Commanders, 

We need to talk plainly about the last few months and especially November. Since I began drafting this update I’ve spoken directly with players, read the recent survey responses, and met with content creators to understand where you are today. I’ve rewritten this message more than once as new issues came in. Publishing earlier would have felt out of touch with the reality you were facing. 

I am sorry for the delay and for the frustration this release has caused. I share that disappointment. I know trust is earned by what we ship, not what we say. As a team we started a journey to make a difference in your experience since mid year and didn’t deliver. 

Today I’ll keep this focused: specific changes, clear dates, and our commitments. I’ll cover what we learned from Outposts and G7, where we are on stability, how we are evolving Mid-Ops arcs, and how I plan to communicate going forward.

Outposts Launch and Future Impact

Outposts have always been intended to be an exciting addition to the game. They aim to add in challenge, variety and new puzzles to overcome and solve.

They are a change to the regular targets in the game in that they represent variable experience and difficulty over time. We originally planned to enable and disable them depending on the current meta of the game, and to be the starting point on our journey to bring exploration and discovery into the galaxy, breathing life into the universe through a changing background to your day to day play.

These past weeks have presented challenges, but the feature itself still represents that experience. They create a space for new crews and provide a different experience for setting up your ships to hold a position for an extended time. Different tweaks and changes can be added to these into the future to reflect where the game is going and what is happening in the story and the galaxy, but based on the response from players, we will be changing outposts to not be a scheduled game activity. We will have them available to interact with at all times without us needing to run a special event to start them. We will continue to follow our plan to make time to run special events that add to the reward you will get from running them, but they will always be available (more information on that change can be found here).

However, with the launch, we have also cancelled a number of upcoming features as it is clear that the changes we had made in the past months are not resulting in an improved experience. You have asked for focusing on fixes and we are making that space. Right now a number of unannounced features and some updates planned for the first half of 2026 are delayed indefinitely as we focus on what is currently live. We will be working on specific areas of the game to start and will tackle:

• Outposts stability, operating it long term rather than seasonally, and quality of life improvements
• Reducing the occurrence of stuck mines in the Veil
• Enabling G5 ship scrapping
• Getting stuck when travelling into and out of Arenas
• Wave Defence stability and freezes
• Alliance Tournaments stability and responsiveness
• Dauntless ASA reliability improvements
• Leaderboard reliability

We are also prioritising a number of generic issues you have been experiencing and reporting,like when the game is stuck on the “Preparing…” screen, and we will be collecting feedback from across the community to help make sure we make the biggest impact on the day-to-day play. We have an ongoing investment on making the game better, but right now we are pausing other work to give it greater emphasis.

We will still have updates coming to the game, and the story and content will be updated, but the complexity and scale of updates will be more focused.

Following the last update, I also heard the ask for specificity: clear timelines for updates and bug fixes, and transparent communication about economy adjustments. This update aims to address those points head‑on by focusing on near‑term deliverables rather than aspirational roadmaps. I want to improve clarity and specifics about what changes are coming and when. You can expect us to share more specific dates and deliverables rather than high‑level intentions. In that spirit, we’re taking lessons from the reception and live experience to heart and moving quickly. 

• This month we released an updated client that starts the process of improving client-server communication to address sources of lag. Recently we have set it as the minimum required client to make sure the experience is improved.
• Outposts are a source of materials and the starting point for acquiring Vengeance blueprints. 
• Unlike previous expansions, we are working to deliver content designed for players in that grade in all following releases. We have already planned and started specific additions in G6 and G7 space, with new hostile targets, combat challenges, and improvements already planned for updates through April of next year.
• Following our plan to improve access to the later game over time, there will be buffs and rewards in the coming updates that will start to open up access to later building and ops levels in G7 and these updates will continue in the coming releases.

I do want to call out some higher-profile fixes here too. Some were released last week, others will follow in updates in the coming weeks. 

• Station Combat issues have been identified and fixed.
• Borg Cube will no longer get stuck during an attack queue.
• Auto-recall in Transogen will no longer happen for depleted nodes, 
• Chaos Tech buffs will apply correctly in combat and reflect their proper defensive benefits.
• The issue where events failed to appear for new or returning players is also fixed.
• Alliance Tournament Leagues will no longer reset after a tournament.

