Star Citizen's Nyx I tech preview adds Starchitect, Guild Halls and a planet split across three servers

Cloud Imperium Games has opened a third Genesis tech preview to its Evocati testers, and this one is the first real look at what Nyx I will feel like to play rather than just to look at. The build brings the Starchitect location tool, a new Guild Hall contract system and an early form of server meshing inside a single planet.

The test is still limited to Evocati, CIG’s NDA testing group, and Live remains on Alpha 4.10.2. But the notes and early impressions, summarized by Cavalera and StarZen, lay out how the pieces fit together.

What Starchitect does:

• It splits the planet into sectors (big areas such as a forest or mountain range, each with a purpose like agriculture, extraction or surveillance), then clusters with a visible hub on the star map, then individual locations built from modular tiles.
• Each location rolls a faction, which changes building tints, loot, NPCs and the contracts on offer.
• Locations get procedural names from a prefix, a type and an optional suffix, and large compounds are assembled from square tiles.

Guild Halls and local contracts: Missions now come from contract boards inside Guild Halls, one per regional hub, and completing them earns reputation with that guild. A local board at each hub adds short-range jobs. The new board drops the mobiGlas for a larger panel with faction filters. CIG calls the loop “hub and spoke”: grab work at the hub, finish it nearby, sometimes on foot or in a ground vehicle, and come back for more. A move to declarative contracts also lets designers build bigger jobs that chain several locations and objective types.

One planet, three servers: Until now a whole planet has lived on a single server. In this preview, Nyx I’s sectors are statically split across three servers. CIG warns testers to expect odd behavior when crossing a boundary and to report it on the Issue Council. It describes this as another step toward full dynamic server meshing.

Not in yet: Mineables, harvestables and roaming fauna are switched off until a backend service supports them across server boundaries. DX11 is back for this test alongside Vulkan.

Starchitect and Planet Tech V5 remain on the RSI roadmap, where Alpha 4.11 is tentatively set for Q4 2026. Watch the official patch notes forum for wider test waves.

PPR take: Guild Halls plus planet-scale meshing is the first time Nyx I sounds like a place you could actually base out of. If the hub-and-spoke loop works, it could keep players planetside for hours instead of bouncing between stations.