Welcome to our 79th 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 Social Campaign is live! Now, next to Escape Velocity, and dogfighting/racing in the Showroom, there is another activity you can take part in! This one allows you to earn loot, and requires you to make some difficult decisions along the way! Good stuff!
Meanwhile, Escape Velocity had its first Surge event, which resulted in a second ship being found from the Gold Tier! Let’s dive in!
Never Alone
After a one-week delay, the team launched the little-anticipated Social Campaign last Wednesday! As most people did not know what to expect from a social campaign, with the team keeping a very tight lid on any related alpha, it flew under the radar of many.
This turned out to have been a good, strategic choice, as a good portion of the community seems to have been happily surprised by the whole setup and potential rewards.
Never Alone, the name of the campaign, is made up of a total of four missions that will be unveiled (one by one) throughout the rest of the year. Currently, the very first mission is live, and it focuses on Escape Velocity. Upcoming missions will focus on different aspects of Star Atlas that have yet to be released. The team’s goal is to synchronize the missions with these releases.
Of course, we wrote an extensive guide on the Never Alone campaign, which we definitely recommend everyone to check out.
The TLDR
If you prefer the short(ish) summary, we’ve got you covered!
The Never Alone campaign focuses on a Punaab survivor you picked up after he crashed on a hostile planet. Unfortunately, he lost his memory and does not know who he is, or where he is from. You decide to call him Saand and spend the rest of the year trying to help him restore his memory. Medical experts suggested that you will need to spark his memory, by exposing Saand to various environments and tasks. They also handed you a neuro-scanner, that will show you how far along his brain is to unlocking a new segment of his memory.
This is a summary of half the backstory, but it will be enough to understand what comes next. The first (and only) mission you have access to lasts a total of 60 days. During those 60 days, you are to try to complete as many quests as possible from the Quest board (managed by a company called Zealy). Each quest is worth XP, and when you’ve gathered enough XP, you can unlock a piece of Saand’s memory.
The more XP you’ve earned, the better the memory revealed. There are three tiers, and each of them is represented by an SFT you will receive in your wallet. You are free to trade this memory on the Galactic Marketplace if you want, but you are also able to exchange this for rewards.
Each mission comes with its own rewards. You can burn a memory (rest assured, Saand still unlocked them) to get the associated rewards. In the next three missions, you can do this again, though the rewards will likely differ.
However, and this is where things become interesting, you can also choose to keep at least 3 memories of the same tier (glimpse, fragment, or revelation) and exchange these at the end of the year for a loot bundle. This means you can still exchange the memories of one of the missions for its direct rewards, or you can skip a mission.
If you go for the bundle, of which the highest tier will gift you the Saand character as a crew member, you will also add points to your DAC’s score. Those DACs (guilds) will then simply compete in different pools to see which one accumulated the most points. There is an entirely different prize pool for the guilds that contain some impressive ships, CSS Land, and other rewards. The top prize is a Tier 5 CSS Land plot, sold by the team for $1.7 million.
If you are not yet part of a guild, expect recruitment efforts to pick up steam for the rest of the year.
Escape Velocity
We’re currently in the middle of the third week of Escape Velocity being live, and the team added some components to help them with gathering more data. First off, the social campaign encourages people to participate, under the guise of helping the Council of Peace explore the Medium Risk Zone, and gain progress (XP) toward unlocking Saand’s memories.
Second, the team upped some loot categories probabilities during the weekend, in what they dub a Surge Event. More on that later, but let’s start by looking into some stats first!
Stats
First off, the team shared a new tool with us that provides some much-needed insight into the scans being made. It looks like this:
You can select a loot tier/category and see where these have been discovered. It also provides a list of which items within that tier were found exactly, and how many.
Earlier today, Steven Sabol (Director of Economy) shared the below image, which depicts the Warp transactions as a percentage of the total Solana Transactions over the past 5 days.
On average, the warp transactions represented 2.95% of all successful Solana transactions. You can once again clearly see these picking up over the weekend, no doubt aided by the ongoing Surge event (see below). Wednesday’s spike (May 10th) can, of course, be attributed to the community event taking place!
Community Event
The Escape Velocity Community Event, which took place during the Atlas Brew last Wednesday, was a success! At least in regards to participation and the amount of chaos that ensued during the Brew 😉
Over 8500 sectors were covered by the participants, covering nearly the full map. Though the server (StarComm) succumbed to the pressure a few times, the team managed to get it back up quickly. Though the event was mostly focused on scanning, the call to action to all move to the lower left corner of the map caused the spike in transactions you can see in the graph above.
Fun times were had, lessons were learned, and the team got more data.
Surge Event
To spice up Escape Velocity, right before the weekend kicked off, the team introduced the first special feature: Surge Events! In essence, these provide time-limited windows during which some of the loot tier spawn probabilities are significantly higher.
The first Surge event took place this weekend, starting May 12th at 12 PM EST (16:00 UTC) and ending on May 15th at 12 PM EST. During this time, the Silver loot probability (normally 0.009%) was pumped to 0.045%, and the chance of Gold tier loot spawning went up from 0.00005% to 0.00075%.
This, of course, also meant that Copper tier loot had its probability lowered from 99% to roughly 98.95%, to accommodate for the increased probability of these other tiers.
More Gold loot found
During the Surge event, on Saturday, the second piece of Gold tier loot was found! One lucky tester discovered a Pearce R6!
Sneak Peaks
We did not get many sneak peeks, or behind-the-scenes eye candy last week, but to wrap this issue up, here is what we’ve got:
And last but not least, check out Ted, the space squid(?)
