Weekly Star Atlas Newsletter #117

Welcome to our 117th 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.

A short and sweet issue this week, as news and reveals from the team have quieted down a bit. Of course, we’re getting close to the big Community Week event (Feb 26 – March 1), and it’s widely expected that there will be some interesting announcements (if not actual releases) during that week! What we do have for this week is a new JNavigating Star Atlas episode, Joni nominations to vote on, and more DAC stats!

Let’s dive in!

Navigating Star Atlas – Vehicles

Last week Tuesday, the community team released the third episode in their Navigating Star Atlas series. In this series, Dominic (Sr. Community Manager) virtually sits down with a team member. As such, it provides a more in-depth, behind-the-scenes perspective on Star Atlas game development.

For this third episode, Dominic sat down with Gary Sanchez (Vehicle Art Director). In the interview, the two discuss Gary’s background and how the team approaches working on the many ships and their in-game manufacturers.

If you missed the first two episodes, here are direct links:

• Episode 1 – Danny Floyd (Chief Product Officer)
• Episode 2 – Hanno Hagedorn (Character Art Director)

Joni Voting Open

Now that the Joni nominations submission period has closed and the team has picked the official nominations for each of the 9 categories, voting is officially open!

Voting closes on Monday, February 26, at 17:00 UTC! So make sure to get your vote in before that time.

Note that, like the nominations round, the community team’s vote will represent 80% of the outcome, with the community’s total vote coming in at 20%. While this may not be a for-the-community-by-the-community award show anymore (unlike last year), everyone is still encouraged to go forth and cast their vote!

Categories

For your convenience, we’ve listed the categories and their nominees below:

Community Member of the Year:

• Arktype
• Siggy
• Yaawn
• Ghazinor

Content Creator of the Year:

• Beyond the Horizon 2620
• Metaverse Nomads
• Metaverse Explorer
• Siggy

Most Entertaining Star Atlas Video of the Year:

• Atlas Theory’s “The Moment Before”
• Siggy’s Combat Racing Video
• Beyond the Horizon 2620’s “Star Atlas and the Future of the Metaverse!”
• Cagyjan’s “Flying all 49 Spaceships”

Best Educational Video of the Year:

• Metaverse Explorer’s “STAR ATLAS GAMEPLAY MANUAL in 13 MINUTES!”
• Star Atlas Froggies “Tutoriel SAGE LABS (Complet en Français)”
• Beyond the Horizon 2620’s “Star Atlas: SCORE VS SAGE – Lab Assistant Tutorial”
• Beyond the Horizon 2620’s “Star Atlas Throwdown: Score VS Sage (Part 1)”

Best Community Tool of the Year:

• SAI Fleet Composer
• Aephia Flipside Dashboard
• SLY Labs Assistant
• Eveeye Interactive Map

Community Helper of the Year:

• Torinder
• Ghazinor
• Odvb
• Morpheus (Star Atlas Froggies)

Most Knowledgeable of the Year:

• Yaawn
• Funcracker
• Eoganacht
• Prometheus

Best Star Atlas IP Project of the Year:

• Galia Merchants
• Galia Art Station
• Atlas Grace
• AEP Life Form

Best In-game Star Atlas Photo of the Year:
(as we did not ask permission, please check out the form)

DAC Stats

Last week, we highlighted the DAC analytics dashboard created by Steven Sabol. This week, we’ll go over some of the new DAC stats gathered by Aephia’s Data Runners. Since DAC registration went live, they have created two new dashboards:

• DACS – SAGE Mining Operations
  Here, you can see a full breakdown of the mining operations per DAC. The table is sorted by total resources mined, making no distinction between the resources’ rarity, hardness, or value. Fortunately, all the individual resources are listed in the same table, and you can use the special sorting columns on the right to sort based on your preference.
  
• DACS – Asset Ownership
  Perhaps the most requested metric since the launch of the DAC registration is VWAP ownership per guild. Note that besides the total VWAP, this table also lists the total VWAP in fighter ships, the total VWAP in SAGE and SCORE (Faction Fleet), Claim Stake VWAP, and more!

Short News Bits

• We mostly do not cover community projects, but we want to make an exception for Atlas Grace this week.
  In the wake of the sale of the limited edition PURI skin for the Ogrika Ruch, both the team and NeoSwap have donated 10% of their respective proceeds from the sale of the PURI skin to Atlas Grace, a community-ran initiative operated by well-known community member Arktype. He is putting his Star Atlas assets to good use by donating a portion of the tokens earned to various charities.
• The COPA deadline for DACs to submit their pitch deck/presentation is looming. Guilds have until Wednesday, February 21st, 17:00 UTC (12 PM ET) to finalize their submission. Only 8 teams will be allowed to present on stage during the COPA ’24 on February 29th.
• There will not be an Atlas Brew this Wednesday, February 21st, because the community team will be going over the submissions in order to be able to announce the 8 finalists at the end of the day.

Sneak Peek

Unfortunately, there is little in the way of sneak peeks, but the team did release a short teaser video of the Pearce T1 Titan ship in a whitebox state in the Showroom.

That is for this week! Thanks for reading!