Are you ready to enter the Star Atlas metaverse? Then let’s get you up to speed! In this guide (and please check the above video), I’ll teach you everything you need to know to get started with Star Atlas. Before we do this you should know none of this is financial advice it is educational in nature only. Who would take financial advice from someone in the middle of a spaceship in the universe?
Important Links for this guide:
Phantom wallet
Jupiter exchange
FTX: Complete Beginners Guide
So to start with: what type of computer do you need to play Star Atlas? Don’t worry! It is a browser-based game for now and in the coming years. As Star Atlas is built on the Solana blockchain you’ll need to be able to get a part of the Solana ecosystem. All you need to do is get a Phantom wallet which you can use as an extension on your browser and you need to buy some of the native tokens of Solana – Solana itself. With this, you’ll be able to connect to the game and buy your first items or ships.
The cool thing about Star Atlas is that it’s a so-called “play to earn” game and all your assets belong truly to you! These are known as NFTs and we cover them prior. By playing the game you will be able to earn money. You might have heard of other blockchains such as Bitcoin or Ethereum – but why did the Star Atlas team decide to go and build on Solana? Fast transactions and cheap fees. Both are especially important for the game where transactions need to be very very fast and since there might be many transactions they need to be cheap.
So, let’s get started! Those are the topics we will cover:
1. Where you can get Solana and USDC?
2. How to deposit your local currency and buy Solana and USDC
3. How to download the Phantom wallet
4. How to set up a wallet yourself
5. How to withdraw funds from the exchange onto your wallet
6. And finally how to buy your first ship using your new funds
Where can you get Solana?
Are you ready? Let’s get started! I’m going to show you in the next couple of minutes how to get some Solana from an exchange onto a wallet. The first exchange you can use for Solana is Binance. You can find them by clicking on this link here and going to their website. Once you verify for AML and KYC purposes you will be able to deposit some dollars or your local currency into the platform to buy some Solana.
The second exchange you can get some Solana is Coinbase. Once you’re on the Coinbase website click get started or sign in and it will take you through the process to develop to sign up yourself and for you to able to put in some money.
The third exchange which is recommended at the moment is the FTX exchange. For US FTX users you can use FTX.us which gives you access to lots of cryptocurrencies, especially for the United States. For international users feel free to use the FTX wallet. This wallet gives you lots and lots of advantages over some of the other exchanges. For the purposes of this video, I will show you how to use the FTX wallet and FTX application, the international version to deposit some fiat and trade it for some Solana.
I should let you know there are lots of resources online for you to learn about how to actually use exchanges. These are complicated instruments and this guide is only a brief explanation on how to get started there are more in-depth videos such as from Guy from CoinBureau who gives you an excellent guide on how to use FTX. Once you’ve signed up for FTX international it’s actually very easy to deposit some money.
Desposit money to buy Solana
All you have to do is go to your wallet section. FTX will show you a list with a lot of different currencies – find the one you’d like to deposit. The easiest one at the moment is USDC. Within the USDC section, you can find the deposit button. Click deposit and you will see a range of options to deposit your local currency. You can deposit USDC via credit card or debit card. You can also make a wire transfer or a bank transfer. Or you can deposit other stable coins you have acquired at other places. You can use the search bar at the top to find a lot of other currencies.
If you go to the FIAT section, you can also chose to deposit Euros, the Pound, the Canadian dollar, the Brazilian real, Mexican pesos the Filipino the Singaporean dollar, and lots of other currencies.
Once you have deposited some money into your FTX account, let’s buy some Solana. In our example, we have 10 USD in our wallet. I’m going to do the easy method of converting this to Solana. In the balance section is a convert button on the right-hand side. Click that and we’re going to convert our US dollar to a new coin. Search for Solana. Click convert and it will be immediately converted.
Withdraw Solana to your wallet
Now let’s look at taking out your SOL from the exchange to our wallet. For you to fully utilize the blockchain and play Star Atlas you will need a Phantom wallet. A Phantom wallet is a blockchain extension for your browser that allows you to interact with the blockchain.
Once you have installed Phantom it’ll prompt you to create a new wallet. Once again there are multiple tutorials on how to do this online. The most important thing: you’ll have to remember your 24 key phrase! Write it down or put this in a very safe location so that you don’t lose it. These 24 words are very important! They are the keys to your wallet.
