The Ultimate CCU Game Upgrade Guide | Don't Buy A Star Citizen Ship Until You Watch This to SAVE $$$

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00][music] >> Welcome back to Over 30's Gaming. Today, we are getting in on how to purchase a ship in the game Star Citizen or outside of the game of Star Citizen.

[00:00:20]Uh when you purchase a ship for real money so you can have it added to your hanger and have it forever.

[00:00:26]Now, uh one of the biggest ship buying events is coming up. Used to be Invictus, but this year it is Defense Con. From the making of this video, only 12 days, 17 hours, and 50 minutes away. Uh one of the biggest ship shows ship sales that go on is Defense Con, IAE, Invictus, uh Fleet Week. So, um yeah, I thought this would be good uh to help everyone prepare going into 4.8 and Defense Con.

[00:00:55][music] This will show you how to properly buy a ship in multiple different ways to buy a ship to get the most bang for your buck. All right. So, our target ship today it and of course this this way can be used for any ship, but our target ship today is the most expensive ship currently offered in the store, which is the Hull E. So, uh the Hull E right now in the RSI store is $750.

[00:01:31]So, you can go there, you can buy it now.

[00:01:34]Uh we can view offers. Now, as you guys can see, there's couple different offers. You got the warbound upgrade version.

[00:01:44]You got the uh the Hull E pack, $1,800. [music] Kind of more expensive, uh you know, but that comes with five ships.

[00:01:54]Um and then you have the standalone ship, the Hull E, for $750 with 6 months of insurance.

[00:02:01]Our goal is LTI, lifetime insurance.

[00:02:05]Now, uh there's two ways to do lifetime insurance. That is doing the CCU game, buying it outside from a third-party website, or buying a pack that has it in with lifetime insurance. So, we're going to go through all three. Easy peasy. Buy into the pack, uh use your if you're subscriber use your coupon save $100. Uh that's the most you can use with one coupon is $100.

[00:02:31]Uh so, 20% off of a $500 purchase. Any higher than that, you're not going to save any money. Coupons are only good up to for 100 $100 saved. Um So, or we're going to go to a third-party website. Let's first go to my favorite, starhanger.com.

[00:02:49][music] All right. So, on starhanger.com, as you guys can see, the prices are all over all over the place, sold by different sellers.

[00:02:57]Uh this is page one.

[00:02:59]Uh the the price really fluctuates because the seller sets the price. So, currently the cheapest one I think is $484.79 uh currently on this website. The next is of course eBay, $519.

[00:03:19]Uh next after that is LTI hanger for $582.

[00:03:24]Next after that is the Impound for $599. As you guys can see, the price is going up. Each different site will always have a differing price. I found Star Hanger to be the cheapest place.

[00:03:39]Now, um on this is another uh Star LTI. They didn't have the Hull E currently for sale, so uh I didn't really use them, but this is another third-party website.

[00:03:50]Now, um the one thing about doing third-party websites is when you're using a third-party website, you want to always CYA.

[00:04:01]So, what I mean is don't purchase outright from the website. Use PayPal and a credit card. Because if you use both, you have covered yourself two different ways. You've covered yourself where you can make a um [music] a question into PayPal. Say you got defrauded, you didn't get what you were supposed to get. PayPal will then try to get your money.

[00:04:22]>> [music] >> And then if that way doesn't work, you can then use the credit card company and say you were defrauded, and then the credit card company will get your money back. So, that way you you've uh CYA'd yourself on two different sides. So, if you're going to use a third-party website, please make sure that you use PayPal and a credit card so that way [music] you're covered. Now, I haven't had any issues with it, uh especially using Star Hanger. Bought my ship, got what I asked for, paid the money, and [music] it came out all right. But you never know what could happen, especially if you're buying from eBay or Facebook, cuz you know, some people do [music] sell on Facebook, too. Uh you can look out for those ships. Sometimes you can really make a really good deal on Facebook. Uh I've seen a really good couple deals going on Facebook where they're actually selling them for below melt value, which means you would actually make a lot more money than you would normally. Uh so, be on lookout for those deals as well. But whenever doing it, please make sure to use Face uh use, excuse [music] me, PayPal and a credit card. Make sure to always cover your ass.

