Elite Dangerous squishing stability bugs in next big update, due in January

Frontier Developments have detailed the first of the promised Elite Dangerous patches focused on fixing bugs, and announced that a short public beta test of it will start next week. The sandbox space sim has accumulated a fair few bugs over the years, with some affecting the game for literal years, and Frontier are finally taking them seriously. They've put content updates on hold for a while and plan to focus the next few updates on fixing bugs before they get back to newness and add the delayed Fleet Carrier ship class.

"For this update, our first and foremost priority is to ensure that everyone is able to have a seamless experience when playing Elite Dangerous, so our focus will be on aiming to resolve game breaking bugs and stability issues that cause disconnects, softlocks and crashes," Frontier said in today's announcement.

They're also planning fixes for several bugs players voted to prioritise on Elite's Issues Tracker (and some that weren't so highly-voted). These include not all deliveries to repair stations attacked by Thargoids being counted, high-resolution screenshots having ugly artifacting, the Galaxy Map not always selecting and highlighting systems searched for, and keyboards sometimes stopping working.

See the announcement for more details on everything they hope to fix with this patch.

The update is due to launch in January 2020. Before then, a public beta test will run from Wednesday the 27th through December 2nd. More public testing pf patches was something many players had asked for as their bug frustrations mounted, before Frontier caved and admitted the game had a serious problem. This is a short test but it's still a test.