Weekly Star Atlas Newsletter #71

Welcome to our 71st 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.

Last week we got a brand new issue of the Atlas Star (#16), a special Atlas Brew, and a very unfortunate glitch in Marketplace pricing. Let’s dive right in!

Marketplace Error

In our previous newsletter, we wrote about the team removing the USDC markets and withdrawing their USDC offers on the Galactic Marketplace over the weekend. This was done as a result of USDC losing its peg as a result of the news that Circle (USDC’s operator) had $3.3 billion of the coin’s backing stored at the Silicon Valley Bank, which had just collapsed. After the US government announced they would back the bank up, USDC slowly regained its peg, and on Monday, March 13th, the team reactivated the USDC markets and re-added their offerings there.

So far, so good! People could once more trade in USDC, and the team made their remaining GAO 1 ship supply, Claim stakes, and CORE comics, available in USDC again as well.

Except, they made a mistake…

The script that re-created the USDC listings contained a major flaw, which resulted in assets that should have cost over $1000, now being available for 1/1000 of their intended price. Even worse, the titan ships (original cost: $5 million), were available for $5 each.

Both community members and the team quickly found out, after which the team removed their wrongfully listed offerings, but not before some of the assets (including the titan ships) had already been sold.

This led the team to freeze those (sold) assets in place and erase their metadata, effectively rendering the assets useless.

The team had the following to say about what caused this error:

Although our investigation (conducted with the assistance of Kudelski Security) is still underway, it appears that a formatting error in a listing script caused prices above 1000 USDC to become truncated. Our internal quality controls did not catch this error before deployment because it was tested on an asset priced at less than 1000 USDC. This error is limited to the listing script for primary sales and does not affect other aspects of the Galactic Marketplace, which otherwise is functioning normally.

Dominic – #announcements (SA Discord)

On Tuesday, the team re-listed the affected assets, at their intended price points.

Atlas Brew – Gary Sanchez Interview

Last week’s Atlas Brew, the community’s theory-crafting show on Discord, was a special one. The community team interviewed ATMTA’s Art Director & Concept Designer, Gary Sanchez. Gary has an extensive track record, having worked for big names in the automobile, movie, and game industries.

During the Brew, the community team & members asked him various questions, and his answers provided good insight into his role at Star Atlas and how a ship gets built. This one is definitely worth a listen!

Progress Report

The latest Atlas Star came with a new Roadmap Report that presented us with a glimpse into where the team members are at with the game’s development.

In short, it looks like the team is getting close to releasing the following over the next few weeks:

• SAGE – Movement Test & Scavenger Hunt
• SCORE – Claim Stake app
• Showroom – R2.1

Let’s zoom in on the Showroom and SAGE teams below!

UE5 – Showroom

The Vehicles and SFX teams have been hard at work on over a dozen ships, with the Airbike, Lowbie, and Opal Jets being (seemingly) prepared for use in-game. The Engineering team has been working on getting the Marketplace integrated in-engine, prototyping the Pearce X4’s hover mechanics (for Ground racing), text chat, character customization (connected to an on-chain PlayerProfile), and voice chat. The Level art team is working on the Ground race track as well as on the Train stations’ interior and exterior.

The Gameplay team has finalized the prototyping stage of the Jetpack, and the Animation team is working on adding the animations for the Jetpack, while also adding additional animations to the character models.

SAGE

The SAGE team seems to prepare for the imminent release of the Movement Test & Scavenger Hunt. They are currently in the polishing phase, with upcoming activities primarily consisting of work on the second SAGE module: Mining & Crafting.

Meanwhile, the Blockchain team has continued work on their simplified UI (dubbed: “Blockchain Playground”), which the team uses to run internal tests against their on-chain programs.

Behind The Scenes Video

Last Friday, the team released a new behind-the-scenes video, highlighting the work in progress on Ground Racing, ship animations, a look at some of the upcoming ship 3D models, ship interior assets, and more! This is definitely worth a watch if you appreciate a glimpse into what the (UE5) team is currently working on!

Work-in-progress Shots

Last week we got another great batch of work-in-progress and behind-the-scenes shots, which you can find below.