Sad news for those waiting for the new Fleet Carriers update promised back in August for Elite: Dangerous - as they've now been pushed back from a December release date to some time in Mid-2020.

The Fleet Carriers would have featured the ability to easily travel great distances, serve as refueling stations, and refit smaller ships. 

The reason for the delay, according to Frontier, is due to a focus on fixing bugs within the game rather than developing the new feature. The September update apparently introduced a lot of unexpected bugs into the game, and this has caused a challenge for developers.

We realise that some of the issues had an impact on your ability to enjoy Elite Dangerous. The team have been working hard to address the most critical issues and have already released a series of patches and updates to bring those fixes in as quickly as possible.

According to community manager Will Flanagan, the company are acknowledging the move is in response to community feedback, who have been asking for more focus on bug fixing and for development to be more fleshed out before launching new updates.

As such, the rest of this year's updates will focus exclusively on bug fixes. Beta testing for this first 'fix' update will begin in December, in place of the Fleet Carriers update, which is now slated for the 'second quarter of 2020', according to Flanagan.

He did confirm, however, that there will be a new major paid expansion for the game, but that it's not expected to drop until the end of next year, and we don't have any details on what that may feature.