40GBs of data from a development build of Star Citizen have been leaked and reuploaded, prematurely revealing a lot of work-in-progress assets of the sort that usually trickle out in press-releases, as well as information that could have been secret in the final game.
The leak originated in 4chan’s /vg/ (“Video Games General”) board, in the /scg/ (“Star Citizen General”) thread on May 22nd at 17:06 GMT. It was claimed that the origin of the leak was a picture Disco Lando took of his monitor containing an unredacted content-delivery network URL to the development build.
SPOILERS AHEAD: READ ON AT YOUR OWN RISK
Video preview (by Teller) of the Stinger, the Vanduul Heavy Fighter. It had previously only been seen in tiny, illustrated side profile in a chart of Vanduul ships back in February 2014, so this is a pretty big leak.
The bulk of what has been extracted so far is in the form of work-in-progress models.
Vanduul ships shown here that had not previously been officially revealed: the Kingship (flagship carrier), Hunter (destroyer), Cleaver (boarding pod), Driller (escort carrier), Void (bomber), Blade (medium fighter), Mauler (cruiser), and the aforementioned Stinger (heavy fighter).
Human ships revealed include: Anvil F8 Lightning (super fighter) and Retribution (super dreadnought).
The following are albums uploaded by people exploring the data, in chronological order of publishing:
- Untextured models of various ships together for size comparisons.
- Close-ups of more ships, some textured to varying degrees. Note, the “Panther” has been renamed, it’s now called the “Pegasus”.
- More close-ups, including the F8 cockpit.
- Mostly shots of the Idris’ interior.
- An album showing the fighter-carrying capacity of the Idris.
Rough star maps had been shown in the past, though the distances and locations of systems hadn’t been nailed down before the map data in this build. 4chan users graphed the stars on plot.ly, but this only displays their relative positions and doesn’t present the real meat of the information: the details of jump point connections between systems, who is aware of which jump point, and the size, ownership, and security rating of the systems. Much of this information might have required player discovery in the final game, and its likely that this map will be subject to change.
Video showing the Bengal, interior and exterior. The video description says it “might not even be the most up to date Bengal model (there are actually a couple in the leaked build). And there are many, many extra interior assets which I didn’t include because they’d each have to be manually positioned.” It’s not immediately obvious whether this model is much updated from the one featured in a 2013 post on the RSI site about progress on the Bengal.
New pieces of the Star Citizen soundtrack were also extracted, at least one coming from the FPS Module.
The Gold Horizon FPS level from Star Marine was included. While nobody has successfully played it yet, some have managed to load it:
- Inside Gold Horizon FPS level, and more screenshots from inside Gold Horizon.
- An “Area 18” Landing Zone level was also found, possibly an area on Stanton.
Preview of the Vanduul Blade, another ship that had previously been unseen.
While CIG hasn’t formally addressed the issue of the leaks yet, the official forum mods have weighed in to say that their policy currently is to allow meta discussion of the leak but ban direct links to leaked content.