G7 Launch and Early Learnings

In early October, the G7 expansion opened a wealth of new systems, new threats, and ships. Many of you mentioned that you loved the scale and creativity of The Veil and The Margins, and told us that we were hitting the goal of bringing back the early feeling of the game – when G3 represented the peak of power, and you needed to explore and experiment to overcome challenges. From the development perspective, the expansion has given us space for the future of the game, and laid the groundwork for some big plans we have for next year.

The Veil was a particular highlight, as it represents our ongoing goal to continue introducing ways to connect more players together, and reflects our vision for future new additions to the game. 

That’s all great – but it could have been better. While the intent was for G7 to feel more expansive and deep than any expansion before, and we feel we achieved that, the launch was impacted by missing events and rewards, and issues like the looping auto‑recall bug that sent ships home as if they had never left, leaving behind points and materials.

Veil Mining continues to be a high priority topic for you and for us. We have been looking at 2 primary elements; some nodes are in a state preventing players from using them and other times ships are getting recalled. The November release greatly improved the auto recall situation, and we have further investigations to make sure any remaining causes for this are addressed.

The source of the corrupted mining nodes has been more elusive, as the issue is more systemic than just the Veil. A number of improvements and updates have already been released and based on the checks we are running it has greatly helped the situation, but there will continue to be active efforts running to repair nodes in this state. While this is tackling some underlying causes, they have not resolved the root cause. This is one of the highest priority goals for the team in our focus on fixes to improve the daily experience. 

But we are also looking forward to improving and expanding the Grade experience. In coming months, future updates will start introducing new sources of power and materials to help everyone go deeper into G7 space. This will also include new challenges and experiences to reward those who have already attained the G7 ships and power. These additions will be expanding on existing systems in the game rather than the creation of brand new features to start.

We also saw a lot of community feedback and discussion around Surge. While we’ve been excited to hear about the fun people are having in the game mode, some of you have reported struggling with the low number of starts available in the early days. We’ve also spoken with several players who are looking for solo options due to the challenges in organising and starting an event. 

As more players enter the Veil, the number of Surges will grow. We will monitor this closely to ensure it scales as intended and determine whether further action is needed. In the near term, we may use temporary measures, such as adding limited Surge starts to special packs and introducing events that encourage alliances to be online together, which will make organizing Surges easier. These measures would be dialed back over time. We are making a concentrated effort towards improving the Surge experience to make it better for everyone.

We are not considering solo variants at this time. Getting more group alliance play and interaction is the goal behind this game mode, and we’re focused on addressing game mode friction issues rather than immediately changing the experience.

Event Rewards: Specific Adjustments Ahead

Events have not met the bar, and we are increasing our focus on event turnover across the team. An event should be a moment of excitement with fresh challenges and objectives that boost your gameplay, not a source of confusion about scoring or rewards. 
Our events are all prepared and reviewed ahead of time, but it is clear there are gaps in this process. Having to rethink the use of Flashpoints in the event strategy for new updates left a gap that we have been recovering from as we added new and different strategies to deliver interesting challenges and goals for everyone. We have expanded our QA team and coverage for events, and we are extending the stages of reviews on our event releases. These changes are rolling out now and we have already started the scaling of the teams involved.

We will outline a specific list of what is continued into the new grade, and what we are phasing out and replacing as players enter this part of the game. This update will be released before the end of the year.

Technical Performance and Client Stability

At the end of September we launched the Unity 6 update. We did this for three main reasons: gain access to new tech capabilities in the future, work towards ever-important performance improvement, and a need to stay inside Unity support. 

We deploy large Unity upgrades or client changes gradually, in multi-month stages, so we can find and fix performance degradations or incompatibilities ahead of time. 

This upgrade has further increased Android client stability to its highest in years, but had a small negative impact on iOS client stability—a degradation of 1 percentage point of sessions impacted by a crash. For context, on Android 99.7% of sessions are stable, but currently iOS has only 97.7% of sessions being stable, and while these are concentrated on a small set of devices, it’s still far below what we believe is acceptable. Our target is that over 99% of sessions are stable. We are working to address this rapidly, and the upcoming patch releases have multiple fixes coming to improve the experience.

