Weekly Star Atlas Newsletter #198

Welcome to our 198th 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.

This past week was lighter on official announcements, but thanks to Jose, we do have some exciting alpha to share on Unreal Engine 5 and a new game mode currently in development. Beyond that, a fresh PIP has gone live for voting, and there are a few smaller updates worth noting.

Let’s dive right in!

Galia SP Roadmap

During last week’s Lore Keepers meeting, Jose (Lead Lore Penguin) dropped a surprising update! He and Brad, along with a small team, are building a vertical slice of emergent gameplay for the Galia game mode in UE5.

This will take the form of a story-driven, single-player campaign featuring NPC encounters, mission dialogues, mining, scanning, crafting, combat, exploration, and more. If you’ve seen the Season 0 introduction campaign demo at the Impact Summit, you’ll have a good sense of the style and structure of these missions.

The first mission takes place on a brand-new map and is steeped in MUD lore. You’ll join the Holy Servants, a MUD special forces unit trained by both the military and the church, as they set out to recover dangerous artifacts in the High-Risk Zone.

Your adventure begins on Hecteria, a volatile jungle planet on the MUD-Ustur border that has mysteriously gone silent. What starts as an investigation quickly turns into a fight for survival after a Jorvik pirate ambush.

Players who complete the first mission will unlock access to procedurally generated quests, offering extended playtime. The team hopes to showcase a playable version in December, ahead of the holidays.

Keep in mind: this is still a single-player experience. Multiplayer is planned, but no timeline has been shared yet. On top, rewards like those present in UE5 today will be absent; however, those who complete the initial mission may earn a unique, custom skin.

Star Atlas DAO: PIP-19 is Live!

For the first time in nearly three months, a new Polis Improvement Proposal is up for voting.

PIP-19 is a new kind of (comprehensive) PIP, concocted by the Star Atlas Council to allow funding requests that lie outside of the limits set forth by PIP-4 (which established the Ecosystem Fund). It resolves this barrier by allowing proposals to be split into smaller sub-PIPs to proceed. PIP-19 is made up of 4 parts, of which the first part is now live, along with the overarching framework.

PIP-19: Funding Independent Economic Research and Maintenance of Critical Data Resources

This proposal requests 44,800,000 ATLAS over the period of 360 days in funding from the Star Atlas Ecosystem Fund to provide investors and players with transparent economic and financial information surrounding the Star Atlas Ecosystem. This amount will be distributed in four 11,200,000 ATLAS increments over four sub-PIPs, each with a span of 90 days. The funding is meant to ensure that the Star ATLAS community continues to have economic data resources, even in the face of structural breaks in data resources and in the face of uncertainty from rising costs.

• Requested funding: 44.8M ATLAS over 360 days
• Structure: 4 sub-PIPs (11.2M ATLAS each, spanning 90 days)
• Author: Steven Sabol
• Voting Opened: Monday, September 22nd
• Voting Closes: Sunday, October 5th (end-of-day UTC)

Early results (within 24 hours of launch, ~24M PVP committed):

• Yes: 1.48%
• No: 98.52%
• Abstain: 0%

News Bits

A few smaller updates from last week:

• New System Status Channel: The Star Atlas Discord now features a dedicated channel showing real-time status updates for the Galactic Marketplace, Lockers, SAGE, Holosim, and UE5.
• Crew Pack Raffles: Participants of the Galia Game Night can now win Crew Cards in addition to enjoying UE5 gameplay with the community.
• Behind the Scenes in UE5: The team shared how some of the in-game voice prompts were created. Watch the short video on X.

From the Engineering Bay

Chip (VP of Game Product) continues his streak of near-daily development updates, now running close to two months. Here are his latest posts:

That is it for this week! Thanks for reading!