How can I start testing Foundry? (How to get onto Tribble?)

System

I haven't been playing STO for months, but when I found out about Foundry I was extremely curious. I've installed the multiple gigs of upgrades, I saw the disabled UI for content creation, I figured it must be offline (given what others have said) and I was going to ask if anybody knows when it will be online, but I see there are still forum posts actively going on about it and people seem to be logging onto "Tribble" and actively using Foundry, and I'm stumped. There are FAQs and starter guides and lots and lots of forum posts about using Foundry. Where the heck is the door to this party? I understand it's "on Tribble" which I understand to be the beta server since Foundry's still in beta, well how do you get onto the Tribble server? There is no obvious (from what I could find) drop-down menu or other interface that lets you specify which server to log onto like in the early days of EVE Online. And if I search for "tribble" in the Forums I get either no hits or a server lock-up because the game is filled with tribble-related content and discussion not related to the test servers.

By the way (this is not my primary question) why does the getting started guide not have a link for instructions on how to get onto Tribble in the first place??

Archived Post

You should be able to follow the directions in this post to get your "Tribble" instance working. The first thing you should do, is check out this link and if you don't see a red-band with "[ You have already submitted this form. ]", that means you need to sign up for the Tribble Test Shard.

If you are signed up for the Tribble Test Shard, check your STO installation for a folder called "Playtest" if that folder is missing, then somehow the downloading and patching of the Tribble instance didn't go very well on your machine.

I assume one of these critical steps I've listed above didn't go well, because you said you can't see any option to select the Server Shard to login into.

Archived Post

By the way (this is not my primary question) why does the getting started guide not have a link for instructions on how to get onto Tribble in the first place??

The third thread permanently stickied at the top of general discussion is called How to Get On Tribble Test Server.

Also on the main STO website it shows up in the Support menu as Public Test.

Archived Post

Thanks guys. By the way, "Copy Character" seems to be broken; it shows an empty character selection drop-down menu. http://www.startrekonline.com/test-shard/character-transfer

Archived Post

wrote:

Thanks guys. By the way, "Copy Character" seems to be broken; it shows an empty character selection drop-down menu. http://www.startrekonline.com/test-shard/character-transfer

Yes, that seems to be a new problem. You might stil lbe able to get onto Tribble, but you have to create your characters there. For using the Foundry, you need to do that anyway, for testing missions, it might be more helpful to have a levelled char, too.