Weekly Star Atlas Newsletter #233

Welcome to our 233rd 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.

One week into the SAGE C4 PTR, the team continues to iterate quickly, pushing fixes and improvements while gathering feedback from players. Beyond that, the current promotional sale, including Cultivation Claims, is nearing its end, and the Triad Tournament PIP (#32) is entering its final days.

Let’s dive in!

Promotional Sale

The special sale is ongoing and will remain open for a few more days!

As a reminder, the sale includes the following items, all priced according to the Open Market Operations (OMO) model and discounted by 25%.

Cultivation Claims:

• Tier 1 @ $15 (1,337x)— Bonus: 1x silver 1 crew pack
• Tier 2 @ $75 (400x) — Bonus: 3x gold 1 crew pack
• Tier 3 @ $274 (128x) — Bonus: 1x platinum 5 crew pack
• Tier 4 @ $639 (62x) — Bonus: 2x platinum 5 crew pack + 1x gold 5 crew pack
• Tier 5 @ $1,970 (25x) — Bonus: 6x platinum 5 crew pack

Ships:

• VZUS arma @ $81 (185x)— Bonus: 3x gold 1 crew pack
• Calico Flattop @ $3,050 (20x) — Bonus: 12x platinum 5 crew pack

The numbers so far:

• 3 VZUS arma ships sold
• 0 Calico Flattop ships sold
• 70 Tier 1 Cultivation claims sold
• 29 Tier 2 Cultivation claims sold
• 7 Tier 3 Cultivation claims sold
• 3 Tier 4 Cultivation claims sold
• 0 Tier 5 Cultivation claims sold

SAGE C4 PTR

The SAGE C4 PTR has been running for a little over 1 week, and the team has already pushed many updates and fixes.

This week, we learned a bit more about how PTR feedback is being handled behind the scenes. During last week’s Atlas Brew (#207), John (Product Manager) said that bug reports from the public tracker are being pulled daily into the team’s end-to-end testing system, and that the PTR already has roughly 75% end-to-end user-journey coverage in code. That does not fix the rough edges players are seeing right now, but it does tell us the feedback loop is more structured than it may have looked from the outside.

The Star Atlas Discord, meanwhile, saw the arrival of a bot that allows players to get information on certain often-asked-about topics, such as claim stakes. This is meant to help them get their C4 empire started.

When asked about the functionality of Cultivation Claims when SAGE C4 goes live, Michael (CEO) responded that it should at least support resource production at launch, while the full consumable loop remains uncertain. In other words, it’s not yet clear if the stims and end-products of that loop will already have a purpose in the game on day 1.

DAO Updates

PIP-32 is entering its final days, so if you have not voted yet, be sure to do so before Friday!

PIP-32: Igniting the Star Atlas Triad Tournament – A Super Phoenix Sports Live Esports Event

This proposal seeks funding of the Ecosystem Fund limit (currently 13,576,392 ATLAS) for the production and broadcast of the Star Atlas Triad Tournament in June 2026, a first-ever combined competitive event spanning all three UE5 game modes: Racing Mode (Star Racer), Gun Mode (Star Shooter), Siege Mode (Star Fighter). Funding is to compensate the team only, it is not funding a prize pool.

Structure:

• Requested funding: 13,576,392 ATLAS
• Structure: 1-off PIP
• Voting Opened: Thursday, May 28
• Voting Closes: Thursday, June 11 (end-of-day UTC)

Early results (~10 days in, ~82.1M PVP committed):

• For: 80.7%
• Against: 15.2%
• Abstain: 3.8%

Iris’ Blessing Drawing

This Friday, June 12th, the 8th Iris’ Blessing drawing will take place. That is, if it does not move to the Monday after, as it did the last two times.

Here are the prizes that you can win this time:

• 10x Fimbul ECOS Unibomba
• 10x VZUS solos
• 5x Fimbul Lowbie
• 1x Calico Shipit
• 1x Opal Rayfam
• 1x Ogrika Tursic
• 7x Crew Gold 5
• 10x Crew Gold 1
• 10x Crew Silver 5
• 10x Crew Silver 1
• 5x Crew Plat 5
• 10x Crew Plat 1

News Bits

• Holosim has now settled into post-chapter cleanup. Michael confirmed in Discord that the current chapter is still playable, but there are no rewards or zXP left in it. That follows both the reward correction work we covered in #229 and the zXP cutoff we mentioned in #232. At this point, players can still log in and play around, just not for progression.
• It’s been a while since there was another community-created Star Atlas Checkpoint episode, but this past Saturday, the DAO Casters (5 of the 6) recorded the 4th episode, covering the past 18 months, the present, and the future of Star Atlas development.

Sneak Peek

Now that the VZUS arma is up for sale, its artwork has also appeared on ArtStation. Concept designer Andrian Luchian worked on the ship, and beyond the images currently available on the Galactic Marketplace, he also showed off some early variations towards the end.

Here is one of those shots:

That is it for this week! Thanks for reading!