Weekly Star Atlas Newsletter #69

Welcome to our 69th 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.

Another week that was light on news is behind us, but there are once again some tidbits from the foundation-room channels worth sharing!

For those of you unfamiliar with the foundation-room channels: If you are a Discord Nitro subscriber, you get boosts that you can use to boost servers you appreciate. If you boost the Star Atlas Discord server, you will get access to two hidden channels: One for direct communication with the team and founders, and one to discuss the information shared with other community members.

Let’s dive in!

SAGE – Movement Test on Mainnet!

Last week we’ve learned that the Movement test (& Scavenger hunt) will be immediately playable on the Solana mainnet! Earlier, the plan was to roll out SAGE on the Solana devnet first, but -as clarified by Michael (CEO)- for the movement test, there is no need to start on the devnet first. Of course, this also makes the scavenger hunt an easier affair, as everything you will find during the test will be added to your mainnet inventory right away.

Playing a game on devnet is not a very user-friendly endeavor as it would require players to switch the network in their wallet. The downside of this is that you can not use any mainnet services in the meantime, as that would require you to switch back, breaking your connection to the devnet game.

For that reason, it’s great news that the first module is playable on the mainnet! However, this likely won’t mean that future expansions of SAGE will not still go live on devnet first, especially with updates that introduce economic activity to the gameplay.

Michael had the following to say on this:

[…] Good chance new programs release to devnet first, particularly as we get the economic loops online. Those “transactions” have potential for material impact to the future in-game economy, and therefore likely require a more delicate approach.

Jupiter Integration

This is really news from two weeks ago, but last week we forgot to include it: Star Atlas and Jupiter Aggregator have established a partnership to improve the user-friendliness of the web3 gaming experience.

A direct link to the Jupiter Aggregator service has been added to the Wallet section of the Star Atlas Galactic Marketplace. The idea is that this will enable users to quickly exchange (almost) any token in their wallet [to Atlas] and get quickly back to playing Star Atlas. Jupiter being an aggregator of several Solana DEXs, of course, means that the exchange rate should be pretty competitive.

Volant Station Showroom

There was not really any news concerning the Showroom last week, but we did get a few nice work-in-progress images from Danny (CPO):

R2.2 – Ground Racing

R3 – Warp Gate and surroundings

The warp gate and surrounding area are currently being refined by a 3rd party co-creation studio, named Sentient Studios. While the showroom area is visible in the shots below, this studio has been given a stripped-down scene, since more detail was not required for their work. The shots below were originally meant to showcase their progress to the team.

For those interested: Danny clarified that Sentient Studios did not create the models, but has instead been tasked to work on the surface materials of the metal parts jutting out from the landscapes toward the warp gate.

That concludes this week’s newsletter! Thanks for reading!