Welcome to our 75th 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.
We have an exciting week behind us! We got a brand new on-chain release, airdrops, and more information on SAGE and the Roadmap. In addition, the team released a brand new edition of the Atlas Star, which aims to shed light on the Galactic Supply Chain and the importance of freight shipping in the Star Atlas universe! But we’ll kick things off with the big news from last week: Pablo Quiroga (Co-founder & CRO) leaving the team all of a sudden. Let’s dive in!
Pablo Quiroga leaves ATMTA
Last week Tuesday, we finally got official confirmation from Michael (CEO) concerning the departure of one of their co-founders, Pablo Quiroga. He did not really want to go into detail, but confirmed that the news we’d heard was indeed the truth. Below you can find the full statement:
Hello all, I’m aware there is a lot of discussion surrounding Pablo’s departure. I can confirm he is no longer with the company, which was effective as of March 31. I would like to keep the reasons for his departure private and wish him all the best going forward. The transition after he left was straightforward and natural: I have been taking a more direct role in leading our revenue department, which includes marketing and growth strategies. There haven’t been any interruptions in our day-to-day operations, and I am focused on empowering a culture of excellence and creativity in the department and beyond. I maintain total confidence in the path ahead for Star Atlas, and I am genuinely excited to share what we’ve been working on with you all.
Michael Wagner (CEO)
Faction Claims
Last week, we discussed Faction Claims and how that new feature might go live sooner, rather than later. Fast forward one week, and this has not become a reality! On Wednesday, the team released the companion program to Faction Fleet (SCORE): Faction Claims.
When you go to play.staratlas.com, you’ll find a new flag icon in the navigation sidebar, through which you can access this new feature. If you have any Claim Stake assets, either from the Rebirth campaign, the Start Sequence event, or because you bought them on the Galactic Marketplace, you can now put them to good use!
By staking your Claim Stakes, you will generate a constant amount of Fuel, Ammunition, Food, and Toolkits (in short: R4) over time. The amount generated increases with the Tier of the Claim Stake you supplied.
Below is a chart released by the team:
Each Tier has been matched to the maximum resource consumption of a ship within each tier’s respective size category. This way, the team is able to hold true to their promise of having Tier 1 Claim Stakes produce enough R4 to pay for the upkeep of an X-Small ship (and similarly for higher tiers, matching larger ship classes).
An interesting final note: During the first 48 hours, $1.5 million worth of Claim Stakes were staked.
SAGE – Progress & Roadmap
XCode (Project Manager) provided some new information on what to expect regarding SAGE going forward. The team now recognizes the following releases:
- Movement Test & Scavenger Hunt – The team is currently testing the Scavenger Hunt internally
- Mining & Crafting – The focus here is on asteroid resource extraction (no claim stakes required)
- Pre-alpha – Introduction of Starbases & Planetary Combat
- V0 – Full version of SAGE; introduces Player-2-player economy, Cargo transfers, Player-2-player refueling
- V1 Land – Land ownership & economics; Faction Claims likely to be phased out; Professions, careers tied to mining, refining ore, etc
The team has already started working on the second module, Mining & Crafting, while a few team members are busy polishing the UI/UX for the Movement Test. It looks like a release anywhere within the next few weeks is very likely!
When the Movement Test will go live on mainnet, you will only be able to control a single ship (assigned to you by the game) to explore the Galia Expanse in SAGE. In order to be able to join the hunt, the team is looking into requiring you to lock up some ATLAS into a custom contract first. This is likely to make the hunt appeal primarily to the current community and throw up a small barrier for outsiders. The last bit of info on this hunt is that it was originally the team’s intention for you to need fuel in order to move your ship around, but this functionality was nixed in order to bring the launch forward.
The Mining & Crafting module, and likely the Pre-alpha version, will go live on devnet first. It is expected that these modules will allow you to use your own ships, or a set of ships given to you by the team. Further details will come late this year, when this module is to be released.
