Guide · Star Citizen
From a scratch to clinical death: injuries, drugs, medical beds and regeneration — and what to pack before you leave home.
Medical gameplay in Star Citizen is not a standalone career: it leans on the Actor Status System, scanning, FPS traversal and beacons. That is why the system has evolved alongside everything else, sometimes falling behind while other pieces matured.
This guide covers what is in the game today — injuries, drugs, medical beds, MedGel, imprinting and regeneration — and closes with what CIG has already shown for after 4.3.1: multiple imprints, medbed conditions and a new regeneration screen.
Injuries are inflicted when you take sustained, repeated damage. They hit your arms, legs, torso or head and show up in the bottom left of your helmet HUD or through a scan. Each tier lowers your maximum health pool and adds effects depending on the body part.
Treatable on site or by any medical bed. No stabilization required.
Keeps every Tier 3 penalty, with stronger effects and new complications.
Symptoms can be stabilized on site or by any medical bed, but healing requires a Tier 2 bed or better.
Escalates everything from Tier 2 and adds hard restrictions.
Symptoms can be stabilized on site, but healing requires a Tier 1 bed.
Not every injury needs a hospital. With the right gear you stretch your time in the field and keep the team standing. All of it can be bought at any hospital, clinic or pharmacy.
Simple and direct: they deliver a fixed dose of one specific drug. Single use.
With the medical attachment it delivers limited Hemozal treatment to yourself and others.
The professional tool: it diagnoses and administers most medical drugs in precise amounts.
The Curelife detects injuries and diagnoses anyone's health status by targeting specific limbs. It has two modes:
To switch modes and adjust the dose, hold the tool up with the right mouse button and hold F to interact with its screen.
Stabilizing temporarily suppresses the effects of an injury. The injury is still there and will need proper treatment later, but you buy a crucial window operating at full capacity.
Every drug raises your BDL, tracked next to your health status on the HUD. Once it hits 50% of maximum you are overdosed: slower traversal, blurred vision, weapon sway, erratic piloting — plus slow damage until it is countered.
Sold as single-use pens and, with the exception of Canoiodide, also available inside the Curelife Medical Tool.
Stops bleeding, restores health up to your current maximum and brings a person back from incapacitation.
Relieves muscle fatigue and concussion symptoms.
Alleviates symptoms that hinder movement, such as severe leg or arm injuries.
Relieves symptoms caused by muscle weakness or respiratory damage, such as a chest injury.
Reduces BDL over time and alleviates overdose symptoms.
Reduces radiation symptoms.
When your health hits 0% you drop to the ground, unable to move or act. The countdown starts.
If allies are nearby, one dose of Hemozal gets you back on your feet. Alone, hold M to create a Rescue Beacon: it creates a mission in the Contracts Manager and notifies the HUD of nearby players.
Whoever accepts it can treat you on site, carry you to a ship-based medical bed or drop you at the Emergency Medical drop-off areas in hangars attached to medical facilities.
If the timer runs out you regenerate at your next clone and leave a corpse behind — along with everything on it.
15,000 aUEC, set automatically and paid out when you are revived.
Medical beds are the automated doctors of the 30th century: they treat injuries, clear drugs from your system, set your regeneration point and scan your status. Outside hospitals they run on MedGel.
The most common one. Stabilizes, restores health, heals minor injuries (T3) and regenerates anyone who died within 50,000 meters.
The mid tier. Stabilizes, restores health, heals moderate injuries (T2) and regenerates anyone who died within 8,000,000 meters.
The most capable one. Restores health, heals every injury (including T1) and regenerates anyone who died within 750,000,000,000 meters.
| Bed | Healing cost | Maximum injury |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 3 | 5 cSCU MedGel | Minor injuries. |
| Tier 2 | 10 cSCU MedGel | Minor and moderate injuries. |
| Tier 1 | 20 cSCU MedGel | Minor, moderate and severe injuries. |
You are only charged once for the highest injury tier you carry, no matter how many injuries are healed at once. Temporarily stabilizing injuries above what the bed can heal is free.
Each bed has two Digital Medical Assistant terminals: one at the foot of the bed and an overhead one that deploys when you enter or regenerate. If you just died, the terminal also shows information about that death.
