Discovery Freelancer 4.86: Exiles Beta released
4.86 really does exist!

After 2 years of work since the last update, the Discovery development team have finally released the first Discovery Freelancer 4.86: Exiles public beta.

The following trailer was released 3 weeks ago, at the same time the release date was announced:



This is still beta, so there are lots of bugs still. Cannon has said "We're thrilled that the server is only crashing once per hour rather than 10 times per hour. We've been going slightly insane trying to fix these problems."
Indeed, the bugs were a big problem from the start of the public beta. Cannon counted over 100 official server crashes in 12 hours.

Since the public beta started, the development team has been working hard on bugs, and have already released a new update that includes minor changes and bug fixes.

This release includes over 90 new bases in 20 new systems in the Gallic Core Worlds alone. It also adds new features like player docking on capital ships, jump drives, different cruise speeds, turret zoom. Some other features are planned but not released as of yet.

Some confusion was caused by the way the release was done on the official community forums; it wasn't made clear that this was, in fact, a beta, instead of a full release. When Cannon was asked about this he promised that the person responsible for the oversight would be shot. 4.86 will remain in beta for 2-3 weeks.

You can find download/install instructions here.