(Apologies for the delay on this dev blog, there's now a new dev blog detailing shipyards.) We're back with another Dev Blog. It's been a little while since we had one but it's now the right time to have one. Firstly the big question, no there's no new build release for this weekend. Why? We're entering into more complex features being added, brand new ones that require a lot more programming to implement and, therefore, a lot more testing to resolve bugs. In this case, fleets are something completely brand new, and it's taking time to implement. Since we've just had the start of 2016, you may have been away for holidays, or you may be brand new to the game. Either way, there's a couple of things that you should probably be aware of and/or check out. Firstly if you're new, you'll want to take a look at our Development Direction, that describes a lot of our plans for the game, not in great detail, but just a taste. Along with that is what our focus is mostly on during this particular season. It's worth checking out if you haven't already. Secondly, you may have seen it, or not, but our long awaited new launcher has come into open beta. You can finally get your hands on with it, test it out, experience some of the features it has and more. There'll be bugs no doubt so make sure you let us know by reporting them here. As developers we have to do a lot of stuff behind closed doors, but not everything. Our in-game assets team is constantly working on new ships and stations for you to encounter in-game. Criss streams a lot of the builds, as does Saber, so make sure to check them out on Twitch or on Twitter. Finally, you may have noticed that we now have a new council. Our player council is a group of seven community-elected players who help be a community voice to the developers, and also assist the developers in interacting with the community. They do this through a number of means. They read all the suggestions that come through, discussing the merits or answering ones that have been previously suggested, and pass them on with summaries to the dev team to review. They also discuss balancing issues with our dev team, vote on badges to give to community members to acknowledge their efforts or creativity, organise Q&As and discussions and other ways to connect the community with Schine. You need only jump into our suggestions forum to see how many threads they've read. The council, specifically SkylordLuke, has setup one mega-thread where you can see a summary of all the suggestions that Schine has received and responded to over the years. This is an excellent resource for new and old players alike to help paint a picture of some of what may or may not make it into the game. Fleets are the next update coming out, and it's taking a bit longer to implement as mentioned above. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't hear a couple of details about it. StarMade is primarily a space game, with ships, and so it naturally falls that fleets be the progression from that. With the ease of being able to make ships, it should be relatively easy to make fleets. Creating a fleet is as easy as a click or two, and adding members to that fleet equally as so. Each fleet has what's called a flagship, this is the primary ship that the other ships in the fleet position around and follow. More information on the fleet update can be found in the next dev blog. Fleets are the first example that some features are going to take a bit longer to implement than just two-weeks. That's a good thing, as it means that they're not only implemented more robustly but also that it's such a new experience and feature to the game that we all know and love that it makes exploring the new feature so much more intriguing. Be patient, and know what we have in store is good. We look forward to being able to share it with you and all our plans as they come to fruition. - The Schine Team​