While Alpha 3.24.2 got out of the door just a few days earlier, it seems like Star Citizen will receive another minor update before the hotly anticipated 4.0 becomes available.
According to the pre-order page for Misc Starlancer MAX, this ship will be available when Alpha 3.24.3 goes live, which is an unannounced patch by CIG. But somewhere else, it has been mentioned that Starlancer MAX will be playable when IAE 2954 launches on November 22, 2024.
Putting these two pieces of information together reveals that Alpha 3.24.3 is aimed to be delivered by November 22 this year or even earlier, so that Starlancer MAX owners pilot their new ship while celebrating IAE.
It is yet to be seen what else will be prepared for Alpha 3.24.3, but we should expect to get this patch in the PTU channel very soon, as there is almost one month left until IAE. Hopefully, players who own Starlancer MAX will be able to test-fly the ship in the PTU channel, so the ship will actually be flyable before November 22.
Starlancer MAX was officially introduced during CitizenCon 2024 as a new cargo hauler from Misc that falls somewhere between Freelancer Max and Hull-C. Starlancer MAX is the first in the series to release, with Starlancer TAC coming out in 2025.
TAC is the military-focused version of Starlancer coming with an interior hangar for Mury-size snub fighters, a pair of Tier-3 medical beds, and a bunch of drop seats for deploying ground troops. The ship also has a rear cargo bay that can fit Ursa-size ground vehicles.
The final variant of the Starlaner family is BLD, which comes with construction drones for base building. There is no official release window for BLD yet, but it is promised to be delivered in the next 12 months, which is sometime in 2025.
Alpha 3.24.2 is currently live, but it does have a lot of server issues at the moment. Getting inside a server is the most difficult job to tackle at the moment, and the in-game performance is also affected by lags and desyncs.
The developers did deliver a hotfix last night to Alpha 3.24.2, but the patch still needs at least one more hotfix to operate properly.
