Weekly Star Atlas Newsletter #220

Welcome to our 220th 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.

After weeks of delays and near-launches, Holosim Chapter 2 finally has a date: Tuesday, March 10th. That wasn’t the only news this week. A public Star Atlas lore wiki is on the horizon, the DAO Casters are known, and the DAO will employ José for the next 6 months!

Let’s dive in!

Holosim – Season 1 Chapter 2

Chapter 2 of Holosim Season 1 has been a long time coming. After yet another last-minute hold last week, Michael (CEO) made it official in Discord: Chapter 2 launches Tuesday, March 10th! There is a countdown on the game page, ticking down to 18:00 UTC on that day.

Good to know: This chapter will come with prizes again, including $10k worth of assets (OMO pricing, meaning close to the actual marketprices).

This week’s Atlas Brew was almost entirely dedicated to Chapter 2, with John (Product Manager) walking through most aspects of the game while sharing some new details.

To begin with, unlike the five weeks the team shared previously, this chapter will run for roughly two months. Rather than one big end-of-season payout, the team is exploring splitting the prize window into shorter 2–4 week intervals, though that hasn’t been finalised yet. Beyond the assets from the $10k prize pool, story completion will earn players a cosmetic badge. Note, however, that there’s no separate prize pool tied to narrative progression this time around.

The Battle Pass is back, and you can get it for a one-time $10 payment for the full chapter duration. It unlocks 10x daily ATLAS rewards, double crew on daily check-ins, a +35% streak bonus, and an exclusive avatar border. Z.ink subscribers get it automatically. No extra steps are needed, no matter which subscription tier you have.

The XP economy rewards bold play: you can earn up to 2 million XP from bases furthest from your Council Star System, so staying home is actively the wrong call.

Automation has been renamed Fleet Directives: players issue commands (mine, transport, patrol) and fleets execute them. Mining now has consequences. NPC threat fleets spawn based on your mining rate on a roughly 10-minute randomised timer. Destroy them, and they drop lootable cargo: R4 materials, fuel, ammo, and toolkits.

Safe zone mining will be net negative. It exists purely for tutorial purposes. Also, SDUs no longer drop in the safe zone from scanning. Every Starbase has NPC-seeded markets where all resources can be bought and sold, though at deliberately unfavourable prices. They’re the economic floor and ceiling, there to prevent total market collapse.

On the fair play side, on-chain asset transfers between accounts are tracked. Accounts found sharing resources across alts face leaderboard removal. Multi-boxing is allowed, but accounts cannot pool resources across wallets.

John also walked through what we can expect in the upcoming chapters: a combat revamp, a crew revamp, possibly crafting, and improvements to scanning. The scanning roadmap is shifting from SDUs to derelict ships and hidden asteroid fields, which may trigger NPC spawn events when discovered.

Lore Wiki

José shared during the Atlas Brew that he plans to launch a public Star Atlas lore wiki very soon, possibly even this week. The wiki covers species, factions, manufacturers, geography, ages, and campaigns, much of which has never been publicly shared before. José plans to use this as the backbone for the lore he is developing for C4, and also sees possibilities for RPG campaigns, books, and novels.

Star Atlas DAO

And that is a wrap! The voting windows for PIP-27 and PIP-28 have closed, and the results are in!

PIP-27: DAO Casters Election: Term 1

Per the requirements of PIP-20: Establishment of the DAO Casters Program — Elected Content Creators for Star Atlas Ecosystem Promotion, this is the election PIP for a structured program of 5 elected content creators dedicated to promoting the entire Star Atlas ecosystem.

The five elected creators, ranked by PVP committed:

• Alice’s Arcade
• [Λ] Neo_AArmstrong [EC]
• [AEP] Funcracker
• ROME | Winston
• odvb

Congratulations to all five content creators!

PIP-28: Temporary DAO Funding to Preserve Core Lore, Design, and Community Functions

In an effort to boost our runway and ensure Star Atlas can fulfill the roadmap and deliver the releases planned for this year, ATMTA (the leading developer of Star Atlas) was forced to make painful cuts to its talent. Unfortunately, my position as a lore writer and community team member was terminated as part of this process.

There were 145 votes cast, with a total of 143M PVP committed:

• For: 92.7%
• Against: 5.8%
• Abstain: 1.5%

This means José’s salary will be paid by the DAO for the next 6 months, allowing him to continue his work on the lore of Star Atlas.

News Bits

Here are some smaller bits of news to wrap up this week’s issue:

• Michael (CEO) answered a question in the #foundation-room, noting that the internal target for the end of the O.RIGIN campaign is April 2026. He immediately added that he could not provide a confidence level on that, however.
• Michael also shared in the #foundation-room that they are shifting the remaining team into a full OpenClaw infrastructure, saying that “Output is going to increase substantially.”
• The 0% fee promotion that launched alongside the OMO strategy in December 2025 is done. The standard 6% topline fee is back, with ATLAS locker fee discounts reinstated.
• Chris (VP of Game Economy) had to cancel last week’s Economic Forum due to unexpected schedule changes. He apologised for the short notice.
• This Friday will see another round of Iris’ Blessing raffles take place! You have until Friday to accumulate more tickets by joining live shows/events.

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