There’s a possibility of gold in those future Star Citizen hills!

You can now buy land in Star Citizen. More accurately, you can pre-purchase a certificate to claim land when the feature is implemented. The details are vague and a little confusing, but the gist is that for $50 or $100, you can buy a Land Claim License that you’ll be able to use to grab a plot of virtual real estate in Star Citizen someday. Although a couple of land masses are now in the recently released 3.0 work-in-progress version of the game, there’s no date for when the system will actually be live. According to the FAQ, players that pre-purchase these claims now will not have a significant advantage over people that wait as the claims will also be buyable with in-game money. Because the vision of the final version of Star Citizen includes “billions” of square kilometers of viable property, there will be plenty of good locations to go around, or so the developers say.

What will you be able to do with the in-game land? Building modular outposts, mining, farming, or plain old real estate flipping are listed as possibilities that may come to fruition. The stars are the limit when the game isn’t even done! The developers even supplied in-game fiction to explain the claim sales.

The UEE sells claim licenses for the same reason as any government – to raise revenue to fund public benefit programs, to liberalize its economy, to spur growth and tax revenue, and to fund the military campaign against the Vanduul.

Star Citizen has raised over $168 million in revenue from crowd-funding and early access sales.