[00:05:28]You're going to get a ship, but you're not going to get the full value for the ship because, you know, someone's got to make money somewhere, right? So, normally people are overselling their ships uh from these websites to what they actually paid for.

[00:05:43]All right. So, I bought my Carrack off of a third-party website. Now, when you buy a ship off of a third-party website, uh there is a thing you cannot do, and that is gift. You can no longer gift a ship. So, if you buy a ship straight from RSI, when you go to it, you're going to have this button right here. You can gift it to someone, or you can sell it on a third-party website. That's how people are being able to sell it. You can only do that one time with a ship. The only other option you have is exchange, and you can exchange a ship for how much money was spent into the ship. Now, how that works is we'll go to the Carrack.

[00:06:32]Now, I can tell you how much money I paid for this ship.

[00:06:35]Um I paid uh about $400 for this ship, if I can remember correctly. Now, the thing about this ship is when you get it from a third-party website, like I said, the only option you have is the exchange. Now, as you can see, the person who bought this ship only put $305 into this ship. So, if I decide to melt this ship, I only get $305 back.

[00:07:00]However, I have a ship that is currently worth $600.

[00:07:06]So, when we go to ship upgrades, even though that I only spent 400, I have a ship that's worth 600, so I can do an upgrade to another ship with using that dollar value. That is one nice thing you can do when purchasing it. You can save money along the way on multiple different occasions.

[00:07:24]Now, but that is the difference when buying it from a third-party website. Now, we're going to go ahead and go in and look to actually see how you can save money by buying it straight direct from Robert Space Industries.

[00:07:39]>> [music] >> Now, there's a reason why I say to buy straight direct from the RSI website. We're going to go in here, the concierge level. So, when you purchase stuff from the RSI website, it goes into your concierge level to show you how you go. I'm currently a High Admiral. Each step gives you something new in the game. Uh I got with my High Admiral the Jacobe top hat and monocle, the Rage Radgask whiskey 2947 Homeward limited edition cabinet.

[00:08:16]Um and then I got the Arc Light pistol, and then of course the soundtrack. The next Grand Admiral thing will give me the KNW Arrowhead sniper rifle executive edition. And then other levels after that, one of the levels actually give you a free um FAC Lightning. Um I think it's an executive edition, as well. But you're putting a lot of money into this game.

[00:08:40]Now, the one thing I can say is to do this is when you're you know, putting towards it, be a subscriber. Um the subscriber perks, oh, I thought it would actually open up the thing. Being the subscriber, you get different perks, right?

[00:09:02]All right. You want to become a subscriber. Now, the subscriber actually adds to your concierge level, as well.

[00:09:10]Now, there's two different perks of concierge. You got Centurion and Imperator. I think that's how you say it. Um the lower level, which is $10 a month, uh you can get early PTU access, vehicle of the month times one. So, uh you get to the keys or you get to fly one in-game ship every month that they let you have for the whole entire month to basically test fly. You get one item flare from the subscriber. Each month is different. Uh you get every 12 months you get a 10% discount coupon, uh maximum discount value of 50 bucks.

[00:09:51]And then you have a uh REC stipend, which is for Wing Commander, Jump Point Magazine, the vault, subscriber den subscriber den den is Spectrum. Uh, now the one that I am uh, cuz see these are two items that you get for the subscriber flare of this month, which it was really cool. Let's go to the monthly plan, which is 20 bucks a month. Uh, PTU access, two vehicles of the month, which I like. Um, flare merchandise discount of 15%, 20% coupon every 6 months uh, up to a maximum discount of $100.