New technical capabilities like utilizing the Universal Render Pipeline in Unity 6, which could improve rendering performance as well as provide higher fidelity, are planned for sometime in 2026. 

On the topic of “lag”—especially surrounding real-time gameplay and/or systems with a lot of ships—we’ve had a breakthrough! What manifests as unresponsive positioning in those high player input/update systems has, so far, been investigated server-side; we optimised a lot of code, but hadn’t cracked the core problem. As I mentioned in earlier updates, we’d been focusing on the client’s role in the responsiveness of play. To help with this, recent clients have had improved analytics and performance tracking, which has shed light on some very particular issues.

A key contributor to this type of “lag” is on the client side and not on the server side. This area of the client has been relatively untouched since early in development. As the game has grown, so has communication volume, and the client’s network queue is now filling faster than it can process the updates. Many of those updates are actually redundant when newer updates are further down the queue. This issue has been slowly creeping up in severity over time rather than actively breaking at a particular moment. It was also happening in a blind spot for us. We had very little telemetry from live clients, and internal test clients did not experience this load in our testing.

To properly fix this we need to attack a number of areas, starting with:

1. Pruning the queue if the client can see that messages are redundant. Only processing the last received update of that type.
2. Optimise the message format so it is more efficient to send.
3. Migrate our client/server communication away from the current system to a more robust and modern solution.

The first part has already been implemented, and we are reviewing the impact. The remaining items will be tackled here in Q4 2025 and into Q1 2026. We will look at a deeper tech update on this area as we get further into the work and the impact to the game.

We also patched the security vulnerability that Unity announced to make sure the client is safe for everyone. This was accomplished before the Unity announcement to ensure that everyone playing STFC had a secure client in time.

But these are areas where we will never rest. Right now, we have several further improvements in development. One of the largest efforts relates to the game’s core buff calculations. We’re targeting March 2026 for rollout, following the development and testing work happening this year. At first, most players will notice little to no change in moment-to-moment play—this is foundational work that sets us up to push farther on balance, clarity, and performance next year. We will communicate more on this significant update and the background to its approach a little closer to the update. Right now we are focused on testing and validating everything before release.

Mid‑Ops and Making A True Arc 

In September, we started adding more experiences for G3 and G4 players, but it was relatively limited. For October we focused on giving you more with additional ships and experiences, all wrapped in a Borg theme. For November we brought you the next evolution of a “Mid-Ops” arc with Causality: a deeper planned narrative throughline on the 20-50 experience, with a more focused intent in regards to event design. This update focused on sourcing the materials you need to continue to advance while also celebrating a fleet of important ships.

The team took November as an opportunity to try something new: content tailored for players that the new content doesn’t yet apply to. As we continue to iterate and try other methods, we rely on your feedback to help shape the future of the Mid-Ops experience. 

Player Sentiment and Community Response

Players have also shown us that we can try alternative approaches in receiving feedback. The community has shared that they can’t provide accurate feedback due to not experiencing the content in full in the first few days of an arc. Our team is looking into sending out the player feedback survey at a later point where it makes sense in an arc so that players can experience the new content more fully, and better guide our team in making decisions following a release. 

And, I want to reflect on what we have changed based on that feedback and these updates. Looking back since September here is what has been delivered.

Getting content right for every level 

Split arcs landed: September began the split. Early and mid-Ops got arc-adjacent tracks while higher Ops got new systems and loops, then October expanded with Villains Pt. 2, G7 The Veil, and separate mid-Ops content.

Battle Pass + early grade clarity: For G3 we shifted away from Choice Rewards and ran ship-targeted tracks around Franklin/Reliant between September and October to make early progression clearer. November had a bolder change with more depth in the events and story for the arc.

Functional upgrades: Unity 6 rollout and backend gateway work boosted stability, with more iOS stability fixes in October’s mid-month patch.

