$2,000,000 – $6,000,000 – The Original Ten
When Star Citizen’s Kickstarter launched, Cloud Imperium gave us stretch goals of up to $6,000,000 beyond the original funding goal of $500,000. They only managed to hit just over $2,000,000 on KS, but they didn’t let that stop them. Looking at these small numbers, it’s a bit unbelievable to see how far the game has come.
These stretch goals were pretty basic. They added a few ships to the game, and greatly expanded the scale of the game’s universe. At $6,000,000, over 100 star systems were promised to ship with the final game, and the single player campaign—Squadron 42—would become a full-fledged Story Mode. These tiers also promised many users some free ships and other swag, as well as access to the Dogfighter Module, which is available now.
All of these promises have thus far been fulfilled, and it doesn’t seem like any will be cut. Again, these were mostly incentive-type prizes for backers.
The Anvil Gladiator
$9,000,000 – The First Major Milestone
After hitting $6,000,000 relatively quickly, Cloud Imperium started announcing new stretch goals, stating that they would introduce a new one for every $1,000,000 made. The first stretch goal was simple: backers who helped fund the game before June 28, 2013 would receive a Roberts Space Industries Class II space suit in their hangar, free of charge. Nice!
Class II Space Suit
$10,000,000 – $12,000,000 – Quality of Life Improvements
The next few goals focused on improving Cloud Imperium proper. These stretch goals ensured that Cloud Imperium Games would build their own mocap and sound studios, and move to a larger facility for expanded development. For the most part, there’s no reason to believe any of these things aren’t true—however, the developers did also promise Hollywood voice talent for the game, but no announcements as to who have been made at this time. With the amount of money the game has accrued, I see no reason why we wouldn’t get some high-quality voice acting in this game, so rest easy.
Oh, these goals also promised Oculus Rift support for the Hangar Module, a playable teaser of sorts that allowed players to walk around their hangar and check out all of their sweet spaceships. This has, indeed, been added to the game.
$13,000,000 – Command and Control
In addition to an additional ship class in the form of a frigate, this goal promised the addition of an interesting game mechanic: Command and Control Center. Using this, players could supervise battles from the decks of their various ships and control other ships en masse, sort of like a high-stakes RTS game, only each individual unit is controlled by another player. We’ve yet to see this implemented in the game, but there’s little reason to believe it won’t make it in.
$14,000,000 – Hibernation
This stretch goal promised yet another new mode: Hibernation, in which players can save and resume their games even while out in deep space, rather than having to travel back to a safe zone to quit. Additionally, this goal promised a professional-quality “Behind the Scenes” film for Star Citizen, and a new landing option on Earth, yet to be revealed. What could it be? Berlin? London? We’ll find out eventually. Hopefully.
$15,000,000 – $16,000,000 – Arena Mode, Weapons, and New Ships
You want another ship class? You bet you do. With these goals, escort carriers were added to the game, as well as Arena Mode, which is pretty much Star Citizen’s matchmaking. Basically, it’s a way for players to shoot giant space lasers at each other without running the risk of losing their ships. A version of this mode, entitled Arena Commander, is already available to players. It currently allows for deathmatch style dogfights and racing. If you’ve already got a ship, go download it! It’s a lot of fun.
This goal also promised a free laser pistol for all pledgers and The Upgrade Handbook, a 42-page (they really like the number 42 over at Cloud Imperium, don’t they?) manual that teaches player show to overclock and customize their ships.
Pegasus Escort Carrier
$17,000,000 – $19,000,000 – More Goodies for Pledgers and Space Stations
With these goals, pledgers would receive free ship upgrades, an exclusive start system for backers (note that while other players can travel here, only backers can start here), a free PDF manual, and other goodies. More importantly, this batch of goals added, you guessed it, yet another ship class: the battlecruiser.
On the more interesting side of things, these goals also unlocked the ability for players to own and manage Space Stations, which fuels the in-game economy. What good’s an MMO if you can’t own and decorate a special home, just for you? Like many things on this list, this hasn’t been implemented just yet. Relax, kids—the full game is still a bit down the pipeline.
$20,000,000 – First Person Combat
Pretty self-explanatory. We’re going to get FPS-style shootouts, on various planets, in Star Citizen once it releases. Hopefully it’ll be more meaningful than just pretty backdrops like a certain other space MMO I know. This is, naturally, not released yet—however, according to RSI’s website; this mode has passed planning stages and is being produced now. Hopefully we’ll get to play some version of it soon!
