Star Citizen will not require a subscription not be free-to-play, it will will be available for a one-time purchase. And while players will be able to play in the Star Citizen universe for free, there will also be virtual items available for purchase with in-game credits so players can customize their ships and other items.

While the Kickstarter campaign ended late 2012, Chris Roberts' Cloud Imperium has kept on racking in donations through its official website and in the months since the end of the Kickstarter has added an additional $37 million, for a total of more than $39 million in funding.

Greetings Citizens,

We have reached another crowd funding record! Even though the team is heads down working to finish the Dogfighting Module, our backers are continuing to spread the word and make Star Citizen a success. To everyone who has joined recently: welcome! To everyone who has helped us reach this point: thank you!

At $39 million you unlocked the penultimate user-chosen star system! Here’s the description:

• UDS-2943-01-22 System – Breaking news: UEE astrophysicists based at the famed Klavs observatory station have utilized advanced telescopy and other remote sensing technologies to identify a truly unusual star system on the fringes of known space. The object, once thought to be a single massive star, is actually a trinary star consisting of two white dwarfs and an active pulsar orbiting one another. Because of the complex gravitic factors at work, it is now believed that a jump point leading to the system likely exists in or near explored human space. Beyond the bizarre stellar makeup, the composition of the system is all but unknown. Could planets exist in this carefully balanced web? What else might have been drawn there? One thing is certain: the first Citizen to travel to UDS-2943-01-22 will have one hell of a view!

I would also like to share some artwork of the UEE’s new Javelin-class destroyer. You may have caught a glimpse of the Javelin on this week’s _Wingman’s Hangar_… and now I’d like to share a closer look! The ship was designed by David Hobbins. David has been working hard to create not just a cool exterior, but also an interior that evokes the crowded corridors of a real world destroyer. The plan is for it to be modular, with parts we can swap out for different roles (assault destroyer, LRR destroyer and so on!) The Javelin is still in the conceptual stages… but I think it’s cool enough to share with the community!

As I said last time, I’m very excited about our next stretch goal. Our previous stretch goals have been about expanding Star Citizen immediately; adding new ships, new systems and more. Each one has added something to the game while allowing us to widen our bandwidth: hire more employees, expand our development facilities, purchase new technology and so on. Now it’s time to look a little further in the future!

Star Citizen isn’t just about the game we launch with. We’re going into this building not only an immersive launch experience, but the platforms and the tools to let us keep expanding the game to meet the available technology. The game won’t be a static experience: we want to build Star Citizen in a way that the experience will be fresh in five years, ten years and into the foreseeable future.

Among the most common feature requests for Star Citizen are atmospheric combat and ground exploration. These are the single biggest things we would like to include in the game, but they’re also something we know we can’t have day one. Our universe is a big place, and creating the hundreds of existing landouts properly is enough of a challenge… building entire continents and atmospheres in the current system would take a lifetime.

That’s where procedural generation comes in. If we can develop a truly great procedural generation system, one that lets us create entire planets for you to populate, then we can expand the game to add these features (and more) in the future.

• Procedural Generation R&D Team – This stretch goal will allocate funding for Cloud Imperium to develop procedural generation technology for future iterations of Star Citizen. Advanced procedural generation will be necessary for creating entire planets worth of exploration and development content. A special strike team of procedural generation-oriented developers will be assembled to make this technology a reality.

I hope you will agree with me that this is an exciting goal, and that you will join me in this commitment to Star Citizen’s future! Thank you for continuing to make Star Citizen possible and for continuing to help it grow. Remember that next time, we will reveal the $42 million goal… which should be a fitting objective for such an auspicious number!

— Chris Roberts