Hello everyone! In a couple of days we will finally bring you Federations, an expansion that weve worked incredibly hard on for quite a while now. Were extremely excited to get it into your hands and see what you all think of it! Im posting today to bring you the Patch Notes for 2.6.0 (Verne). But before I do that, I want to talk a bit about something were doing a bit differently this time around. In game development there are several milestones and key dates that you need to hit to make sure that a game is made. Thats where the Producer (thats me!) comes in to oversee that things are done in a prioritized manner (within the time/resource constraints we have) and as we get closer to what is called a Release Candidate (RC), we have to be as certain we can that we dont add things that could risk the stability of the version we will put out into the public. So what did we do differently this time around? The RC we created was frozen earlier to ensure an as stable build as possible. Because once an RC is frozen, it is sent to QA for rigorous testing with not only our in-house testers, but also our outsourced partners. Scheduling this requires weeks (sometimes months) of advanced notice, so its not something we take lightly. So during this time of testing, we need to limit the amount of times we send them a new RC. Because, a new RC means the testing needs to start over and all the previous testing would have been wasted! But as everyone knows, especially you guys, a build is never bug-free. We could work on Stellaris on now until forever to fix every bug imaginable, and there would still be a typo in a tooltip somewhere. That is the nature of our industry and software development in general. Which means that after the RC was frozen, we found some issues that we wanted to fix but didnt want to risk the overall integrity of the RC and put in. Which brings me to branching. Since there were still bugs to be fixed and features to be balanced, we branched off from the RC and started working on the first patch we plan to release. That patch is something we would love to get into your hands as early as possible, but as I mentioned before, stability and integrity of a build something thats extremely important to us. So instead of putting the patch live immediately, we will be putting 2.6.1 as an opt-in beta! Which means that those of you who want to check it out early, will be able to do it on release day. I hope this has given you some more insight into the inner workings of game development, and if you want to know more feel free to ask questions about our processes (or request another Dev Diary ;) ) ! Please note that 2.6.1 is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch. Also note that save file compatibility between versions is not guaranteed. If you have an important 2.5.0 game going, don't try to load the save in 2.6.0 or 2.6.1. But without any further ado, if you wanna read the full patch notes as well as added features, have a read [url=https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-173-federations-is-soon-upon-us-with-patch-notes.1354520/]here! And last, but not least, heres the feature breakdown video for Federations! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hI9jUsW4gs&feature=emb_title