[00:10:34]So, definitely worth it if you think about it. Rex dypon um, Jump Point uh, magazine, the vault, subscriber den, early access, and then the gold ticket item the test flight. Try out every new ship and ground vehicle for a full week upon release. Any flyable or drivable vehicle added to the quarterly patch are available from nimble snubs to hulking capital ships. So, any brand new ship that comes out into the store, you get to fly for 1 week from the release of that ship, and you get to see [music] it, test drive it, and everything else.

[00:11:12]That's why I really like the the subscriber flare for the >> [music] >> um, Imperator.

[00:11:20]So, that is one way to do it. Now, the reason why I brought the subscriber stuff up is because of the coupon. The coupon will save you money when buying ships. That's just common sense, right?

[00:11:30]Um, but you want to have a reason of why you want to spend money to get that coupon. Now, if you think about it, uh, 20, what's 20 * 6? That's 120 bucks.

[00:11:40]So, literally you're going to get a $100 coupon. So, you're spending, if you think about it you're spending 20 bucks to get $100 off of a ship. That's if you use the [music] coupon to the fullest of its value. Some people do, some people don't, but either way you're still saving some money.

[00:11:57]All right. So, let's go get into the CCU game. Now, we are going to build from the cheapest ship all the way to the most expensive ship in the game. This is the CCU game.app.

[00:12:09]>> [music] >> Uh, use this website. It's free. Uh, it's a great resource to have. Um, literally I have it bookmarked uh, in my thing. It is an add-on.

[00:12:22]The one thing I like about it is you download your data from the RSI website.

[00:12:27]You don't have to worry about it. It's not going to steal your data or anything like that, and it shows you what's currently in your hanger. So, as you guys can see, this is currently what's in my hanger. Uh, it tells you when you have loaner ships as well, what gives you the loaner ship. As you see, loaner Mark I, which I I don't understand it, but yeah, I got a loaner for that. Um, and so you this way you can easily quick uh, click to see what is currently in your hanger as well. Now, um how the CCU game works is uh, you go to a create a chain. All right. So, we're going to uh, prefer LTI.

[00:13:04]Oh, well, we're going to select a ship.

[00:13:07]Which we're going to go with the UTV, right? I already have it built over here, but I'll show you how to do it.

[00:13:12]Uh, and then we're going to do target ship the Hull E, and then create a chain. And what it does is it automatically creates a chain to show you how much to save. So, right now it's going to tell you you're going to spend $575 for a $750 ship. You're going to currently save 23%.

[00:13:31]Now, this is as you guys can see, long-term highest savings exclude save chains, prefer flight ready, use speculative prices, and maintain buy prices. So, this is right now currently with using the current store to be able to do this. [music] Now, as you guys can see, I have missing items here. Now, you can play the long game and wait for like the Raft or Corsair uh, the Corsair war bound edition to come up to save more money, or you can just currently do it with all the green.

[00:14:09]Now, to save you the most amount of money uh, a lot of people want it now. So, they don't want to play the very long game on building the actual chains to save the most amount of money. So, we're going to go ahead and do it like that.

[00:14:24]We're going to go ahead and go through the chain to save you this amount of money where you only spend 750 bucks.

[00:14:31]You're going to save a total 23%, which is $175 off of this ship. Um and you know, that will get added to your concierge level. Now, a total value that you can save maximum amount of required money, which can be paid with store uh, credits uh, without store credits [music] uh, is uh, $420, which we're not really worried about that because we're going to be doing the war bound upgrades. It's the best way to do this. Now, we're going to go ahead and go to the cart.

[00:15:05]Now, I will show you how to do this.

[00:15:07]This is how we have built it in the cart to currently save. This is active real life time. As you can see, everything is war bound. Now, what war bound means is you have to use new money in the game to be able to purchase it. As you can see, this item cannot be attained with the use of store credit. So, you cannot add store credit to this purchase to be able to do it.

[00:15:31]Now, as you can see here we did the war bound upgrades to save the most amount of money, and a total myself total, which lines up $575 $575.

[00:15:46]That's the most amount to do it, and I'll show you how to build this chain.