Time and effort → progress

Clearer daily/weekly rhythm: September reduced event bloat for G5+ and tightened structures.

Let the game work while you do: U.S.S. Dauntless introduced automated hostile hunting to ease dailies and rep grind.

Bulk Actions: Adding more areas to allow you to bulk upgrade officers and ships, and adding more sliders to let you avoid repeated actions all help give you time to get to your goals more directly.

Alliances front and center

Alliance Tagging: We shipped Alliance Tagging in September’s mid-month to help communicate more clearly the alliance’s focus and playstyle to potential new members.

More alliance-driven scoring: Interim schedules included more focused Alliance Leaderboard events to encourage alliance play.

Vengeance

Combat Performance: We tuned the U.S.S. Vengeance mid-month in response to feedback and investigation on the performance of the ship in the live game

Access and Sourcing: We have broadened the sourcing through events and outposts has brought direct consistent access to the game through gameplay.

Shipyard management

Hangar space: We had expanded in June and in October we added an additional 50 slots. Scrapping: Additionally, we talked about how scrapping payouts versus today’s economy can over-accelerate progression and we pulled back the version of scrapping planned for this year. We know G5+ scrapping is a hot topic, and we are making intentional changes to our roadmap to make space for its release before July 2026.

Stability and performance

Live wins: communication-gateway upgrade has started to improve some networking performance. Updates to Client networking have just rolled out this month and we are reviewing the data.

7th Anniversary in November

November marks seven years of Star Trek Fleet Command, and we’re approaching it with gratitude and focus. The celebration will blend nostalgia with forward-looking updates: exclusive cosmetics and a series of events to celebrate this journey we are on, and a reflection on bringing G7 to the game. The goal isn’t just to celebrate the journey, but to reaffirm our long‑term investment in the Fleet ahead of Star Trek’s 60th Anniversary next year.

Each anniversary is a chance to reflect on the past year of STFC, the path the game has taken, and how the community has grown. Over the past year we have added the Krenim, changed the opening of the game, brought Khan into the game (the original Khan), created new ways for players to play cross-region with arenas and then regional space, and launched an expansion to set the direction for the future of the game. As a development team, we are here to craft a universe for all of you to play and connect within. There have been challenges, but the universe today is absolutely richer and more connected than it was 12 months ago, and we have more coming to bring more life to it all in the future.

Looking Ahead

The mid‑ops Causality arc is just the start of a more cohesive narrative for the middle of the player journey, and the Outposts feature will bring new strategic combat and rewards into 2026. Perhaps most importantly, we’re committing to clear timelines and concrete fixes with a change to our release plans happening immediately.

As we consider the direction of Fleet Command, our strategy is to deliver bold new varieties of challenges that reward mastery of your main ships and the power you’ve built, not just “unlock once and forget” content. Some of these encounters will be hard at launch; that’s intentional. We want to create those “can anyone do this yet?” moments that make eventual victory feel earned. Future hostiles and missions will demand different crew and ship setups, breaking the current meta and encouraging experimentation, similar to the first G7 hostiles.

2026 will revisit some classic Original Series Trek and iconic massive enemies that we have yet to face. We will be leaping into the future to celebrate the newest show, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy and adding a new layer of challenge and interest to the galaxy for you to explore, and may even look at new areas that Star Trek has yet to consider. We will have more information in the Roadmap video later in the year

And, we will need to consider how we share what we are focusing on in the team. I aim to be transparent with you all. We want to build the connection we all share through STFC. However, I also need to be aware of the time it takes from the moment we make a change in what we do, and how we work, to the point the experience in the game changes. Pushing to make that change too fast has an impact on everyone that can make an issue worse and distract us all from making this game a continually better experience with every release. I will strike the balance of openness and also give the right level of expectation to everyone, but the updates and improvements will continue. And on that front, we will be updating everyone on the plan for 2026 in the coming months. When releasing that update we will review how we have worked in the past and aim to give you a better timeline of when things will be delivered. Some elements are more concrete, some things we will keep as surprises, but overall we will look at how to improve what you see will be coming in the future.

Thank you all who have made it this far, 

Live Long and Prosper.

— Conor