To place another person on a bed, drag the incapacitated body close and pick "Place In Bed" through the Inner Thought system.
Regeneration is the full restoration of your being from the DNA imprint recorded where you set it. By default it is the hospital at your primary residence, but you can transfer the imprint to another hospital, clinic, ship or vehicle with a medical bed and enough MedGel.
You wake up at your home location instead of the chosen bed in three cases:
| Bed | Regeneration cost | Range |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 3 | 100 cSCU MedGel | 50,000 m (0.05 Mm) — enough to cover most gameplay areas. |
| Tier 2 | 100 cSCU MedGel | 8,000,000 m (8 Mm) — enough to cover most planetary bodies. |
| Tier 1 | 100 cSCU MedGel | 750,000,000,000 m (750 Gm) — enough to cover most star systems. |
MedGel fuels nearly everything, from the Multi-Tool's limited healing to the beds that bring people back to life. Keep small canisters on you and a larger supply in your ship's cargo.
Capacity per bed: T3 200 cSCU · T2 400 cSCU · T1 600 cSCU.
Medical players pick their platform by the bed it carries — and by how much fire it can take while pulling the extraction off.
The industry standard for rapid response and medivac for over two centuries. Its modular room system lets you configure the beds however you like.
Keeps the famed toughness of the original Terrapin, built to extract allies from situations nobody else survives.
Drake's space ambulance: enough shields and armor to run pickups under fire.
The smallest and most agile medical ship, ideal for search and rescue. Two-person crew plus patient.
The first ground vehicle with a medical bed: roll into the battlefield to locate and treat friendlies.
Beyond ships and vehicles, medical beds are found in hospitals and clinics across landing zones and stations. They have all the functionality described above, but do not depend on MedGel to operate.
Everything above keeps evolving. CIG published a design brief covering what is in development for after 4.3.1: imprinting on several beds at once, choosing where to regenerate, and living with conditions that limit healing and respawning.
The first change lets you hold imprints at several locations at the same time, turning death into a tactical choice. Destinations fall into four categories:
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| Landing Zone | The last landing zone bed you imprinted on. |
| Ship / Vehicle | The last ship or vehicle you imprinted on. |
| Home Base | The last bed you imprinted on at a base you or your org own. |
| Temporary | A bed that fits none of the categories above — a POI like Storm Breaker, for example. |
In 4.3.1 requiring MedGel became the first condition for healing and regenerating. The plan is to expand that: conditions are not global, they are states enabled by content or by the bed's owner. A single bed may carry several at once.
| Condition | Description |
|---|---|
| Manual MedGel | The bed needs Panacea MedGel restocked by hand to work. That is today's behaviour. |
| Auto MedGel | The bed consumes MedGel but restocks itself. Nobody has to top it up. |
| Temporary imprint | The imprint lasts X time, then enters a cooldown before it can be set again. |
| Regeneration timer | You can only regenerate there once every X. The timer is per person. |
| Disabled by distortion | Distortion damage shuts the bed down. The imprint is not lost: you just cannot heal or respawn there. |
| Disabled by soft death | The bed goes offline when the ship suffers a soft death. The imprint stays on record. |
| Invalidated by distance | If you die more than X meters from the bed the imprint remains — it just does not serve that death. |
| Destructible | The bed can be destroyed, and the imprints stored on it are lost with it. |
If the bed sits inside your ship, vehicle or base, you set who may use it to heal and imprint:
The two flows CIG published in the design brief, rebuilt here in HTML.
To handle multiple imprints and conditions, the death screen becomes a destination picker: every valid imprint shows up as an option, side by side.
Since Alpha 4.0 the beacon system has been carrying legacy design pieces still waiting for an update. With 600 players per shard the notification system became unmanageable and needs refactoring. Markers also need to support intermediate destinations, such as a nearby jump point.
CIG also wants to give first responders a way to see the last beacons a player has sent — a good gauge for the likelihood of an ambush. No dates yet, but it is on the radar.
Based on the official Cloud Imperium Games medical gameplay guide and on the design brief "Life, and Death, and Life Again Beyond 4.3.1". Star Citizen and Roberts Space Industries are trademarks of Cloud Imperium Rights LLC. SpaceGamer is not affiliated with CIG.