$21,000,000 – Salvages
Salvaging is a big deal in Star Citizen. With this stretch goal, the team has the funds to create a truly in-depth salvage mechanic that will impact the game in meaningful ways, both in space and on the ground. You can discover ancient alien secrets or be the first player to contact an alien race. No updates on how exactly this works as of today, but down the line we’re sure to hear something, right?
$22,000,000 – Facial Capture
So, this is … an interesting one. Basically, the team will now utilize technology to import real-life faces into the game, adding a more realistic look. They’ve even promised to go out and find fans to capture and put into the game as a bonus. If you ask me, the human graphics we’ve seen thus far don’t seem that much more impressive than anything else that’s released. But it’s a cool bit of technology nonetheless.
$23,000,000 – Alien Ships?
This stretch goal adds a new ship: the Xi’An Khartu, an alien ship with incredible agility. As of writing, this ship has been designed but is not yet available for purchase. Roberts promises that alien ships won’t just look different—they’ll feel different, as one would expect when utilizing off-world technology. This is just a small taste of alien ships to come.
Xi’an Scout concept by Eddie Del Toro
$24,000,000 – Public Transportation System
With this stretch goals public transportation systems will be added to the game, effectively serving as a method of travel in space when you don’t have a starship (either because you didn’t buy one yet or you picked a fight with a pirate far more skilled than you). Allegedly this system will be more than just a simple fast-travel system and the in-game economy will have an impact on it.
$25,000,000 – Enhanced Alpha (Starting “Soon”)
With this stretch goal, the game’s alpha will be enhanced with more features, as well as more player slots to play the game before launch. Currently, the alpha is slated to begin sometime before the end of this year, along with the release of the first few chapters of Squadron 42. Whether or not this will be pushed back is anyone’s guess, but given the scale of the game, don’t get your hopes up until a final date is revealed.
$26,000,000 – $27,000,000 – Enhanced Command and Control System and Banu Merchantman Ship
At 26 big ones, the developers promised a few more features to the Command and Control module, as well as other small additions to capital ship functions. At 27 million, the Banu Merchantman ships—another alien vessel—will be playable, giving economic-style players a valuable option for making trades throughout the galaxy while keeping their hides intact. Like the Xi’An ship above, this ship is not yet available for purchase.
$28,000,000 – $29,000,000 – A New Starter Ship and Squadron 42 Enhancements
With these goals, players can now begin Star Citizen with the Mustang, manufactured by a new ship company: Consolidated Outland. Like the Aurora, the Mustang is a wallet-friendly ship. It focuses more on engines and thrusters rather than weapons and cargo capacity—it is the starter ship to go with if you plan on exploring rather than fighting.
Additionally, with these funds, the team can provide an enhanced Squadron 42 campaign, with better mission design and animations. We should be seeing this in action pretty soon, now.
$30,000,000 – $35,000,000 – New Ships Galore
With the next six stretch goals, Cloud Imperium announced a new ship for each of the game’s major manufacturers, based on community votes for what types of ships they’d like added to the game: the Origin 890 JUMP, the RSI Orion, the Aegis Reclaimer, the Anvil Carrack, the MISC Hull C, and the Drake Herald. A few of these ships, with the exception of the Orion and the Hull C, have been fully rendered. None are available for purchase yet, but none have been officially axed.
The Orion
$36,000,000 – $40,000,000 – New Systems Galore
Similar to the previous few stretch goals, these all promised new systems for players to explore based on community votes. They are as follows:
- Tamsa System: A system with only two planets around a central star that has collapsed into a black hole.
- Tanga System: A new system at the center of a nebula, with most of its inhabitable planets destroyed as its star collapsed into a white dwarf. Before this happened, there were many planets speculated to be inhabitable here, but now only frozen, dead planets remain.
- Cano System: A system similar to our own Solar System, with its only inhabitable planet being fully aquatic. The flavor text hints at an unknown species residing deep beneath the water.
- UDS-2943-01-22 System: An unknown system noted for having an unusual trinary star, consisting of two white dwarfs and an active pulsar orbiting each other. The flavor text teases that whoever discovers this system first is in for a beautiful view and other surprises.
- Kabal System: An ordinary system that held an interesting secret: a planet that housed old Tevarin cities. Despite appearing uninhabited, UEE marines discovered that the technology there had been recently developed.
- Oretani System: Part of the rapid expansion era of the 25th century, surveyors began work on terraforming one of the planets there. Eventually, the only jump point into the system collapsed, stranding the workers there. Many believed they died out, but no one knows what lies out there.
These systems will be added into the game once it releases next year. They all sound pretty interesting, don’t they? Hopefully by the time you get there, the big mysteries will still be…well, mysterious.
