Weekly Star Atlas Newsletter #197

Welcome to our 197th newsletter on Star Atlas! This weekly newsletter, published by Aephia Industries, focuses entirely on the development of this ambitious game. Here, we attempt to aggregate all the newsworthy tidbits revealed, primarily by the team, throughout the past week.

It’s been a relatively quiet week in Star Atlas, though not without highlights! The Atlas Brew brought some fresh revelations, the first INK drop has landed, and Chip shared his latest round of developer updates. To wrap it up, the sneak peek section is back with some Calico Scud eyecandy!

Let’s dive in!

C4 Revelations

This past week, during the Atlas Brew, Joseph from the team, alongside our very own Viktor, joined the Community Team on the Brew to discuss the recently released SAGE Editor Suite.

It was no surprise that some C4 revelations were shared there, and we did our best to list them for your reading pleasure below. That said, it was an interesting one, so consider checking the recording as well!

Before we kick things off, the following definitions are used below:

• Raw Materials: Things you mine
• Final Components: Usables, the final step in a production chain (e.g., ship components)
• Ingredients: Anything directly contributing to a Final Component (there are 150 of these planned, currently)
• Components: Anything between Raw Materials and Ingredients

Using these definitions, the production flow looks like this:
Raw materials -> Components -> Ingredients -> Final component

Now, without further ado, here is what we’ve learned:

Faction Specific Resources

• There will be eight faction-specific resources within each faction’s initial territory. Three of these will exclusively be used for cosmetic improvements only. The remaining five will focus on the Faction’s core strengths.
• Certain ship configs will rely on these 15 faction-specific resources (5 per faction), meaning that to craft them, a faction would need to:
  • Conquer systems that contain the required resource from another faction
  • Trade the resource, or any intermediate component, on the galactic marketplace
• The team is considering making these resources mandatory for crafting specific ship weapons and/or countermeasures that deal a certain type of damage. Perhaps a faction is unable to counter a particular type of damage unless it gets its hands on the resources required to craft the related ship components.

New Players / Small Players

A lot of care is taken to ensure that new players, or those with only a few assets, can have a fulfilling game experience. To this end:

• Of the top 10 most used resources (in final goods), eight can be mined with a T1 claim stake. This means that (for example) your T1 Copper Miner will be highly relevant in the game economy. It will also stay that way throughout the game, as Copper is still needed even to craft components for Titan-class ships.
• Most of the XXS ship components rely solely on resources that can be mined with a T1 claim stake. This gives new/small players something to work towards, a clear goal they can achieve by themselves. There is an immediate use for the resources they mined.

Claim Stakes

• Claim Stakes have a limit on how far you can go into any production chain. There is no claim stake building for anything taking more than two production steps to build. For example, you can go from Copper Ore to Copper Wire, but you can not get past that on a Claim Stake. You would need to go crafting at the Starbase (Habs)
• This means the game won’t allow you to automate the creation of any final component that is used in a ship config.
• Higher-tier claim stakes are needed to access all resources available on a planet. Council rank plays a role here as well.
• A Claim Stake T1 has access to approximately 60-80% of all resources. Sometimes, a T5 claim stake only opens up a single resource. 

Asteroid Mining

• All of the resources available on planets in a star system will also be available in the Asteroid belt, albeit at a lower richness. In other words, every resource available through claim stakes will also be accessible to mining fleets.
• Miner fleets will also be able, perhaps more importantly, to mine asteroids in other systems and asteroids that are free-floating in space.

Miscelaneous

• INK will be an ingredient for some of the recipes. It could work similarly to the faction-specific resources, providing a bonus (through its end-products) to those who possess it, while limiting access to effective counters for those who do not.
• Drones are OP at the moment (according to Danny), but this may change, of course.

News Bits

Two more small tidbits from last week:

• The long-awaited INK drop occurred this past Wednesday. If you played UE5 and earned INK there, go claim it in your Inventory on the Star Atlas Play-portal.
• The team had some fun last week by jumping into Holosim with a “pirate” fleet and causing havoc. Particularly, players close to their safe zone borders (but just outside of it) had to suffer. In the future, the plan is to introduce true NPC fleets. This event could be regarded as a showcase of what to expect.

From the Engineering Bay

Chip (VP of Game Product) has been posting daily development updates for well over a month. Below you can find his new additions from the past week:

Sneak Peeks

It’s been a while since we had some new art to share, but thanks to RenderDock Studio completing (and sharing) some nice renders of the Calico Scud ship, we’ve got some for you!

Note that RenderDock also features some cool video clips, so it’s definitely worth checking out their ArtStation page! It looks like we may expect a new Calico Scud beauty video to be released soon.

That is it for this week! Thanks for reading, and until the next!