ATMTA, the team behind Star Atlas, launched their very first Social Campaign, Never Alone, on May 11th, 2023. Mission 1 began that day and came to an end on July 11th. One week later, on July 18th, Mission 2 was launched!
You are currently reading the guide for Mission 2. We’ve previously published an extensive guide for Mission 1 as well. As you are still able to complete quests for Mission 1, if you have not done so already, it’s worth looking into that questboard!
In this guide, we will go over everything you need to know to be successful in Never Alone and make informed choices!
This guide is a starting point for both Never Alone and Mission 2.
Relevant sections from our previous guide have been copied here (and extended where applicable) so that you can simply start your journey here, regardless of if you are a Mission 1 veteran or completely new to Never Alone.
“This is a neuro scanner, and it will show you the progress on recovering the Punaab’s memories. As you can see now, there is barely any progress, but as you expose him to different environments and tasks, hopefully, you will see the memory gauge filling up to the point where major events of his past will return to him.”
An anonymous Ustur Doctor
The Story Sofar
On May 10th, the team kicked things off stealthily by sharing the background story for the event. In this story, the two core ingredients for the campaign were introduced:
- The Saand Punaab character, how you (the adventurer in the story) two met, and your objective (return his memory)
- The Council of Peace (CoP) changing its stance from passive to active/aggressive regarding the ECOS and Jorvik. Where previously, they allowed these minor (pirate) factions to exist outside of the Safe/Secure Zone without any interference from the CoP, after a bunch of brutal incursions, this has now come to an end. The Council of Peace is going to war!
The story combines the two threads by suggesting that you can contribute to both objectives in one go. By helping the Council wage war on the pirate factions and bringing Saand while doing so, the events you two will experience may jog his memory and allow him to recover some of his memories.
On May 11th, the team followed up by launching the actual campaign, which ties directly into this lore.
Mission 1
In Mission 1, you and Saand ended started by following the CoP fleets around in search of spoils. Through a meeting with a Mierses prophet, however, the two of you finally ended up on the Fimbul ECOS Superphoenix (titan ship), where Saand’s memory was jogged by a familiar sight. A small lake, with a bench and tree standing next to it, draw his attention, and he right away runs off. The story continues:
As you follow your friend, you see a tree with a small bench close to it, and Saand is standing still with his pawn on the tree trunk, and you see tears streaming down his face. You immediately reach out to him, asking what is wrong, and you look to where his paw is placed, and to your surprise, it was a perfect fit, right next to another one, a little bit smaller than his.
Right under them, a single word, Etira, was written with small cuts.
“I was here with someone… Someone very important to me, but… I can’t remember.” The anguish was clear on your friend’s face, and since he didn’t seem to know what Etira meant or was, he fanatically started looking for more clues on the site.
Never Alone [Mission 1] – Exploring the Medium Zone 👁️ – Step 3
A little later, you both find yourself on the MUD Central Space Station, where a special, mesmerizing event takes place in the evening. The Wandering Caravan, a mysterious troupe of 33 storytellers, uses the sky above the space station as a canvas to tell their stories. They show, rather than tell, those present a glimpse of the past & present of the Galia Expanse.
Each of the performers wears a mask with strange symbols on it. Saand suddenly recognizes one of these:
Suddenly, Saand broke your enchantment by saying:
“27.”
Never Alone [Mission 1] – The Wandering Caravan ❓- Step 2
“What?” You replied.
“That symbol on her mask is a number, 27. Don’t ask me how I know that because I have no freaking clue.”
At this point, the story picks up with the lore from the official announcement of Mission 2.
Mission Dashboard
The Campaign is run through an online engagement tool called Zealy (formerly known as Crew3). The team defined a great many quests in Zealy, which you can find on their questboard. Most of these you can easily complete through links in the quests or by providing an answer to a question (both lore & personal info like Twitter profile & wallet). However, there are also quests that require you to use the supplied wallet to engage with other applications the team will launch this year. For this first Mission, the focus lies on Escape Velocity!
Missions
Never Alone consist of 4 chapters, or missions. Each mission will come with its own lore and quests, which have been carefully crafted around the product launches and announcements of Star Atlas. This does not mean that all the mission quests will solely focus on those products. There will be plenty of more general quests introduced with each new mission.
Quests
The missions consist of a number of (chains of) quests. In order to complete any of them, you will first have to finish any prerequisite quests. Like Mission 1, Mission 2 starts with a single quest that has to be completed before other quests become available.
Each quest comes with a snippet of lore to either comment on the quest, or that will further unfold the main story. Completing a quest requires things like answering a (multiple-choice) question, a social-media action (Twitter), or a Discord action (claiming role).