$41,000,000 – Procedural Generation
This is a big one. With this funding, the team will develop procedural generation for the game. This essentially means that the game’s universe can expand forever in a randomized fashion, allowing explorers to pick a star and fly on ‘til morning and almost always manage to find something. A feature like this will likely add some years to Star Citizen’s lifespan. Whether or not the team pulls of procedural generation of this scale is unknown. We’ll just have to wait and see. I keep saying that, don’t I? Sorry.
If you’ve been reading along to this point, you might be thinking these promises are starting to sound a bit…ambitious. These are one of the stretch goals that I, personally, am worried about. Procedural generation is fun for small roguelike games such as Rogue Legacy, but I have difficulty believing such a system can be put into place in a universe-sized scale this game is hoping to create. To be fair, No Man’s Sky—a space exploration game—also promises this feature and has shown it in action, but only in very small, controlled spaces. The concept sounds amazing, so here’s hoping Star Citizen can pull it off.
$42,000,000 – New Ships, a Guide, and a… Towel?
As mentioned above, 42 is a pretty important number over at Cloud Imperium. As such, this stretch goal is quite large. Firstly, it adds the Observist Guide, a dynamic guide that will update in real-time as players discover jump points and as the game changes. It will be accessible on the website and in-game.
Additionally, all players who pledge to support the game will receive the Explorer-class mobiGlas Rig, a specialized version of the portable device all players can equip. The mobiGlas is sort of like a smartphone—it gives you access to tons of information in-game, and this particular model comes preloaded with some info that new players would otherwise have to discover on their own.
Also added to the game will be the Gladius, an Aegis spaceship designed as a short-range patrol fighter. It’s fast and packs a punch powerful enough to take down larger starships. It was available for purchase for a short time. Currently, it is not available in-game.
And finally, the most important addition to the game: a towel. Not just any towel, mind you—a special Observist towel, only for those who backed the game before $42 million. Now you can explore the universe without ever having to worry about getting wet. Congratulations!
After this point, almost every stretch goal is based on a community vote of what random feature they want added to the game. As you may’ve guessed, ideas for stretch goals begin to run thin around this point—we’ll still cover them all for you, though.
$43,000,000 – Omni Role Combat Armor (ORD) Mk 9
For backing the game before this point, you’ll receive some free Marine combat armor. This armor provides better protection than standard-issue armor, so wearing this will give players a slight edge in ground-based combat. We likely won’t know anything about it until the FPS Module releases sometime this year. Honestly, this one sounds more like a preorder bonus than a funding incentive. This is, sadly, a trend you’ll also pick up on in the rest of the stretch goals.
$44,000,000 – Stellar Cartography; 3D Map Room
Here’s a cool feature. Once the modular room system launches, players will get an extra room in their hangars that allows them to wander around a simulation of any part of the universe they’ve previously explored. It serves a sort of digital diary for the player that also tracks secret jump points and learn more info about the various worlds in the known universe. Currently, this room has not been added to the game. Bummer.
$45,000,000 – Hadesian Artifact
A mysterious artifact found within the also-mysterious system of Hades, which once housed an ancient civilization. Many fakes were produced after the artifact was discovered, but the real one may house some interesting secrets. Roberts promises that this particular event will kick off something very cool in the Persistent Universe once the alpha for that launches.
$46,000,000 – Updated Scanning Software
This is a pretty basic one. With this, the standard scanning software in the game’s universe will be upgraded to allow for high-resolution scans, variable scan sizes, and other such tunings.
What’s interesting about this stretch goal is that this is the point where Roberts officially noted that the stretch goals for Star Citizen were going to reach an end soon. In his own words, there just wasn’t anything to really justify further stretch goals. In fact, the letter describing the Scanning Software included a poll to vote for whether or not more stretch goals should even be announced going forward. The community voted yes, so we got a few more to talk about for you here. However, these stretch goals are mostly just backer-related incentives.
$47,000,000 – Engine Tuning Kit
This is the final community-voted stretch goal: the ability to really go in-depth with engine building. With this kit, Engineers can really study their engines and make tons of minor tweaks to mix/max their ships. Of course, they’ll do this at their own risk. Space-ship engines aren’t exactly simple, and one wrong tweak here or there could damage your machine. Be careful while tinkering!
$48,000,000 – Retaliator Commercial
With this stretch goal, the team will put together a commercial for the Retaliator, an in-game ship. Expect a commercial for this ship to launch with the Cutlass and Constellation commercials. Hey, a little flavor text never hurt anybody, right?
