Star Citizen's free week has now launched—hop in and you'll get to try a total of 80 ships without opening your wallet. It lasts until November 30, and it's the perfect chance to explore the space sim's first planet, Hurston, and its first city, Lorville, both of which were added to the game this week.
Everyone will be given the Cutlass Black ship at the start of the free trial. To test other ships, you have to fly to Lorville and walk around a newly-created Convention Centre, which will showcase available ships for rent. From there, you can interact with any ship to rent it.
The available ships will rotate, and you'll have 24 hours to try out ships from each manufacturer. Right now, it's Roberts Space Industries, and tomorrow at 8am PT it'll switch to Origin Jumpworks. It'll keep switching until November 30 at the same time each day.
If you've never played Star Citizen, which shot past $200 million raised in crowfunding last week, then booting it up for the first time can be intimidating, so Cloud Imperium Games has posted a number of gameplay guides here. It's also worth checking the minimum specs before you try to play it—it's recommended you have at least 16GB of RAM, for example.
To take advantage of the free week you'll need to sign up for an RSI account and then download the Star Citizen Installer.
Along with Hurston and Lorville, the latest update added VOIP, fancy face-tracking integration, and a number of moons with outposts.
