It is time to pick a Star Atlas faction! Today marks a huge day for all Atlassians! We collectively take the next step on the path to living our lives (or part thereof, suit yourself) inside of the metaverse! Star Atlas is launching their “player enrollment”-module in a few hours, allowing players to register their (Solana) accounts with the game.
What It’s All About
There are a few important parts to this registration process:
- Picking the right Solana account (your wallet)
- Selecting your Star Atlas faction (MUD, ONI, or Ustur)
Some parts are not launching today. There will be:
- no race selection (human, alien, or android)
- no avatar creation
- no DAC selection or registration
- no name selection / auctioning
- no playable experience just yet. Ship missions will come later!
This guide will shed light on both aspects relevant to the registration process as it will exist today, with a specific focus on the faction selection part. We’ll go over what it means before diving into Aephia Industries’ strategy concerning this.
Quick Facts
Let’s start this article by getting some quick, important facts out of the way:
- There are different perks associated with the faction you choose. This means that your in-game abilities will change a little, depending on if you have chosen to be part of the MUD, ONI, or Ustur faction (see below).
- Faction choice is permanent and can not be changed! This means that the (Solana) account you use to register will not be able to be registered to a different faction later on.
- The faction you choose will determine the race of your avatar (player character). In other words: your avatar’s race will be that faction’s race (at least initially).
- Later on, in the game’s release cycle you will be able to recruit additional crew members from different races, and use these as your avatar instead (not yet implemented, so could change!).
- There is no rush! This registration module is not time-limited. This just marks the launch of the player registration, it will remain available for all eternity!
- Registration will cost a small gas-fee, so make sure to have some SOL at the ready (0.03 SOL should suffice)
No Race Selection
Just to reiterate, in case you skimmed over the points mentioned above, there will be no option to choose your race at this stage of the registration process. Though it was mentioned a few times in the (recent) past this would be possible, this is not currently going to be the case! Your race will default to the faction’s race.
In the future, you will be able to add crew members from different races and be able to select whichever crew member you’d like to use as your avatar.
Account Considerations
The account you select will be permanently bound to your player profile. At first, this does not matter much, you can simply move your assets and register a new account to a different Star Atlas faction. However, later this year this will change!
Skill-tree
When the full-fledged Ship Missions-module arrives (sometime after the simplified Ship Missions-module), besides adding more gameplay to the ship missions, you will start to level up your skill trees. This skill progression is linked to your account (meaning: stored by SA!) and this can not be moved to another Solana account!
In short: You can register an account now, while still having a good many weeks to reconsider, no questions asked and no consequences suffered.
Using a Ledger
Whenever you are dealing with cryptocurrencies and NFT’s, storing these safely on cold storage (a hardware device) is always a good idea. There have been some concerns (raised by the team) that using a Ledger (being the only hardware device supporting Solana) to play might lead to a sub-optimal experience.
Later on, this was downplayed by the team to some extent, but it does look like registering a Ledger account for actual gameplay might not be the best idea. Since we don’t know for sure until the game arrives, we’ll leave it up to you to weigh your options! If you decide to use a hot wallet (like Phantom), you are still encouraged to move your non-SA NFT’s and all FT’s (including most ATLAS and POLIS) to a cold wallet to at least keep those safe.
Star Atlas Faction Selection
There are several factors you might want to consider when choosing your faction.
Combat Perks for a Star Atlas faction
Each faction comes with its own unique in-game combat-oriented bonuses. You might want to go ahead and select the faction that you feel has the most powerful in-game advantage based on these perks, but do realize that these should all balance each other out (as in they are of similar strength).
The team has often mentioned they are going for a rock, paper, scissors approach. This means the perks of one faction will make it stronger against one of the other two factions.
Each faction’s advantages are in the following areas:
- MUD: Firepower, Travel distance
- ONI: Stealth, Scanning Distance
- Ustur: Manoeuvring, Hull strength
If you look at these terms, it’s clear that they express an advantage in each of the areas mentioned. It does not mean that each faction has exclusive access to these, they are not the only ones who possess those abilities mentioned. Every faction has firepower, maneuvering skills, ships with some hull strength and travel -, and scanning range. From this, we can deduct that each faction will also have access to stealth technology. Do not be misguided by interpreting this list as if only ONI possesses stealth technology.
If you have no (or little) interest in the combat aspect of the game, then you can safely ignore these advantages when deciding which Star Atlas faction to choose. But, there are more factors in play!
Financial Perks for a Star Atlas faction
The current thinking of the Star Atlas team is that whenever a new batch of rewards is unlocked that can be earned by playing ship missions, this batch will be split into three equal slices. Each slice represents the total available earnings for one of the factions.
This means that each faction as a whole will earn (or at least has the potential to earn) the same value as the two other factions. However, given that the player count for each faction differs (or really: the number of ships actively used within each faction), there will be a difference in what individual players will earn, based on what faction they are in. The faction with the least amount of ships actively deployed on missions will be earning more per ship used. The ROI per ship sent on a mission will be higher in that faction.
Balancing act
The team did something very smart here, as over time this should lead to factions having roughly an equal amount of players. New players might want to join the smallest faction (based on asset-value, not players), as their income should be higher in that one.
Should you wait?
It might be worth postponing registration to see what faction ends up with the least amount of accounts joined. This is not a very good indicator, but there is currently no overview of the total number of ships in each faction, let alone of the activity level of its players. If going this route, it makes sense to wait until Ship Missions will kick off, so you’ll have a better idea of what faction will maximize your earnings.
That said, do realize that this is a balancing mechanic and over time other factions can become the smallest. In the end, it might not matter much, as the factions should trend towards being in equilibrium.
Player Organization / DAC
Finally, there is one more very important piece of information that needs to factor into your decision which faction to join.
Each DAC (aka player organization, guild, clan, corporation) has to register itself with a faction as well. This very simply means that any player who wants to join that specific DAC will have to choose the same faction as that DAC, else it will be impossible for them to join.
And it’s at this point that we, Aephia Industries, stepped out of the box, and took another hard look at our options.
3-Faction Setup
At Aephia Industries we have chosen to have a presence in all three factions. This means we are going against the grain, but we are convinced this will benefit our members and our collective as a whole!
Aephia Industries will set up 3 DAC’s in-game, one registered with each faction, that represents the three arms of Aephia Industries. For you as a player, this means that you can choose any faction you like, without having to consider the DAC-factor as mentioned in the previous section.
No matter which Star Atlas faction you choose, you can and will still be a part of our corporation!
Why all three?
There are a number of reasons we made this decision. Our exact reasoning is shared with our members-only, but there are of course some clear benefits:
- Access to all exclusive resources
- Giving our players more freedom (or: not restricting their options)
Exclusive Resources
Every faction has exclusive resources that can only be mined in/near that faction’s sphere of influence (aka “Economic Region”). Some ship construction (and presumably components) will depend on these faction-exclusive resources. Without having a presence in each we are unable to construct all available ships just by ourselves.
If you want to know, how to set up 3 different accounts, using the Phantom Wallet and optional a Ledger – check out our “Setting up multiple Star Atlas wallets guide.”
Trading with others is an option, but given that vertical integration is our goal, in order to own the full supply chain, we will need to have a presence everywhere. This will guarantee (to some extent) us having access to the resources required to construct every possible ship.
To all Aephians reading this: Please check our Discord for additional considerations
