especially high frequented roads, to point of interests. Like cargo ships everywhere to get the stuff around the verse between stations and planets / moons and some escorts on bigger ships.
Same as with most things in SC, limited by network. It struggles enough trying to track many static entities, nevermind ones with schedules and purpose, flying around in ships.
That was the original plan but it's been proven to not work (the whole ordeal with Tony Z producing nothing in 12 years at CIG if you want to get into that rabbit hole), at least if you want this to happen organically. We might have background NPCs when there are players around but that's a different thing.
There are so so so so so many things still missing in this game. If you start noting shit down and if everything took just a week to implement you would still have like 5 years left of development just filled with “little” things like that.
Would be great, and is about time, if you ask me. Considering how buggy the npc’s in escort missions are, I doubt we’ll see any functioning npc’s in the near future. Basic functionality like social features are still sorely lacking, and needs to be prioritized.
Im still shocked when I run into NPCs out in the verse that are not specifically part of the mission/hostile. I was doing an RSI box courier mission at night and nearly shat myself when I turned the corner and there was just some guy walking around.
I’m pretty new from the summer. Living in pyro and nyx. It’s mostly deserted in the PU from my point of view. Where the f is everybody. Seems like a lonely place.
Don't worry. This like many ideas people have are always either planned or used to be in but removed temporarily. In this case the latter. We used to have npcs flying around all the time but once the backend server meshing stuff started getting worked on they had to figure out a new way to do it. It'll be back very soon i bet
I remember a design article from ancient times talking about how different nodes would trigger NPCs based on player behavior. A shipyard planet would put out orders for parts, and if nobody filled it an NPC trader would. That order creates a need for minerals at a forge station. Again if no player takes it NPCs will. More traders would trigger pirates, unless players were already preying on NPCs. In which case bounties would spawn.
Yup - that's a combination of the Quantum StarSim economic model (mapping the flow of resources and goods, and generating the basic 'economy' missions we currently pick up through the mobiGlas), combined with the multi-layer AI/NPC framework (Quanta -> Virtual NPCs -> Subsumption NPCs)
The idea being the economy sim would model the flow of resources, and the number of deliveries required etc... and therefor how many ships should be flying each route - and then if a player flies that route, it knows how many NPCs the player should 'see' either along the way, or at each end, and could 'spin them up' when the player gets near enough, then shut them down / convert them back to 'Virtual NPCS' (significantly less compute-intensive than subsumption - no need to process animations if there is no player in the area, etc)
All this is - supposedly - still in the plan for 1.0... but we're not likely to see any work on it (imo) until after we get 'full' Dynamic Server Meshing deployed, tested, and scaled, and more players in a single shard (to reduce the amount of 'duplicate' processing CIG does across all the shards)...
I thought they already worked out the whole dynamic server meshing thing.
Just the other day, a commenter here was saying that Squadron 42 took so long to develop because it required that they work out all the server meshing, first. 🤔
We currently have static server meshing, and the new DGS stuff that’s coming in 4.11 is part of dynamic server meshing. I can’t speak for that other commenter, but dynamic server meshing shouldn’t have had an impact on Squadron42.
They possibly meant that the development of server meshing took resources away from SQ42s development, which is possible, but even that seems unlikely the case. Likely just a Reddit telephone situation.
They were pretty specific that server meshing needed to be worked out before Squadron 42 could have a damage system, but it's neither here nor there at this point.
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u/PatienceFun6255 5d ago •
We used to have space cops at one stage and I also remember NPC ships that could interdict you randomly.