Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games has resumed its regular programming of updates following last week's anniversary celebrations, and today they released a new video featuring the gravlev feature that enables hoverbikes to work in the game.

Developers explore a quite interesting aspect of their features, which is the ability to move over the very rough terrain of the game's planets and moons. While simply making a hoverbike like the Drake Dragonfly or the  Aopoa Nox float over a flat course would be relatively easy, making it negotiate a procedurally populated rocky landscape with many obstacles and even canyons is a completely different challenge.

Interestingly, this kind of vehicle can also exit hover mode and enter flight mode if the player wishes, but it ultimately won't be able to leave the atmosphere, requiring support from a bigger ship to do so. This ties into one of the most interesting aspects of Star Citizen, which is the ability to land a vehicle or even a starship in a larger player-controlled one that has enough cargo hold or deck capacity. That's no small feat.

Incidentally, since our latest report, the crowdfunding tally has made another sizable jump, passing 173 million dollars. It's now sitting at $173,039,266, with 1,935,433. This means that the game has made another two million in five days.

Last, but definitely not least, the developer just reached out with a mail to backers, mentioning that next week a newsletter will be sent, focusing on the Squadron 42 single player campaign. It will continue on a monthly basis. On top of that, the Holiday "Around the Verse" broadcast which will air on December 21st, will focus on Squadron 42 as well. Hopefully, we'll get a firm release date or window.

Lastly, Alpha 3.0 was marked as "feature-locked" today, which means that the release to all backers is now even closer.

You can check out the video below. As usual, for the sake of full disclosure, keep in mind that the author of this article is an original backer of the game.