Weekly Star Atlas Newsletter #230

Welcome to our 230th 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 week’s update offers a clearer view of where both Holosim and SAGE C4 are heading. The team continues to rework combat responsiveness in Holosim while also teasing upcoming marketplace and drone systems. The biggest news, by far, is that work is underway to introduce regional governance for SAGE C4. Beyond that, the first five players for the inaugural Embercoil campaign have now officially been selected.

Let’s dive in!

Holosim

Holosim received a new patch, v1.2.28, which continues the recent push to make combat and the command view easier to read. Enemy fleets are now arranged by faction in combat view, command view got a manual refresh button to re-spread cluttered sectors, and several effect-budget and rendering issues were addressed, so dense battles stop dropping lasers and impacts. That continues the combat-reliability work we covered a few weeks ago and aligns neatly with what the team later shared in Atlas Brew 204.

Furthermore, John (Product Manager) shared last week that the current prisoner-of-war mechanic is being removed entirely. Instead, if a starbase flips while your fleets are docked there, those fleets will simply be destroyed and towed to the Central Space Station. That is a much cleaner rule than the current limbo state, even if it is also the harsher outcome.

That Brew also made the combat direction much clearer. John said the team moved away from hiding chain and indexer delay behind long missile animations and is now rebuilding combat around more direct RPC reads so damage, retaliation, and destruction show up almost immediately.

Because of this, John is now experimenting with laser weapons instead. He shared a short video, demonstrating this:

John also said the team wants to test instanced combat in a development environment before tying another meaningful Holosim round to combat leaderboards. That helps explain why John later said the command-view upgrades are almost done, but another Holosim round may not make sense if C4 PTR is too close. In short, it looks like we shouldn’t expect a phase 2 for Chapter 2 anytime soon, if at all.

We also got an update on what the next substantial Holosim release is supposed to include once combat feels good enough. Jacob showed early marketplace screens, explained that crew packs should go straight into inventory rather than open like loot boxes, and outlined the first three planned drones: the Calico Med Drone for repair boosts, the Opal Wamp for shield regeneration, and the Fimbul Naga for faster attack cadence and higher DPS.

Lastly, John also shared that the combat work being done right now for Holosim will feed back into SAGE C4. All this experimentation will directly result in combat feeling better from the get-go when C4 goes live.

Holosim Changelog

Below is the changelog for the patch we received last week:

v1.2.28

• Combat view layout – enemy fleets are now arranged by faction, making the battlefield easier to read at a glance
• Command view refresh – a new refresh button re-spreads fleets when sectors get visually cluttered
• Effect reliability – lasers, missiles, and impacts are less likely to get dropped during dense battles
• Cross-sector attacks – incoming attacks from outside the viewed sector now render as edge streaks instead of disappearing
• Beam tracking – lasers should no longer appear to fire from empty space when fleet positions update mid-shot
• Diagnostics – more behind-the-scenes telemetry was added for dropped volleys and exhausted effect pools

SAGE C4

Last week’s Atlas Brew (#204) had a special guest! Jacob (CTO) joined to shed more light on SAGE C4 (among other tidbits, such as the team’s use of AI). Or rather, he shared some light on what might go live soon after C4’s launch!

Jacob shared that he has been working on prototyping the 3rd layer of the POLIS-based governance: Regional governance. This system will allow players to allocate Polis Voting Power (PVP) to specific regions in order to influence things like crafting fees and local policy. This feature is officially in the pipeline for C4, and that is great news for those who have been asking to see governance finally make its way in-game! The initial 2021 White Paper already described that POLIS would be used for the Star Atlas DAO, plus the in-game Faction, and Regional DAOs. It is great to see another layer of this 3-tiered governance system being in the works!

Lastly, Jacob provided a bit more clarity around testing. The next milestone is a closed beta phase with selected testers under NDA. After most bugs have been ironed out, the PTR will then go live on the z.ink testnet.

Embercoil RPG

The deadline for the community to vote on their preferred 5 players of the inaugural Star Atlas Table-top Roleplaying Game (TTRPG), dubbed Embercoil, expired a week ago on May 11th. However, because there was only a few votes’ difference between the names for positions 4-7, José (Lead Lorewriter and Game Master) decided to do a quick 48-hour round 2 to select the last 2 members.

In the end, that meant the 5 players have now been selected (in order of votes received):

• Saint-Just
• Lerinor
• Atlas Theory
• Dinarei
• Bohemian

The first meeting of the group took place this past Friday, during which José shared the ins and outs of the system and the campaign. The players have since started working on their characters, and we’ll have to wait and see how quickly the group can kick off this much-anticipated campaign!

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