The Roberts Space Industries website announces that Star Citizen alpha version 2.1 is now available for testing by backers of the upcoming space combat and exploration game. Though version 2.0.0 is also in testing, they have put the new version up separately on the PTU and will run both concurrently for the time being. Here's word:

We’re excited to announce that we’ve opened up 2.1.0 on the Public Test Universe (PTU) to all players!

We’ve feverishly been working to get Star Citizen Alpha 2.1.0 ready, but we’ve discovered a couple of issues that prevent it from being a fully enjoyable and stable gaming experience (particularly, temporary significant drops in framerates). The last thing we want is to jeopardize all of the fun everyone’s been having with 2.0.0, and certainly not over the entire holiday period!

With that in mind, we’ll be keeping 2.0.0 on the Live service and opening up 2.1.0 on PTU for all players!

We know some of you really want to check out the flight-ready Freelancer as well as the hangar-ready Sabre, so take a look at the updated 2.1.0 Patch Notes available on the forums:

https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/306826/2-1-0-published-to-ptu

Important things to keep in mind about PTU, which is a true test environment where we can stage our builds before deploying to Live in order to stabilize the service and catch critical bugs:

- Playing on PTU is completely optional!

- PTU capacity is somewhat restricted compared to Live. If you find that you cannot join a match, we advise waiting for another time.

- PTU is not about “early access” to content; it’s intended for actual testing of features, content, and updates. Opening PTU up is opening up the option to be a tester to help us accomplish near-term development goals.

- You might encounter some game breaking bugs or experience latency issues not seen on the Live service. We encourage all players to help report bugs at https://robertsspaceindustries.com/community/issue-council.

- You’ll have 60GB+ of Star Citizen installed if you decide to play both on Live and on PTU: 30GB+ for the 2.0.0 client on Live, 30GB+ for the 2.1.0 client on PTU. Make sure you have enough space before you start the install!

- We frequently update PTU with large patches. PTU is not advised for those with bandwidth/download caps.

For those players who are not familiar with how to get onto PTU, all you have to do is:

- Start the Star Citizen Launcher and log in with your normal credentials.
- Once logged in, click the gear cog on the top right of the launcherto go to Options.
- Click Copy Account on the lower right.
- You’ll get an email notification with the copy process is complete. This process can take up to an hour if there is a large concurrent influx of players all copying their account concurrently.

This basically wraps up our year, and what a year it has been in building the BDSSE.

We hope you enjoy your time on PTU and Happy Holidays from all of us here at Cloud Imperium Games!