Straight-up multiple-choice quiz questions and social media engagement (like/RT) will be verified on the spot. However, when it comes to open-ended questions (like your Solana wallet – the very first quest), or posting specific content on Twitter/YouTube, your answer must be reviewed by a team member. This may take a while, so best to plan for that.
Mission I & II
The first mission, Scraps & Spoils, launched on May 11th and ran for 60 days. Mission two launched on July 18th and will run for 70 days. You will be able to check the time remaining on the official web page (not updated yet).
Interestingly, you are still able to complete Mission 1 quests while Mission 2 is ongoing. However, you may not be able to acquire Tier 3 memories anymore due to the Escape Velocity quests & time-limited quests having come to an end.
In addition to the quests you can already find on Zealy (list below), additional quests will be introduced as the campaign progresses. You won’t have to complete all quests to earn the Memory Revelation for a mission!
Mission 2: The Search for Etira
The team decided to use the same Zealy questboard for Mission 2, which meant they had to find a solution for the Mission 1 quests that people can still complete. Their solution was to move all the Mission 1 quests to a new Mission 1 category. For Mission 2, instead of re-using the old categories or creating new ones, they simply created a single Mission 2 category to house all their new quests.
They still divided the quests into categories, but the relevant category is now only mentioned at the top of a quest. As these do help to paint a better picture, we’ve decided to still subdivide the quests in our overview using these categories.
Below you can find an overview of the Mission 2 quests. As more quests are introduced along the way, we’ll make sure to update this overview!
NOTE: You can supply a different Solana account/address for Mission 2! It does not have to be the same as the one supplied for Mission 1!
Intro 🏁
- Getting Started Mission 2 – Insert/update Wallet address (1XP)
Exploration 🧭
- Preparing for a New Adventure [Step 1] – Publish a Showroom photo (1000XP)
- The Shadow Cabinet – Lock any amounts of Polis in the Polis locker (333XP)
Diplomacy 📡
- The Story of the Medium Zone – Create an image of a planet with AI tools (333XP)
- Bottoms up! – Create a picture of a Bounty Bar drink (250XP)
Exploration 💥
- Lights, Camera, and Action [Step 1] – Retweet the Photo Career mode tweet (167XP)
Research ❓
- Border Control – Answer a lore question about the Galia Expanse (333XP)
- It’s not that simple – Answer CORE Act 2, Ep. 1 question (333XP)
- Reminiscence – Answer questions about Saand (333XP)
Future (as of yet, unnamed) quests in this category:
- Submit the secret code found in videos from well-known influencers
1 requires review by the team
2 time-limited quest; introduced after the launch of Mission 2
Collecting XP
Like in Mission 1, each completed quest will award you with a certain amount of XP. The XP gained for Mission 1 quests is not going away for the purpose of the leaderboard. However, your XP tracker for Mission 2 has “been reset” to 0.
This has the side-effect that Zealy still lists your total level (earned with Mission 1 quests), but in the background, you are actually starting at level 0 again for the purpose of Mission 2.
Memories
Once you have gathered enough XP points, you will be able to redeem these for Memories. The more XP you gather, the higher the tier of the Memory you are able to unlock.
Below is an overview of the various tiers and the amount of XP needed to acquire them:
- Memory Glimpse: 5000 XP
- Memory Fragment: 6250 XP
- Memory Revelation: 7500 XP
When you accumulate 5000 XP, you can finish the “Recover a Memory Glimpse” quest. You will need to supply the wallet where you want to receive the SFT.
Next, when you hit 6250 XP, you can complete the “Recover a Memory Fragment, and so on. Completing all three quests (meaning you accumulated at least 7500 XP) will deliver you all three SFTs into your wallet.
To make this ultra clear: You can get all three Memory SFTs! It’s not a single one that gets upgraded; it’s three different assets. This is important when looking at the Utility (or shall we say: Loot!) next.
Important: You will be able to accumulate 10000 XP in each mission, which means you won’t have to finish each and every quest!
Loot!
The Memories you unlock (acquire) can be used in one of three ways:
- You can sell them on the Galactic Marketplace to people who want to use them for the other two options:
- You can redeem a memory for Mission-specific rewards
- You can collect a set of three same-tier memories and redeem the set to receive an asset bundle
This last option also contributes points to your DAC, enabling them to potentially win some awesome guild-specific loot for their treasury!
Let’s dive deeper into the last two options!
Mission Specific Rewards
There are 4 missions, or story arcs, in the Never Alone campaign, and each one will offer you interesting rewards in exchange for the memories you manage to collect. Each individual memory can be exchanged for a specific piece of loot offered for that specific mission.