Airdrops
Did you buy Claim Stakes from the team during the Start Sequence event in late 2022/early 2023? Then you will find some claims in your inventory! You will have received a Mining Drill and Power Plant for each Claim Stake you acquired, regardless of its Tier. However, if you bought a Claim Stake of Tier 2, or above, you will additionally find several Material Bundles dropped to you, namely Upgrade Mining Drill Upgrade Bundles and Power Plant Upgrade Bundles.
If you acquired a Tier 2 Claim Stake from the team, you will have received a Mining Drill Tier 2 Upgrade Bundle and a Power Plant Tier 2 Upgrade Bundle. These bundles combine the assets one would need to upgrade a Mining Drill or Power Plant, respectively, from Tier 1 to Tier 2. If you acquired an even higher Tier Claim Stake, then you should have additional Upgrade Bundles of higher tiers as well. Each bundle upgrades the respective building one-tier. In other words: You should have received Upgrade Bundles for both buildings for each Tier above 1. If this is not the case, be sure to create a support ticket on the Star Atlas Discord.
With this last drop, all airdrops for the Start Sequence event have now concluded.
Volant Studio – Roadmap
With the release of the Atlas Star, we got a much-needed update on the status of the various projects as well, including the Showroom!
The road to R2.1 is nearing its end, but it looks like there is still some work to be done. Let’s dive into the features we know are coming for R2.1 and their status:
- In-game Marketplace – Currently being built by the team, still in the early stages
- Additional flyable ships – Looking good! Confirmed ships are: Airbike, Jet, Jetjet, Lowbie & Unibomba
- Tons of ship updates – Check!
- Train & updated train track – Done
- Conversion to Unreal Engine 5.1 – Done
- Conversion of the map to World Partition – Not mentioned in the roadmap at all, but likely done
- A ton of quality improvements – Looking good!
- Bugfixes – Check!
Besides wrapping up R2.1, work is already ongoing for the R2.1.5 release, which will bring us Ground Racing! This update is targeted to go live on July 18th, or shortly thereafter. Ground Racing has been a huge focus of the team these last few months, and it looks like that feature is well underway.
Then there are some features being worked on that may appear in R2.1, or later, such as Text chat (done), character selection (in progress), character customization (in progress), and gamepad control (bug fixing).
R2.1 is still expected to be released in Q2, possibly sooner rather than later, but the Marketplace does need to be finished first. Stay tuned!
Crew
Danny (CPO) shared some of the current thinking in relation to the release of crew members.
The crew-focused, mobile companion app is dependent on the crew members (also dubbed “crew cards”) being ready. At the moment, the team is working on setting up a system where they can render various (meta-human-based) characters in-engine and then take a snapshot in order to create the (art for the) SFTs.
At some point further down the line, we will be able to customize our characters, much like how we will be able to customize ships (see our previous newsletter).
Below are the distinct phases (3 & 4 might coincide) the team defined for the crew members:
- Create crew to SFT pipeline (and put these on the Marketplace).
- Finalize the stats of these crew members
- Reflect crew progression in these stats
- Enhance Marketplace to allow filtering of these stats and attributes
Future of Web3 Gaming
Last Friday’s episode of the Future of Web3 Gaming Twitter Spaces again had some team members on to talk about Star Atlas: XCode (Project Manager) and Ryan Moreau (Lead Engineer). In addition, they had a special guest, Danial Sax, the CEO of Canadian Space Mining Corp. The topic of this (nearly 2-hour) episode was Mining in Space, with the team members going into the launch of the Faction Claims and some related topics!
Near the end, the conversation is somewhat sidetracked, but it kept being highly interesting!
News Tidbits
To close off this week’s edition, here are some of the latest news bits the team shared:
- The Punaab race actually consists of two races: the High Punaab and the Profound Punaab. The latter sub-race is even smaller than the High Punaabs and can move around in exo-suits, as seen in the CORE comic.
- Claim Stakes are upgradeable. The team is considering requiring you to assemble an Upgrade Bundle in order to upgrade one, similar to how the Mining Drill and Power Plant are upgraded to higher Tiers.
- The designs for the upcoming Governance Proposals are close to final.
- The team is back to working on the DAC Platform.
