Luminalia time is here. Get in space and cheer!

Luminalia is CIG’s/Star Citizen’s Holiday event. The lore behind it is that it’s celebrated by both humans and Banu on December 22nd. There’s a whole Galactapedia article about it that you can check out. I won’t rehash it all here but there’s a bunch of info there.

The celebration in the game is going to last until January 10th. Until then, you can snag some discounted starter packs and if you sign up with someone’s referral code, you both get a free Argo Cargo! It’s nothing too fancy but they’re fun little gophers and you can use it to Cross Chassis Upgrade (CCU) to another ship and put the value of that towards the upgrade. If you’ve been looking to get into the game, feel free to use my code: STAR-7766-THGL to snag your free ship. Cause, heck yeah I’m looking to get one too!

One of the gift delivery missions. These work like regular delivery missions. Just funner.

Apart from that there is a screenshot, contest, some in game missions to deliver presents, small presents hidden around the verse that you can collect and sell, and an Advent Calendar that should be starting today going through the 22nd (but they’ll be available to claim until Jan. 10)! They mentioned in the post that for the first time, 100% of the gifts will be usable in-game so that’ll be interesting. And because of not finishing this post the night before, I can tell you that Day 1’s present is Luminalia sweaters! Mine aren’t showing up in my hangar yet…

but I bet it’s just because so many folx are hitting the servers for their presents. Looking at Spectrum chat, I’m not alone in this.

Apart from the delivery missions, I’ve been clowning around a good bit. Above is a collection of all my plushies. Below are some shots of the ship of the month for subscribers, the club in New Babbage (I don’t go here a lot but those little gifts are hidden everywhere), me hanging on the lights in Port Tressler, and NPCs being weird. On fresh servers, NPCs spawn in like this before they start moving. It always looks like they’re in a orientation or something. What’s weird is they turn their heads to look at you sometimes.

Centurion is the Ship of the month for subscribers
Me and this random person just chilled on the lights in PT for a half hour

And, outside of all that, we’re eagerly awaiting the release of 3.18 to the Persistent Test Universe (PTU). From what I understand it’s in Evocati testing right now. That’s group of NDA’d, super testers and then it’ll move on to Wave 1, which I think will include me now? There have been a couple of “Patch Watches” post on Spectrum. You can find those here: Continuing Lawlessness and Balancing Keys.

I don’t think we yet know exactly everything that’s going to be in 3.18 in day one. They’ve already hinted at the possibility of things being spread out over updates in the coming year. But from what I understand, here’s everything that was committed for 3.18:

  • Drake Vulture – Salvage Ship
  • Cargo Refactor
  • Time Trial Race Missions
  • Persistent Entity Streaming
  • Gen12 Scene Renderer
  • Daymar Crash Sites
  • New Rivers
  • Sand Caves
  • PTV Races
  • Prison Missions/New Escape
  • SPK reactivation
  • Salvage – Hull Stripping
  • Soft Destruction of ship/Disabling

That seems like a lot. And it is. I’m hoping we get a lot of it out of the gate but realistically, probably not. And I’m okay with that. I won’t get into what all of these updates are in this post (some are self explanatory) but I will probably expand on what they do and add as I’m able to experience them. I’m really excited to try out the Vulture and salvage game-play loops.

Are you enjoying the Luminalia festivities? What are you looking forward to most in 3.18? Have you used my referral code to get that Argo Cargo yet? WHY THE HELL NOT?! Let me know in the comments!

Fly safe!