For Mission 1, you will be able to exchange Memories for the following rewards:
- Memory Glimpse: Exclusive character skin
- Memory Fragment: VZUS solos (XXS ship)
- Memory Revelation: Exclusive VZUS solos skin
For Mission 2, you can exchange Memories for the following rewards:
- Memory Glimpse: Exclusive “Never Alone” emote
- Memory Fragment: Fimbul ECOS Unibomba (XXS ship)
- Memory Revelation: Exclusive CORE Century cover
When you redeem a memory, that memory is burned, meaning you can only use them once. The team will introduce new rewards for each new Mission!
Note: You will only be able to exchange memories for loot after the end of the second mission! At that point, a web page will be available where you can exchange these memories.
Saand’s Story Rewards
An alternate route you can take is trying to earn memories in at least 3 of the 4 missions. When you gather and hold 3 memories of the same tier (i.e. all three are either Glimpses, Fragments, or Revelations) until the end of the year, you can instead exchange such sets for a complete Saand Story digital asset bundle on the Never Alone Campaign page, effectively allowing you to complete the main quest.
The rewards for these sets are:
- Glimpses of a Forgotten Life
Hand in 3 Memory Glimpses to receive:
– Fimbul ECOS Unibomba (XXS ship)
– Ship Component Upgrade Bundle (Tier 0 -> Tier 1)
– Glimpses of a Forgotten Life title (account bound)
- Fragments of a Forgotten Life
Hand in 3 Memory Fragments to receive:
– Calico Maxhog (XS ship)
– Ship Component Upgrade Bundle (Tier 0 -> Tier 1)
– Foundation Room access (account bound)
– Fragments of a Forgotten Life title (account bound)
- Revelations of a Forgotten Life
Hand in 3 Memory Revelations to receive:
– Ogrika Niruch (XS ship)
– Ship Component Upgrade Bundle (Tier 0 -> Tier 2)
– Saand Crewmember
– Foundation Room access (account bound)
– Revelations of a Forgotten Life title (account bound)
Ship Component Upgrade Bundle
The Ship Component Upgrade Bundles listed above will each come with an upgrade to three main components of your ships:
- Thrusters
- Shields
- Weapons
These bundles will only be usable on ships the same size as the one you receive in the asset bundle. As an example, you can apply the Glimpses of a Forgotten Life only to an XXS ship. Doing so will upgrade the three components from Tier 0 (the default) to Tier 1.
Support your DAC
There is one more important aspect to saving your Memories until the end of the year. By exchanging a set of three same-tier memories, you can actually help out your DAC. Let’s dive into that next!
DAC Competition
A whole second layer to this Campaign focuses exclusively on Decentralized Autonomous Corporations, or DACs (more widely known as guilds). Every DAC member that redeems 3 memories of the same tier at the end of the year, will also contribute points to their DAC. The more points a DAC gets, the higher their score and the better their chance to win some reward(s) for their guild.
Each tier of memories redeemed is worth a different amount of points. If you redeem multiple, then you will get multiple asset bundles (see previous section), and your DAC will accumulate more points.
Here is the overview of the points each tier is worth:
- If you handed in 3 Memory Glimpses – 10 points
- If you handed in 3 Memory Fragments – 15 points
- If you handed in 3 Memory Revelations – 25 points
If you complete all quests and keep all your Memories until the end, you can contribute a whopping 50 points to your DAC (and get all three asset bundles)!
There will be several pools of DACs, assuring smaller DACs also have a chance to bring home some loot!
Loot Pool
The Loot available to DACs is impressive. The grand prize will be a Tier 5 Central Space Station Land/Hab ($1.7 million VWAP – Winner decides which Faction they want it to be located in). The other prizes are listed in the infographic below:
Social Experiment
The official Medium article states:
“In this journey, you will participate in an experiment on the value of memories and information, deciding what actually holds value for you.”
True words! This whole campaign is, among other things, a big experiment where we will see how people value the various reward options. Will they sell the memories, go for the loot at hand, or accumulate and finish the main quest, receiving the Saand’s Story digital asset bundle?
And perhaps on top of that all: How strong of a bond do people have with their DACs? Will people save up their memories to aid their DAC in the final competition? Or will they instead solely focus on their more direct and immediate return on investment?
It will be interesting to watch, for sure!
Final Words
We will update this guide as more quests become available and the missions progress. Good luck, and go help Saand get his memories back!
“This is the beginning of a new legend in the Galaxy! Our very first mission shall henceforth be named Scraps and Spoils! Come, partner! We will get rich and discover the secrets of my past! To the Spaceship!”
Saand, the Punaab