Once you have your wallet installed you will find the wallet address by clicking on the Phantom application. You can find your address at the very top. Click Alternatively you can click on Solana and then click on receive. This will give you your QR code and a wallet address. Copy this address to your clipboard. Now we will go back to FTX and withdraw your Solana. Click on the withdrawal button. This will take you to the Solana withdrawal page. How much do you want to withdraw? All of it. What’s the address that you want to withdraw to? This is the address that we have just copied. Make sure you paste the address from your Phantom wallet. It’s always a good idea to check at least that the first and a couple of last digits match.
If it matches – let’s go ahead! You’ll have some verification to complete – for example your withdrawal password. Once you’re happy, you click withdrawal and your Solana should arrive in your Phantom wallet after a couple of seconds. Congratulations – you should now have some Solana in your Phantom wallet.
Buy your first Star Atlas ship
Now let’s go ahead and try and buy a ship! Exciting, right? To buy a ship on the Star Atlas marketplace all you have to do is connect your wallet on the bottom left. When you click on the Connect Wallet button, it will tell you that the recommended wallet is Phantom. You already have Phantom installed – click on it. It will connect you very easily. Go to the marketplace and find a ship that you’d like to buy. For example the Pearce X4. If you are looking for a bargain – feel free to use our famous Star Atlas Ship Prices comparison page.
You can offer tokens in ATLAS (the Star Atlas in-game currency) to buy this ship or you can offer USDC. This is unfortunate because we only have Solana in our wallet! Don’t worry! Let’s go ahead and get you some USDC to buy this ship.
Once you have Solana in your Phantom wallet, it is pretty easy to exchange it into USDC (or other Solana native currencies and tokens). And this time we also do not need an centralized exchange like Binance, Coinbase or FTX. We’ll use a decentralized exchange like Raydium. If you’re not sure what the best DEX is you can use the Jupiter exchange. This handy tool will find you the best exchange rate across the Solana ecosystem. All you have to do is go to the Jupiter exchange, connect your wallet in the top right. In the middle of the page, you’ll find two boxes. Select Solana and then USDC. Afterward enter the amount of Solana you want to exchange into USDC. Click swap and this will exchange it for USDC for you. Once you have USDC – come back to the Star Atlas marketplace.
To go ahead and buy the ship that you want, just find your favorite and click on it. In our case the Pearce X4. Click on the buy section. Now, remember the first view of this page will show you offers in ATLAS. You can use the dropdown to select USDC that we’ve just acquired. Now we can see that people are buying and selling ships over the left-hand side.
Enter the number of ships you want to buy of that type under SIZE (if you want to buy one ship, the value here is 1). Enter the price you’re willing to pay under PRICE – if you want to buy it immediately, it always makes sense to offer a little bit more than the lowest current offer. If you click buy, your order will be placed including a little fee. Make sure that you always have a little bit of SOL in your Phantom Wallet – because that will be used to pay for the transaction fee! Otherwise, your order can’t be placed.
Settle your order
There is something I should tell you though. The Solana blockchain is a little bit different than other blockchains. Once you’ve bought your ship on the marketplace using USDC you will have to settle your order. What this means is that your ship is still on the blockchain. You have to collect it from the blockchain into your wallet. It is a bit confusing but I’ll give you an analogy: You ordered something online it’s now at the post office you have to go and grab it.
How do you do this after you’ve bought your ship? Go to your inventory – you will see all your ships, collectibles and badges here. If you go to the ship section after a little while you will see that there will be an entry titled PX4, accompanied by the number 1 and a claim button. What this means is that your order was succesfull and you’ve bought the ship – but it is still in the marketplace (post office) and isn’t in your wallet yet. All you have to do is click claim and sign the transaction. Very soon this PX4 will be added. Now keep in mind this does take a while to happen. Your wallet doesn’t automatically recognize when you have a ship in the marketplace – so give it a few minutes.
This has been a very brief introduction on how to buy a ship using ALTAS or using USDC, how to withdraw funds from your FTX exchange onto your wallet and how to exchange it, how to download Phantom and set up a wallet, how to deposit fiat or your local currency onto FTX. There are numerous other methods and other ways for you to acquire your funds on the blockchain. I suggest you do some research and also look at some youtube tutorials. If you have any more questions feel free to join us in discord and we are very happy to answer for you!
