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Star Citizen developers reveal "full reset" of universe with new patch

Following controversies around players duplicating items and buying expensive ships quickly, Cloud Imperium is fighting back by pressing the reset button.
Alex Hopley Editor UK 18 May 2026

As Star Citizen is still in its alpha phase, there's a lot that Cloud Imperium Games is monitoring from players to make sure that by the time the game does fully release, it shouldn't have too many major controversies. Like players duplicating items, for instance, which has been a hot topic among the community as of late.

With Patch 4.8, Star Citizen does away with fancy ships and duplicated items and resets everything. It's described as a "full reset" in the patch notes, taking away "economy, characters, reputation, in game earned ships and in game looted items, and more." If you're terrified of losing everything, at least you get to keep blueprints you've collected. Oh, also if you bought anything with real-world cash, you get to keep that too.

Cloud Imperium hopes that it has put in safeguards to prevent players exploiting the game in future. The controversy around duplications came from players being able to use an exploit to make loads of high-value items, sell them for expensive ships, and effectively crash the Star Citizen player economy.

Even if there's a lot of focus on doing away with exploits in 4.8, Star Citizen has some cool content packed into the update, too. There's an exciting new mission called Tactical Strike, and you can check out the trailer for it below:

Editor UK Alex Hopley covered the video game industry for Gamereactor, from new announcements and launches to the business behind them. He also wrote on tech, film and entertainment, and his coverage wasn't tied to any one region.
Full profile Gamereactor author since 2023 · 9,411 published articles
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