Welcome to our 64th newsletter on Star Atlas! This weekly newsletter is published by Aephia Industries and focuses entirely on Star Atlas. Here we try to aggregate all the newsworthy tidbits that were dropped by the team throughout the past week.
The past week has been a quiet one. No reveals came from the team, and no public appearances or new articles have manifested. Well, that is not entirely true, the team did post a second (text) update to the Epic Games Store. There is nothing new here, but it’s well worth the read. Meanwhile, January is nearing its end, and in February, the team is expected to shed more light on what to expect from them this year.
It looks like the first step in this direction will come through a Townhall this Friday (February 3rd). The team seems confident this date will work out, but we are still awaiting official confirmation. So keep an eye out!
Let’s dive into the few tidbits last week had to offer!
Cosmic Overture Ends
Tomorrow, January 31st, marks the end of the Cosmic Overture, the name the team gave to phase two of the Golden Era: Startup Sequence. During this promotional-sale period, the team sold their first Claim Stakes, and Central Space Station (CSS) Land Plots.
Michael (CEO) shared that the remaining inventory will stay online, but no longer will special perks be given to anyone who buys either item after January 31st.
As a reminder, these are/were the perks:
Claim Stakes: Claim Stakes bought from the team during the Cosmic Overture will get a Mining Drill, and Power Plant airdropped to their account soon after January has ended.
Land Sale:
- ALL land plots bought from the team during the Cosmic Overture come with: a hab(itat), crafting stations, indoor/outdoor paint, ship skin, commemorative badge, and priority access to land selection and commercial plot sales,
- Additionally:
- Tier 1 – Tier 5 come with Ships
- Tier 3 – Tier 5 come with Pet Houses
- Tier 4 and Tier 5 come with Sculptures
SAGE
During these past few weeks, many in the community have wondered when we would hear more news about SAGE. The request for screenshots, or even in-game videos, came up a few times in the Foundation-room channel on Discord, and this is what Michael had to say on the topic:
The reason we haven’t been sharing SAGE gameplay content is that the front end is still largely in early development with low fidelity assets. A lot of the work that took place last year, beyond multiple iterations of game design to get to what we felt would be an enjoyable product, was foundational backend tech development. Building out the on-chain programs for movement, coordinates, inventory, fleet management, player profile, mining, crafting, and combat systems. These are all essentially feature complete and in audit. We also built an MMO game server called StarComm which enables orchestration of game state with the blockchain. And a blockchain indexer, which I referenced at Breakpoint, with the working project title of Fuzzy Lemur. This all took monumental effort to build, doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world, and consumed a lot of time. We have had a bit of a bottleneck with front end devs capable of building in playCanvas, but it’s all coming together. Unfortunately, the UI is going to be about the last thing we can share, though it’s what people will be most inspired by.
– Michael Wagner (CEO)
Volant Station
To close out this short newsletter, here is a small thing that went unnoticed by most: The team changed the name of the large in-game structure in the showroom from Volant Studio to Volant Station. As this structure was also the namesake of the Volant Studio Showroom, the name of the UE5 game, it remains to be seen how the team will refer to the UE5 game going forward.
This change was undoubtedly influenced by the inclusion of an in-game train in path 2.1, connecting this building to other points of interest on the map.