[00:15:50]Um, the key is to like, right now uh, because of taxes stupid taxes. Uh, which for online digital it doesn't make any sense why I have to pay taxes for this, but my state's Uh, $615.

[00:16:04]You can use the coupon, right? For subscriber, save $100 cuz it's over $500 purchase. So, technically right now I would only pay $515.25 for this ship, which if you can see isn't quite to the level of Star Hanger 498.

[00:16:26]However, that is being added to my concierge level and leveling me up in the game, which is really nice as well.

[00:16:34]So, uh, I would want to do this over doing it from the Star Hanger [music] website because that way, you know, later on and like if I want to, you know, sell the ship myself and maybe get a couple bucks back cuz I'm not happy with it, I can go and sell it on Star Hanger [music] myself.

[00:16:52]So, now we're going to show you how to actually do this to build this chain here. So, when you're building the chain, you're going to want to go to your hanger.

[00:17:04]Well, actually we'll do shop. You can do it in your hanger as well. Um we're going to do all products and then we're going to go to upgrades.

[00:17:16]Now, in upgrades we're already going to purchase the main ship, right? Which I currently have in the cart. The main just basic ship. So, you're already going to add that. You just go to the store. You just add this to your cart.

[00:17:31]Now, how to do the upgrades is you're going to pick the UTV. I already have it. Uh, and then you're going to want to pick the next level up. Now, when you're doing this, you're just going to want to scroll down until you see two options. Now, we're going to pass the first one because right here, two options available. This is a subscriber ship. It just gives you more insurance.

[00:18:00]So, we're going to go to the next one, which is the LTI 22 Wolf. Now, if you look back here the first saving it it says is the LTI 22 Wolf. $10 savings right there. So, we're going to go back here. We're going to click on the LTI 22 Wolf.

[00:18:15]Now, you have two options. As you see here, it says two options here. Oh, Snaps. Or we can just type it in.

[00:18:21]L -22.

[00:18:26]Um, [music] two options available.

[00:18:29]War bound standard edition. Standard edition can be purchased with um, in >> [music] >> uh, in store credit, but we're wanting to save money. As you can see, war bound saves you $10.

[00:18:42]So, we're going to go ahead and do that, and then add that to cart. Now, when we add this to cart, you'll see added to cart. We'll go back to cart. Oh, I thought it would have added two, but it didn't.

[00:18:53]Um, it probably can see that I'm already doing it. But, as you guys can see, I have the LTI 22 Wolf here. Now, the key is is the next key where I'm going from the LTI to the Prospector, right? So, in the upgrades, we're going to go back to all products. We're going to go to upgrades.

[00:19:13]Now, I own the LTI 22 Wolf. We're going to go to Prospector.

[00:19:18]And as you can see two options, war another $10 savings. All right. Awesome.

[00:19:25]Add to cart, $10 savings.

[00:19:28]See here.

[00:19:31]Yeah, I'm surprised. It's probably cuz I already have it in the cart, so it's not going to do it. Um, we'll do we'll actually do this next one. We'll pull this one off so you guys can actually see it added to cart.

[00:19:42]So, the next is we've went to Prospector. We want to go Prospector. No money savings here, so So just going to skip that. I'm going to go right to raft. Prospector to raft. So we're going to go back up to here all products upgrades. Now I don't currently own the prospector. So when [music] you want to do when I type it in nothing shows up, right? You want to click all ships prospector. Now it's not going to show the war bound value that you paid into it. But we're going to click that and then we can either scroll down raft or you can type it in at the top cuz you already know where you want to go raft.

[00:20:19]Look, it's a $190 ship. However, we click on it 20 bucks to upgrade from the prospector to the raft. So 20 bucks to 155 instead of paying $190 for that ship, we're only paying $175 for that ship.

[00:20:42]So you're getting the savings throughout. We're going to add to cart and as you can see it will add it to cart down here.

[00:20:52]Um this is how you save your money.

