Star Citizen received a huge patch last week, one that added new enemy ships to the Arena Commander mode and made many fixes to its network code. The rubber banding issue’s been solved for multiplayer deathmatches and Roberts Space Industries’ reckon they’ve made gret strides for eliminating it in the final, larger, persistent game.

Most importantly, though, there are now flushable toilets.

One of the modes in Arena Commander lets you fight in a combat simulation against AI ships. Patch 12.5 adds a new ship type for the enemy Vanduul to pilot against you. This will spice up single player a tad but the real changes come in the form of multiplayer updates.

One of the focuses of this patch was taking feedback from the community and balancing the ships for dogfighting. “With top to bottom changes of virtually every tweak-able value on every ship and item what we’ve ended up with is the most balanced multiplayer dogfighting that we’ve had to date,” writes associate producer Travis Day.

With the release of the Arena Commander update only a small portion of backers had access to PvP but that number’s been steadily increasing since launch. “The increased community participation exposed many weaknesses in our nascent backend and matchmaking systems that did not manifest until we reached much higher numbers of concurrent players,” Day explains. “For patch 12.5 we’ve diagnosed and addressed most every problem that the increase in players had exposed. For players this means that you will connect successfully to a match much more often, experience far fewer random disconnects, and in the event you are disconnected you will be able to rejoin the match much more readily. On top of this we’ve also better stabilized the game servers and resolved most all of the known crashes.”

One of the key issues to come out from the Star Citizen alpha is a rubber banding problem. In multiplayer matches each player’s position, rotation, and velocity wasn’t being correctly communicated to each player’s game. In this update RSI say that they’ve “significantly reduced the occurrence of the divergence and also implemented systems to correct it much more quickly and seamlessly.” The problem’s not been solved but greatly improved.

The studio have also “identified areas in which we could further improve synchronization for future iterations of Arena Commander and eventually the Persistent Universe. These future changes include dead reckoning to increase the visual quality of ship movement while simultaneously reducing the amount of data sent to the game clients, along with adding time synchronization to allow the client to display the current game state sent from the server more accurately.”

Of course, the most exciting update in this patch is the newly added flushable toilets.

Here’s a rundown of the patch’s key changes:

Additions/Improvements

Added subscriber jukebox
Adding visual and auditory feedback for incoming fire and weapon impacts
Missile sounds polished and improved
Additional shield sounds added (power down, power up, taking damage)
Added new Vanduul ship designated [REDACTED] by UEE Naval Command
Added Victory/Defeat/Draw messages on end of round scoreboard
Added voice over announcement to denote which team has won the round
Added additional Hornet top bar warning lights
Freelancer bunk beds can now be used
Freelancer bathroom and toilet can now be used
Revised for Aurora interior to increase fidelity
Added Aurora warning indicator lights

Networking Improvements/Fixes

Fixed issues that resulted in being kicked back to hangar during match load
Positional correction fixes to reduce rubberbanding
Failed connection attempts to HubServer will now timeout after 10 seconds
Removed socket disconnections due to login timeouts
Networked physics is now independent of framerate
Reduced server load caused by console logging
Creation of http interface to capture server statistics
Fixed players not connecting to matchmaker
Added a handshake system to guarantee the correct initialization of servers
Server-to-server connection improvements
Adjusted ship network packet priorities
Fix for disconnections while in the hangar
Reworked network correction to use network sync’d packets and direct physics pushes instead of IFCSsystem
Greatly reduced hitching and performance issues associated with players joining or exiting a match

Fixes

Mantis cannons no longer takes damage without overheating
Player can no longer zone into a match standing in the cockpit
Helmet is no longer invisible
Fixed 300i landing gear placement
Fixed rare crash when loading into Vanduul Swarm
Fixed crash when receiving connection error
Fixed crash caused by players spawning on top of each other at beginning of map
CPU optimizations to improve client performance
Gatling gun audio stops when no longer firing
Destroying an asteroid no longer counts as a final kill
Energy bolts now scale properly when fired to the side
Winning music no longer plays at match end for losing team. You get nothing, you lose, good day sir.
Fixed ships in holotable no longer showing hologram model
Notifications, points, scoreboard and timer should now be shown in third person
Player movement prevented when interacting with helmet stand
Friendly killed audio no longer plays Hostile Eliminated, Target Destroyed or Enemy down
Removed use icon on ladder
Correct game mode descriptions added in Arena Commander UI
Adjusted bloom of objects on radar
Projectiles scale properly when firing in decoupled mode
Particle emitters now properly destroy themselves, reducing lag
Ship Energy system optimizations
Fix for sound velocity/speed being calculated incorrectly if its position is changed multiple times per frame.

I had a terrible time with the initial Star Citizen launch but these patches show RSI are rapidly solving the issues I came across.