Surprising no one, Hangarworks is better with data.p4k

Star Citizen ships with a very large file on your hard drive, and inside that file is a database, and inside that database is the answer to nearly every question this site has ever been asked. Which mission gives you the Parallax shockwave variant. How much reputation it takes to stop being a Contractor for Intersec. Where the Laranite is, and… like how frequently do you actually find it there? Surprising no one, the data.p4k has known all of this the entire time. I simply never went looking for it, in the way a dog that never bothers opening his food container.

So Hangarworks now reads the game's own files directly: the blueprint catalog, where every resource spawns, every contract the mission boards can offer (1,811 of them), and every faction's reputation ladder. Most of what follows is what that makes possible.

How to get a blueprint

Open any blueprint and the "How to get" card now tells you which missions grant it, at what rank, where they run, and what they are called on the contract board.

Take the Parallax Rifle Battery (80 Cap). Foxwell Enforcement hands it out from its Ambushes and Patrols, among others, starting with contracts like "Yellow Level Contract: Ambush An Amateur", and each one completed has up to a 17% chance of granting it. That percentage is for this blueprint in particular. The game first rolls whether you get a blueprint at all, then picks one from a pool, so the figure is that first roll shared among everything in the pool. It is the number you care about, and not the one the pool would like you to think about.

Event rewards are in there too. Orison Relief and XenoThreat both pay blueprints out at personal point thresholds, and 41 blueprints that come only from those tiers are now listed where before they were not listed at all. The S-38 "SecondWind" Pistol, for example, waits at 43,200 Orison Relief points, which is a lot of relief. One blueprint also moved house: the TH-01 Propulsor comes from Orison Relief's fabrication orders, not from Foxwell, and now says so. Not that it will matter shortly, anyway. Boy howdy is Orison getting relieved.

Reputation, with a plan attached

The reputation tracker on your profile used to be a list of factions with a rank next to each. It still is, but now you can tap a faction and it tells you what that rank is for.

Set your rank and the plan shows:

• every mission family open to you, with where it runs, the reputation each contract pays, and whether it pays aUEC, items or blueprints
• how far the next rank is, and roughly how many runs of your best-paying repeatable contract it will take
• what the next rank opens: new mission families, and how many blueprints

A Headhunters Contractor, for instance, is 3,600 reputation from Sr. Contractor. That is about nine runs of "Little Heavy Lifting" at 400 apiece, and the far side of it holds 18 more blueprints. The top of the tracker adds it all up across every faction. With no ranks set at all, your standing already opens 347 of the 671 blueprints faction missions grant, so the universe is more generous than it looks from the landing pad.

You still set your own rank. We looked quite hard, and nothing in the game's files records what you, personally, have done. This is probably for the best.

The rank names now come from the game as well, rather than being typed in by hand, which turned up some things:

• Five factions keep reputation on two ladders. Covalex, Red Wind, Dead Saints, Eckhart Security and Northrock each gate some work on one ladder and some on another, so each now gets a second row in the tracker. Eckhart turns out to hand seven of its blueprints out only on its Security ladder, which the old single ladder could not describe.
• Foxwell Enforcement's ranks are named differently. Its contracts all use the contractor ladder (Neutral, Jr. Contractor, Contractor and up), not the security ranks we had written down. Your saved rank keeps its place. It just has a new name, like a moon that was reclassified while you were standing on it.

Where the ore is

Resource pages now list places most likely first, with a percentage: the share of deposits there that hold the resource, by how you mine it. Laranite, for anyone keeping score, turns up in 39% of the ship-mined deposits at Pyro V-c (Adir). The percentage is how often it appears, not how much you get, which is a distinction the rock will make for you if you forget.

Smaller things

• Twelve tractor-beam slots that the game labels <= PLACEHOLDER => are now called "Frame", which is what they are.
• Seven ship components that had no listed manufacturer now have one.
• Mission titles no longer end in mid-sentence where the game drops a place name in at runtime. "Outlaw attack at" is now "Outlaw attack", which is less suspenseful but more accurate.

All of it is on the website today. The iOS and Android apps get the new "How to get" card, the reputation planner and the resource odds in their next update. Until then they carry on as before, just better informed. Well, they will, when some issues get resolved on my end.