Welcome to our 101st newsletter on Star Atlas! This weekly newsletter is published by Aephia Industries and focuses entirely on Star Atlas. Here, we try to aggregate all the newsworthy tidbits that were dropped by the team throughout the past week.
A relatively quiet week lies behind us, but the team is still moving at full speed ahead! The team made some tweaks to the economy last week, but the next patch should be coming very soon!
In other news, we are expecting the next issue of CORE on marketplaces soon, and we are gearing up for Solana’s Breakpoint conference and meetups, of course!
Let’s dive in!
SAGE Labs
The team released an updated infographic regarding the loot available in SAGE Labs. A number of redeemable items are no longer available, and this update illustrates that. Specifically, the following items can no longer be redeemed:
- Fimbul Airbike
- Filmbul BYOS Butch
- Faction CSS Tier 1
Note that this update stems from October 12th, so it is already outdated.
Patch
The team released a bunch of economic tweaks last week, which impact strategies throughout!
Below are the notes:
- Updated cargo weights of select products to incentivize more complex supply chains
| Component | Old Weight | New Weight |
| Polymer | 2 | 1 |
| Electronics | 3 | 2 |
| Magnet | 2 | 1 |
| Power Source | 4 | 2 |
| Framework | 2 | 1 |
| Energy Substrate | 5 | 4 |
| Electromagnet | 5 | 4 |
| Radiation Absorber | 10 | 6 |
| Particle Accelerator | 10 | 6 |
- Reduced fuel cost of subwarping by 64%
- Increased toolkit cost per scan by 10x (There will be additional scanning adjustments in the future. Stay tuned.)
- Decreased mining rates by 10% for economic balancing
- Decreased mining ammo and food consumption by 10% to keep R4 consumption per cargo load the same
The SDU Toolkit cost changes sparked quite some debate, with many not loving the change. The team has cautioned that this is just a temporary band-aid, and a complete overhaul of the SDU scanning mechanic is forthcoming in the very near future!
Chris (Head of Game Economy) had the following to say about the patch:
We had multiple goals for this update: reduce scarcity gap between SDUs and r9 as well as encourage more dynamic play for certain ship classes. Part of the reason we increasd Toolkit burn was because that asset was just simply not playing a role in the economy. Yes, more time will be spent moving back and forth between SBs and scanning, but this is intended to reduce the crowding going on around SDUs (r9 is simultaneously more sexy), not necessarily reduce overall SDU production (recall, SDUs are fixed to 1500 per minute). I’ve already said too much but if it is the case that the changes to SDUs were too aggressive, we will certainly monitor and respond accordingly. But we’ll just have to wait and see!
Chris
Stats
A week week, we were proud to have hit 15% of daily Solana transactions. It looked like it could go even higher this past week, but that did not come to fruition. In fact, after a few more days of 13-14%, we fell down a notch to the 7-9% range. This drop was sudden and aligns perfectly with the release of the aforementioned patch, which, of course, affected SDU scanning severely.
Automation Tool Announcement
Community member Ryecoe from the Unseen guild has open-sourced a SAGE Labs automation tool. This in itself is commendable, but what made this all the more interesting is that the Star Atlas team made the following (minor) announcement:
You can now automate your SDU scanning using this open source tool provided by The Unseen guild!
Santi (Community Director)
While the Star Atlas team does not officially endorse this tool, its use is being permitted on a trial basis to test the game systems and the impact on the in-game economy. As the tool has not been audited or reviewed for stated functionality, you are using it at your own risk. Star Atlas supports innovation and development in the gaming ecosystem, and welcomes products that are easily accessible to the whole community, open for use and free of charge.
This, unsurprisingly, led to questions from the community. After all, botting is considered forbidden, or at least at your own risk.
Michael (CEO) clarified that they don’t endorse the tool because they haven’t reviewed or audited, the code. In addition, they do not want to favor any specific team or tool. On the other hand, they do support external development across the ecosystem, so did want to give them a moment in the limelight.
Regarding the nature of the tool, Michael shared that the Unseen team had been upfront about the intention of the tool, before its release. In response to asking questions about how far such tools are allowed to go, and where the limits are with regard to botting, Michael responded:
The release of this tool is a step towards understanding that exact question. @Chris has already developed an algo that will help us identify bots and their impact on the economy and gameplay, but I do want to ensure we aren’t overzealous in our policing of automation tooling too early, because some of these things could lead to significant QOL upgrades for the community. And it saves our team the time of building those systems.
But [the] bottom line [is], we’re experimenting right now.
As we noted, tooling that isn’t game-breaking, extractive, egregious, and open to all players is likely to receive better treatment than something developed for exclusive use.
We still maintain the right to take action against accounts we believe are abusing the game systems.
Michael
CORE – Act 2 Episode 3
CORE’s next issue, #9 (or: Act 2, Episode 3), will be released this week! After last month’s issues with Magic Eden, the plan is to ensure both issues launch on the same day again this month.
On that note, you can acquire issue #8 from Magic Eden only for a few more hours (provided you read this right after we published it)!
The future of CORE on Magic Eden remains unclear at the moment. Michael mentioned previously that this upcoming issue may be the last one to appear on Magic Eden. The team is looking into ways to continue their 2-cover approach going forward.
Breakpoint
Breakpoint is coming up in two weeks! The Community / Atlas Brew Meetup has been finalized, and everyone is encouraged to register on short notice. Both events have limited capacity, particularly the dinner cruise.
Here are the registration links:
- DinnerCruise: Entry 74 EUR / person (Aephia is sponsoring the Lu.ma & Stripe processing fees)
- Drinks & Socializing: Entry is free of charge, but you pay for your own consumption
Keynote
On Thursday, November 2nd, Michael will present a Keynote at the conference. In fact, the Solana team specifically called out the presentation by Star Atlas in their latest round of marketing for Breakpoint.
News Tidbits
We’ve got two small tidbits for you this week:
- The community team set up a new channel on YouTube where they will share short, interesting clips from Atlas Brews and other events. Something to keep an eye on!
- Chip (Director of Game Systems Design) had the following to say on the order of upcoming SAGE changes: “Starbased, combat, land claims is the order I’m expecting with lots of little feature releases in between”.
Sneak Peeks
We did not get that much regarding sneak peeks, but the team did share the finalized model for the VZUS solos with us. To round this issue out, we also throw in two of the meme images made for SAGE Labs that were published by the team!
Note: The last one may be considered NSFW by some.