[00:20:56]Uh that is how you go through the CCU game up chain upgrade and you can literally go each individual level after that raft to hull B, hull B to C2 Hercules and then C2 Hercules to hull E.

[00:21:12]Um and how that works is we'll go back upgrades and we can [music] just scroll down on this list and you can see we'll start from the bottom.

[00:21:26]Two options.

[00:21:28]Two options. I don't know if this one's currently broke. This does have two options, but it doesn't allow you to do from Valkyrie to C2 Hercules. I think it's because of the ship cost itself.

[00:21:40]I'm not positive, but there is no upgrade available. So you have to skip over this one and go from the hull B directly to the C2 Hercules. Even though that this would allow you to save more money, there's a reason why they're not letting you do it in the ship upgrades.

[00:21:56]Uh and then of course two options, scroll up two options.

[00:22:02]Two options and as you can see anything that has two options. [music] And now every month this changes and that is why the CCU game if you want to play the long long game to get the most bang for your buck, you can play the long game and wait for these other options to come in. Like you know, maybe down the way at IAE the there might be a um an M50 for sale war bound edition. So you would get the upgrade from the UTV [music] to the M50 war bound and maybe save five bucks here. And each different level you might be able to save more money. Now as you guys can see here, right? We click on here CCU price history uh missing data normally saving $10.

[00:22:52]Uh and you can see when they were for sale war bound edition. So back um Oh, so it's probably uh 2025. So in February this ship was worth $130 saved. So if you were playing the long game, you could have saved another $10 on top of the overall price. So if we [music] were to had done that, we would have saved another $10.

[00:23:22]Now will that always happen?

[00:23:24]You could [music] be waiting a very long time, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it won't come about. Uh they seem to cycle every so often the different war bound available ships.

[00:23:37]Now as you guys can see I've gone back to the main patch of 4.7. This is like on these really big patches, this is when they'll show you what ships are going to be offered for war bound. We're going to scroll all the way down to the bottom and as you guys can see these are the ships that they currently limited to time upgrades. Expand your fleet with limited time war bound upgrades on select ship. War bound cannot be obtained with store credit. Now this is how you can play the CCU game. On every large patch they'll have these special ships down at the bottom of the patch that will be your war bound upgrades.

[00:24:13]This is how you save money. If you want to play the very long game, this is the way you want to [music] do it. If you don't want to do it you you I mean you can do it the simple way which I just show you do.

[00:24:31]Now the reason why I say this is good is I'm going to show you guys how the money was totally saved on one [music] of the ships that I currently have.

[00:24:41]Now we're going to go back to my fleet.

[00:24:43]We're going to click on the HMS Brittany and you can see here the person saved a total 49% on this Carrick.

[00:24:53]That is a steal. They only paid $305 for this ship. That is half off by playing the long game. Now you can play the long game and save the most amount of money for your ship, but you're you're not going to have instant gratification. I'm an instant gratification kind of guy and so I will play the short game which I just showed you before to be able to get a ship. Now this is the best way I can say on how to save money when purchasing a ship in Star Citizen. So when uh defense con comes out and you want that ship, come back to this video.

[00:25:32][music] Look at it again.

[00:25:35]And then know how to buy your ship. Use these websites that I have on out there.

[00:25:40]Links will be down in the description below. Tell me what you guys think of this video. I tried to go in depth so you guys knew had all the information you guys could use the best of your ability. I know it was long. I'm sorry, but it takes a long time to explain on why buying a ship from a third party website than the RSI is different and then how to save the most amount of money and do the upgrades so that way you can save the money in the upgrades as well. So please leave a comment what you think what you thought of this. Do you think it's going to be helpful for you in the future? If you like more videos of these, I can try to do more.

[00:26:18]Um so yeah.

[00:26:20]Uh thank you for coming and watching. Uh don't forget gamers to keep on gaming, to always have fun and if you fly in the verse, fly dangerously. Thank you for watching Over 30s Gaming.

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