Star Citizen Retaliator Concept
$49,000,000 – Xi’An Space Plant
That’s “space plant” like a plant that grows somewhere in space, not “space plant” like a manufacturing plant or something. These plants will be sold in-game and are similar to bonsai trees. It seems dumb and pointless, but I happen to like pointless visual flair in my games, so I’m down with space flowers. Don’t worry, more interesting stretch goals are coming up. I promise.
$50,000,000 – Full-On Alien Languages
See, I told you things would get more interesting again. With this stretch goal reached, Cloud Imperium will work with linguists to make authentic alien languages for the game. This kinda thing has been done before numerous times, but it’s neat to know a little more realism will make its way into the game. Instead of just various weird-sounding grunts we’ll get an actual language to hear in-game. That’s neat! Hopefully the “Hollywood actors” they end up hiring are good enough to handle fake languages, though.
$51,000,000 – Development Shifting
With this stretch goal, Cloud Imperium gave the community the chance to determine what the production schedule for Star Citizen would be, starting with having the web design team focus on making a map of the “known universe” in Star Citizen. This map should be available soon.
$52,000,000 – The BB-12 Jetpack for Backers
This is another incentive reward. Those who backed before this point will receive a free jetpack for their characters, capable of operation for six hours. With the physics engine Star Citizen has in place, this should create awesome (and/or hilarious) space battles.
$53,000,000 – Independent Arbitrator’s Guild
The guild described here will allow players to confidentially file complaints against in-game players and AI characters who have wronged underlings in their company or stolen funds. This applies even to “less-than-legitimate” organizations, no questions asked. The cool thing? These players will be filing these complaints to other players, who will work to resolve the issue. Obviously, this is something we won’t see until the Persistent Universe launches.
$54,000,000 – More Detailed AI
Pretty simple. Ten more AI character roles will be added to the game, including Bartender, Doctor, Nurse, Entertainer, Sanitation Worker, Security Guard, Shopper, Tourist, Vagrant and Vandal.
$55,000,000 – $56,000,000 – Ship Upgrades
These two stretch goals add two new upgrades for ships: the Ballistic Gatling weapon and the J-Span Cryo-Star cooling system. Each of these were activated immediately and given to all players who backed the game prior to the goals being reached for Arena Commander.
$57,000,000 – $63,000,000 – Even MORE Ships Galore + In-Game Money Bonus for Backers
Once again, Star Citizen stretch goals focused on community-voted ships for each of the game’s manufacturers. Among them, the following were announced, none of which are available yet (they’re too new!): the MISC Endeavor, the Anvil Aerospace Crucible, the Aegis Vanguard, the Espera Prowler, the Crusader Genesis, and the MISC Reliant. Mo’ Fundin’, Mo’ Ships, am I right?
Additionally, at $58,000,000, all players that have backed the game received 10,000 UEC (in-game money) for free to spend on upgrades and the like. When you consider the fact that over 750,000 people have backed this game, that’s quite a lot of free money to dish out. Don’t spend it all at once, though.
$64,000,000 – Pets
Look. It’s an MMO. Every MMO needs pets in order to survive, this is fact. Honestly, the fact that it took $64 million for Star Citizen to have Pets as a backer reward surprises me. Pets in-game will include normal terrestrial animals (now you, too, can finally buy a fat cat and name it “Jonesy”) as well as any other random animal the team dreams up.
$65,000,000 – Enhanced Ship Modularity
This last one is a real doozy. With this stretch goal, the team is going to overhaul a TON of ship designs to allow for more and better modulations. With the new model going forward, players will be able to fully customize ships, both internally and externally, with fittings as they please. You’ll still be able to purchase pre-built sets as before, but now those ships won’t be locked to certain tasks. Almost any ship will be modable to reach any need. Hopefully it won’t be too long before we get to see this in action with already-released ships!
$66,000,000+ – ???
As of now, no other stretch goals have been announced or revealed. However, the team has hinted that more stretch goals are likely coming in the future—and they will be pretty big. Until then, those backing the game will receive nothing but the joy and contentment that comes with helping the game’s million-dollar counter climb ever higher. The game still pulls in well-over 30 grand a day—and that’s only on slow days.
What does the future hold for Star Citizen’s stretch goals? Whenever we find out, we’ll update this article. We’ll also try to update it with new info for existing goals as it arises. So far, the money is being put to good use, and we have no reason to suspect any of the previous stretch goals are going to be forgotten. Stay tuned, space cadets, as we move on to the future.
Be sure to catch up on the rest of our Star Citizen coverage right here.
really nice article there i have played the hanger and the dog fighting module looking promising but that is really such a tiny part of the game