Weekly Star Atlas Newsletter #115

Welcome to our 115th newsletter on Star Atlas! This weekly newsletter, published by Aephia Industries, focuses entirely on the development of this ambitious game. Here, we try to aggregate all the newsworthy tidbits revealed [mainly by the team] throughout the past week.

We’ve officially entered the second month of the year 2024, and the team has launched its highly anticipated DAC Platform! Exactly 3 years ago, the team (only a handful of people) published their Whitepaper and shared their vision with the world. Since then, dozens of DACs (aka guilds) have been created, but there was no way to officially register these with Star Atlas. Those days are now in the past!

This release was not all, however. The team also announced a brand new ship, the Ogrika Ruch. When it goes on sale, it will do so along with 3 exclusive skins! And there is something special happening with those skins.

So, enough talk, let’s dive in!

DACs are Live!

Last Thursday, February 1st (February 2nd for Europeans), the team officially launched version 0 of their DAC Platform! This has been a long-awaited and much-anticipated release!

Up until last week, several dozen guilds had already been created, but only in name. By far, most of them existed solely on Discord servers, and the community sort of agreed that this was the way to do it.

Now that the team has launched their official registration, they are opening the doors to a more seamless discovery process for Star Atlas enthusiasts and incorporating DAC affiliations in-game!

Now, this first release was a little bumpy. The team put some hotfixes in, but it may still require some refreshes before you find yourself able to join a DAC. And, with this being the V0 release, it’s also very limited at the moment. The current features are available:

• Everyone can create their own DAC (if they choose to)
• Every DAC has a profile page with a description and user-selectable list of tags
• All registered players can join DACs. You can join more than one (though your primary DAC may disapprove)
• DAC owners can approve membership requests, changing the member’s role from Applicant to Member
• There are currently only two roles available, which are auto-assigned (“applicant” & “member”)

These roles will be much expanded in the future. This will, among other things, allow the DAC creator to share the burden of member approval (a pretty tedious process at present) with hand-picked members.

Note: If you want to see what the process of joining a DAC is like, watch Metaverse Explorer giving it a go!

Rocky, but Solid Start

As alluded to earlier, the launch of the DAC Platform did not go as smoothly as one would have hoped. Despite this, a surprisingly high number of DACs have been registered meanwhile. Michael (CEO) stated on X.com that 236 DACs registered in the first (roughly) 24 hours, alone!

Meanwhile, the team has been gathering feedback and appears to have started work on smoothening and improving the experience.

New Ship: Ogrika Ruch

On X.com, the team announced the upcoming release of a new ship: the Ogrika Ruch! The Ruch is a single-seater XXS Racer ship from the Ogrika line (known for ships like the famous Thripid but also the slightly bigger X-Smal Niruch transporter).

The Ogrika Ruch will be available to purchase today, on Monday, the 5th of February!

Contrary to the Fimbul Sledbarge, released two weeks ago, Chip (Director of Game Systems Design) has not yet updated the ship specification spreadsheet.

Unfortunately, pricing was not yet known at the time of publication. Note that secondary market sales will not be allowed on the Galactic Marketplace for 30 days.

Limited Edition Skins

With the launch of the new XXS Racer, the team is also doing something new this time. You will be able to purchase skins for the Ogrika Ruch right away as well. And there is not just one – there are three different skins being made available today. But there is more to these skins! For starters, they can only be bought for a limited time: the next 7 days (starting February 5th)! But what really makes them stand out is that they can not be purchased using USDC or ATLAS!

Jupiter Skin

To commemorate the launch of Jupiter’s token $JUP and the big airdrop that accompanied it, the team is launching a special, limited edition skin that can only be acquired using $JUP.

For those unfamiliar with Jupiter, they are the leading Decentralized Exchange (DEX) aggregator on Solana. You’ve likely used their services if you ever exchanged one token for another. The team has also incorporated Jupiter’s services into their own products, to enable people to easily swap to ATLAS.

Puri Skins

As if the Jupiter skin was not already a surprise, the team revealed that they will also sell two limited-edition Puri skins! At first glance, you may think that these skins are themed around the cute(?) pet that was revealed a while back, but that is not the case here. The skins are based on the community-launched meme token of the same name!

Unlike their Jupiter counterpart, the Puri skin comes in two editions: an eye-popping pink variant and a more subdued (but still very cool-looking) black one. Like the Jupiter skin, you will need a small bag of $PURI tokens instead of ATLAS or USDC if you want to acquire one or both.

Skin Pricing

When this newsletter was published, the exact price of the skins was not yet known. So far, the team has only communicated that they did not want to share the price in advance due to the volatility of the tokens (especially PURI). These will go on sale in tandem with the Ogrika Ruch ship itself!

Joni Award Nominations

Though the Joni Awards (see last week’s issue) will not take place until March 1st, the deadline for submitting nominations is this Friday, February 9th!

As with the voting phase that comes next, the names submitted by the community will count for 20% of the weight, with the other 80% coming from a panel of judges from the team.

You can cast your votes here!

Purigotchi

Ordinarily, we do not share news on community projects, but now that PURI has received the team’s attention, it makes sense to share some of the news from the PURI front as well. Some of the community members who have been helping out the token are currently working on a game, and this past Sunday (2-4-24), the team responsible for the game launched the website, paper, and a 24-hour long tech demo!

As information is scarce, it is best to join the official Discord if you are interested in finding out more.