Weekly Star Atlas Newsletter #78

Welcome to our 78th 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.

Escape Velocity has been available for over a week now (close to 12 full days, to be exact), and the team has clearly made it the focal point of their communication. This means that the majority of news in this issue will be about the movement test, its rewards, and upcoming events!

Strap in, and let’s go!

Escape Velocity

Having been put squarely in the spotlight by ATMTA, let’s look at what has happened in Escape Velocity since our previous issue!

Loot Drop

Though the primary appeal of Escape Velocity, from a tester’s standpoint, has been discovering some good loot, none of it actually ended up in your wallet. With scanning and finding loot happening off-chain, the team decided to wait a bit before distributing it to the masses.

However, on Thursday, May 4th (the day the force was strong with all of us), roughly one week after Escape Velocity launched, the team hit the button and initiated the distribution! Note that the rewards are not being airdropped, similar to the last “airdrops”. This means that you will actually need to claim them from your Inventory* on the Star Atlas Play website.

It is not yet clear when the next loot drop will be, but Michael suggested the next ones should be coming faster than this first one.

*) This links to the Star Atlas website, but it’s really a lot safer to just navigate there yourself and not rely on links posted on external websites (even ours)! If you do click such links, always check the URL very carefully before connecting your wallet.

Stats

By now, the game has been going on for over a week, and it’s clear that the amount of people participating has slowly but surely decreased. Before we get to that, let’s go over things in chronological order, starting with these numbers that the team shared on Twitter on May 1st (over a week ago by now).

In just the first few days of Escape Velocity, the game boated some impressive stats:

• 3,400,000+ transactions (~2.9% of total @solana transactions since EV released!)
• 4,950+ wallets connected
• 4,200,000+ ships scanned
• 500,000+ loot found

With regards to loot found, on May 3rd at 8:45 PM UTC, Chris (Director of Game Economy) shared that the community had collectively found 61 ships while exploring the map. These are all from the Silver Tier, meaning Pearce X4s and Fimbul Airbikes.

More Stats

That was it from the team, but our own Data Runners have been busy assembling charts and gathering insights! Every Thursday, we’re sharing a clean overview of the last 7 days on Twitter, the first (and most recent) of which you can find here:

As mentioned in the intro, the number of active players is steadily declining, and so are the movement transactions (though at a reduced rate). This does not necessarily mean there are fewer players scanning as well, as these actions take place off-chain, meaning only the team has insight into those.

When plotting the number of players and transactions per player in a chart (and appending the days until Sunday, May 7th), this is what this looks like:

It’s interesting to see that over the weekend, the number of transactions per player went up, while the active player count (again, counting movement transactions only) kept going down.

Finally, we have the below chart that shows the total number of transactions per day and the total EV-related transactions (blue line):

Golden Loot Found

A big news item popped up on May 5th, when it was announced that the first Gold Tier loot item (an Ogrika Tursic ship) had been found. The probability of loot from this tier spawning is 0.00005%. This means that (on average) this will only occur every 2 million spawns.

As loot from the Copper Tier has a 99% spawning chance, it’s not so strange that most people have only ever found loot from that tier, plus the odd piece of loot that is Bronze. Finding Silver Tier loot, let alone anything above that, requires a more than decent amount of luck or a ton of grinding, most likely both.

The question people have right now is: When will the first Platinum loot tier be breached? We’ll keep you posted!

Coordinated “Atlas Brew” Event

This Wednesday, May 10th, during the 62nd Atlas Brew, the community team hopes to get the largest amount of active ships on the Escape Velocity map ever, covering as many, if not all, of the sectors on the map.

To this end, they put out an invitation to the guilds (and to the community in general) to assemble their force and participate in this endeavor!

If you would like to participate, please reach out to ZeSKK (aka NootNoot) and let him know the number of ships you or your guild would like to participate with!

Governance – Phase 1

We got an update from Michael (CEO) regarding the team’s progression on their governance platform. According to him, it’s coming along nicely and should go live in 4-6 weeks.

This would put it in the last month of Q2, in line with the roadmap we shared last week.

Note that while governance going live is a major milestone in itself, this does not mean that everyone can start creating proposals right away. A major part of the remainder of this year is reserved to draft, vote on, and implement the foundational proposals. Only once those are all behind us will governance open up to all of us (what we dubbed “Phase 2”)

News Tidbits

• Michael had a short appearance at the monthly SuperTeam DAO Call – Nothing new was shared here, it was targeted at folks who are outside of the Star Atlas ecosystem.
• The Social Campaign did not drop last week, despite Michael’s announcement during the Town Hall. It’s unclear when the drop will happen, but it likely won’t be much longer.
• The future Central Space Station (CSS) of the three major factions will be linked to one another by jump points. This means that it will be possible to travel from one CSS to another without having to go through the High-Risk Zone. Trade tariffs and Faction Passports will make this option less lucrative, however, for transporting cargo.

Picture Drops

Finally, to wrap up this week’s newsletter, we’ve got a few new in-game & WIP shots shared with us last week for you!

Fimbul ECOS Unibomba – Interaction Model