Greetings Pilots! I hope everybody had a good time this holiday. I am back once again to document the latest month's results.

I must admit that getting everything together this time around was fairly tricky. It involved one large, primary element and changing other modules to accomodate it. This meant that most of my efforts were less spread out like with previous updates, resulting in this latest addition looking a bit shy on new changes. In either case, I would like to present version 0.2.1's main attraction:

Pilotable capital ships! Yes, the foundation for manning large space tanks is here, with the first ship having this functionality being the Petrel class corvette, armed with two large cannons and two pairs of medium turrets.
In addition, you can also also have them as backup craft that can jump with you, allowing you to finally have a fleet. The method behind this change is simple - the old player's party system has been replaced with a module similar to what ambient fleets you see around starsystems use, including their jump functionality. This also means that temporarily all ships under the player's control will be with them and cannot be separated. This functionality will change later.

Other future additions are already planned, one including ship crews, which will deal with keeping large ships functional via micromanagement. You will be able to hire and station officers on key positions, engineers to keep subsystems online, marines to combat intruders (which you would also be able transport via ships for piracy). Expanding fleet command & control is another goal, which will allow for fleet formations, ship positioning, cargo management, fighter/bomber control when carriers make it into production and so much more.

Finally, a few tips regarding the controls: the current camera layout for capital ships is exclusively third person. Instead of changing between perspectives, the space keybind in this case functions for resetting said camera, or if you are in manual aiming mode, swap between left or right aiming positions. The right mouse button has two functions as well, depending whether the cursor is visible or not (changed via R by default). The former brings up the context menu where you can order your turrets to target or ignore selected targets, while the latter is for toggling between manual turret aim and automated. The last notable keybind is H, allowing you to turn ship mouse aiming on and off. You can refer to these controls found in the game's root folder at any time.

And so concludes the first year in Astrov's development. If there's anything I can take away from these past few months is that I might have done the equivalent of leaving a warehouse with half-empty boxes at several places. They eventually need to be filled and sealed, and sometimes you just try your best to finish your work, but some issue or event gets in your way and you put them off for later. If you read the previous month's shenanigans, you might be aware that I have addressed several bugs that occured in the 0.2.0 version of the game. Sadly I will have to put them aside for just a little longer. My decision for this push was so that I could focus on adding as many new mechanics as possible and add polish and content afterwards. I am now switching gears, which might not make the next few months sound as interesting but will be important none the less. If I leave these boxes empty for too long I will just have a messy warehouse and nobody would want that.
To end this post, consider these my new year's resolution: Getting Astrov in an alpha state with way less bugs and way more fun (and volatile) tech to play with.

Thanks for reading, see you next month!