Public Roadmap Companion
The Star Citizen and Squadron 42 Public Roadmap is designed to give you an unprecedented look into the game development process by following every feature being worked on by our 50+ development teams, from their initial implementation to their release.

Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are massive projects with lots to track, and this companion guide will help you read and navigate the Roadmap for both projects, as well as provide additional insight into the processes behind it.

Upstream and Downstream
The Difference Between
Throughout our development communications, you have likely seen us reference a team as being designated "Upstream" or "Downstream", which carries an important meaning. Upstream teams begin work on any given feature at the beginning of its process. They typically handle things like art, vehicles, locations, and gameplay features. These teams set the major tentpole deliverables for the rest of Star Citizen and Squadron 42, and as such, they're able to plan up to four quarters in advance, which is displayed in the Progress Tracker.

Downstream teams are reactive and support the upstream teams, so they depend on the upstream teams scheduling and progress to determine their own work and priorities. Because of this, they're only able to plan for the upcoming quarter, rather than a full year.

Example: The Vehicle Teams (Upstream) begin work planning a newly concepted ship, the Aurora. The Vehicle Content Teams then schedule out production of the Aurora, from a design, art, and animation standpoint. Once the ship is nearly built and the design is close to final, the downstream teams jump in and begin adding details like VFX, Audio, and UI. The important takeaway is that the downstream team relies on information from the upstream team in order to produce a schedule/plan.

The Final Review Process
Feature Cards are added to the Release View near the start of the quarter, once they've been completed for release and the QA process begins. These new cards will always show up on the Roadmap marked as Tentative, meaning the goal is to release in the next quarterly patch, but the feature has yet to pass its Final Review.

Every quarter, development Directors come together to review features approaching completion in an effort to evaluate if said feature is ready to be released to the live game. If a feature passes its Final Review, then it is integrated into the live release candidate and marked as Committed on the Roadmap. At this point, it is nearly certain that the feature will arrive with its corresponding update. Once the feature has been released to the Live servers, its status is then updated to Released.

Progress Tracker
The cornerstone of the Roadmap is the Progress Tracker view, which is the default view when you visit the Roadmap. The Progress Tracker pulls back the curtains for all teams, showing you what each team is working on this quarter and what their priorities are after completing the deliverable at hand.

This view presents a comprehensive look at features, art, and technology scheduled for production within the next four quarters. Keep in mind that this isn’t necessarily when these items will be completed, simply when the work on them is scheduled to finish out by that team specifically.

Below is a breakdown of the information displayed in the Progress Tracker view and how to navigate it.

What is a Deliverable?
All in the Details
Additional Navigation
What is a Deliverable?
A deliverable in the Progress Tracker view is a 1:1 representation of a group of tasks scheduled for work in a particular time period. This can be just about anything, a ship or location, an AI behavior, or even a piece of core technology. Shown to the right is a list of deliverables for the Actor Feature Team.

A deliverable will house all work scheduled to be worked on for that specific deliverable, including varied disciplines. For example, if you clicked on the "Drake Vulture", it would display work being done by numerous teams such as concept art, audio, etc.

All in the Details
You can sort between two major views when browsing the Progress tracker. First, you can sort by teams, which allows you to browse any work being completed by a specific development team. Alternatively, you can sort by Deliverable, which allows you to browse any/all teams working on a specific deliverable. This multi-path approach is meant to give you the tools you need to follow along with development in great detail.

Expanding a Deliverable, as shown in the image to the left, gives you further insight into what teams are working on a feature, and for how long. Here you can also see if a Deliverable is being worked on simultaneously with another on the same team, signified by a striped progress bar. Finally, you can also click on the team's abbreviation to navigate to the Teams view mentioned above.

Additional Navigation
The Progress Tracker reveals 500+ deliverables across 50+ teams. It's no secret that such a large dataset can be overwhelming, which is why it was a priority for us to provide you with tools to easily navigate the presented information. Most importantly, while in the Deliverables view, the search bar can help you find a specific deliverable based on a key word or two. Both the deliverable names and descriptions are indexed, so you're able to search for something even if you don't know exactly what it's called.

Additionally, the filters on the right side of the Roadmap allow you to sort deliverables by project (Star Citizen, Squadron 42, or both), as well as their Release View categories.

Release View
The second section of the Roadmap is the Release View. The Persistent Universe of Star Citizen receives updates on a quarterly basis, and the Release View's intent is to show the planned features for the next quarter's Persistent Universe update. These cards represent a high level of confidence in their release timing, however these features may still move depending on unforeseen circumstances or a change in priority.

Release Windows
Feature Cards
Release Windows
The columns displayed on Release View represent release windows for their respective quarters, labeled with a patch number. The column displays the overall status of the release at the top, along with the intended timing of the start of the patch cycle.

Each column represents the entire cycle, both the initial release as well as any incremental follow up patches. For example, Alpha 3.15.0 released on November 10, 2021, but a follow up 3.15.1 update was released a few weeks later that added new ships and content. All of this is represented together under the 3.15 column on Release View.

Feature Cards
All features scheduled for release are represented by "cards" on Release View, sorted into these categories: Locations, AI, Characters, Gameplay, Ships and Vehicles, Weapons and Items, and Core Tech.

Each of these cards displays a description of the feature, an image, and links to the corresponding Progress Tracker deliverable. Above the feature you can see its current status of Tentative, Committed, or Released, which is determined by the status of its final reviews.

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-The Star Citizen and Squadron 42

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-Example: The Vehicle Teams (Upstream) begin work planning a newly concepted ship, the Aurora. The Vehicle Content Teams then schedule out production of the Aurora, from a design, art, and animation standpoint. Once the ship is nearly built and the design is close to final, the downstream teams jump in and begin adding details like VFX, Audio, and UI. The important takeaway is that the downstream team relies on information from the upstream team in order to produce a schedule/plan.I.
+Example: The Vehicle Teams (Upstream) begin work planning a newly concepted ship, the Aurora. The Vehicle Content Teams then schedule out production of the Aurora, from a design, art, and animation standpoint. Once the ship is nearly built and the design is close to final, the downstream teams jump in and begin adding details like VFX, Audio, and UI. The important takeaway is that the downstream team relies on information from the upstream team in order to produce a schedule/plan.
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-This view presents a comprehensive look at features, art, and technology scheduled for production within the next four quarters. Below is a breakdown of the information displayed in the Progress Tracker view and how to navigate it.
+This view presents a comprehensive look at features, art, and technology scheduled for production within the next four quarters. Keep in mind that this isn’t necessarily when these items will be completed, simply when the work on them is scheduled to finish out by that team specifically.
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+Below is a breakdown of the information displayed in the Progress Tracker view and how to navigate it.