Weekly Star Atlas Newsletter #142

Welcome to our 142nd 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.

This past week was all about Crew! The snapshot took place, the airdrop almost took place, and this week, people will start opening up their Crew Packs with the custom opening experience the team has created! Packs will go on sale this Tuesday, and the team has been leaking Crew art left and right to drum up hype!

But that is not all there was going on! The second and third rounds of POLIS Improvement Proposals have been approved, the first phase of the Council Elections is underway, and the IMPACT Summit is drawing near!

Let’s dive in!

Crew Airdrop

Last week, August 8th, the team made a snapshot, capturing the whereabouts of all ships on the Solana chain. The goal was to airdrop single-crew Crew Packs and a Component bundle for each ship the very next day, on August 9th. Though the snapshot was taken successfully, unfortunately, the team ran into issues the next day with the Airdrop.

Airdropping many thousands of Component bundles and over 2.5 million crew packs was more difficult than the team had imagined beforehand.

Possibly, though unconfirmed, the increase in the amount of Solana transactions had something to do with this, as the chain has seen an increased load since last week as a different product relaunched that is incentivizing users to perform a lot of transactions.

The team merely stated the following on Friday evening (US):

Hey everyone, just an update on the airdrop. It needs a couple more days to cook. We’re parsing through a massive amount of data, and it’s taking longer than expected. Thank you for your patience and we’ll keep you updated.

It is unclear if the team will manage to send these out before the sale starts on August 13th, though that does seem to be their goal.

Crew Sneak Peeks

The team released a few sneak leaks, which we’ve included below:

And lastly, the team shared a video showing off a number of different Crew Cards:

Crew Sale & Opening

Crew packs will go on sale on Tuesday, August 13th (the day after this issue’s publication)! The team is selling three different packs on their Galactic Marketplace, each with a different rarity distribution of the Crew Cards contained.

The three packs and their Crew Card rarity distribution are:

• Silver Crew Pack – 25 USDC
  • Common: 86.57%
  • Uncommon: 8.66%
  • Rare: 4.33%
  • Epic: 0.43%
  • Legendary: 0.009%
  • Anomaly: 0.00004%
• Gold Crew Pack – 37.5 USDC
  • Common: 0%
  • Uncommon: 86.84%
  • Rare: 8.68%
  • Epic: 4.34%
  • Legendary: 0.130%
  • Anomaly: 0.00043%
• Platinum Crew Pack – 50 USDC
  • Common: 0%
  • Uncommon: 0%
  • Rare: 90.09%
  • Epic: 9.01%
  • Legendary: 0.901%
  • Anomaly: 0.0045%

Note that the team will sell these 50/50 in ATLAS and USDC!

Opening

The same day that the sales go live, the new Crew Cards section on the Play portal will open up as well. Here, Crew Pack owners will be able to open their packs. We wrote about this experience extensively in our new Crew Guide (see below!)

Trading

Last week, the team officially announced that they partnered with Tensor to enable the trading of Crew Cards. While the team is working on developing a new version of the Galactic Marketplace that supports true NFTs, crew owners will have to resort to this 3rd party marketplace to exchange Crew Cards.

Crew & Component Guides

This past week, we published an extensive guide on Crew Cards, which is worth checking out if you want to learn more about your new Crew members’ (future) capabilities.

It also goes into detail on the Opening process and SAGE and has a section on the Faction Leader promo and Component de-bundling.

Furthermore, the team wrote an extensive article on the Ship Components & Configuration, which really is required reading for everyone.

Crew Collabs

Last week, we went over the collaborations the team had set up with other Web3 projects on Solana to market their Crew Packs. Meanwhile, the team added a few more projects to their list, which we posted below (in full – bold are new).

• Mad Lads
• Superteam
• Wilder World
• Oogy
• Good Game Hunters
• Degen Ape Academy
• Nyan Heroes
• Metaplex
• Tensor
• Genopets
• Aurory DAO

Check out this thread on X for a live list of projects the team is collaborating on and more information.

Discord Crew Names

During the last Atlas Brew, the team announced they are honoring the top 100 active chatters on their Discord by taking their names, adapting those to fit the lore, and adding them to the naming tables the Crew Cards minted get their name from.

In other words, whenever you open a Crew Pack, every card minted has a chance to come with a name that somehow looks familiar. Now you know why! Also, consider contacting the community member in question, as they may want to take the card off your hands.

Governance

As expected, last week, PIPs 3, 4, and 5 were approved by the community by 87%, 85%, and 79.6%, respectively, all three with a roughly 20% participation rate. This means that:

• Council self-nominations are open until August 20th
• Proposals can now be submitted to request funding from the Ecosystem fund
• The Naabathon will be receiving an extra allocation from the DAO’s treasury to the prize pool, totaling 6 million ATLAS

If you want to contribute to Star Atlas and its DAO and run for Councilmember, be sure to register before August 20th!

IMPACT – Star Atlas Summit

You can now officially register for the official Star Atlas conference (Breakpoint side event) in Singapore on September 21st! If you are coming, make sure to register so you are not missing out on anything. During the IMPACT Summit, you can expect the following:

• Exciting team presentations
• A tournament featuring a new multiplayer map with prizes
• A chance for attendees to grab a rare ship skin
• Meet Star Atlas guilds and IP projects
• Meet team & community members
• Star Atlas & Community merch!

If you can not attend, know that the team will be live-streaming the entire day!

You’ve reached the end of this week’s issue! Thank you for reading!