Weekly Star Atlas Newsletter #81

Welcome to our 81st 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 would have been a quiet week, were it not for the surprise Townhall the team hosted last Friday! Santi had the honor of announcing this surprise event during the Atlas Brew event on Wednesday, including its special guest: Danny Floyd (CPO), also known as Bunthius!

A ton of stuff was shared here, so let’s dive right in!

Townhall

In this newsletter, we provide a short summary of the key highlights of the Townhall. If you instead prefer to get more information, we have a few resources available for you:

• First off, we wrote a pretty extensive report that covers everything that was shared at the Townhall
• However, if you prefer to watch/listen to the whole thing instead, we have a video recording as well
• And, of course, Metaverse Explorer went ahead to summarize the event in one of his videos

For a textual summary, continue reading as 90% of the content that follows has been sourced straight from the Townhall, with the other 10% coming from the Discord during and after the event.

Stats

Michael (CEO) kicked off the Townhall by stating that the team is pleasantly surprised with the engagement they are seeing with both Escape Velocity and the Never Alone campaign.

Then he shared the following metrics for Never Alone:

• 42,000 completed claims
• 3,700+ questers
• 550,000 warps and scans done to complete Escape Velocity quests

Followed by the following stats for Escape Velocity:

• 20,000,000+ successful Solana transactions
• 25,000,000 scans for loot
• 7,550+ unique wallets connected
• made up 3% of the daily Solana transaction volume since inception
• seen peak volume reach 8% during the Atlas Brew with the Community Event

Though not directly attributable to a specific product, the team saw some impressive social media stats that undoubtedly have been influenced by both Never Alone and Escape Velocity:

• 3x increase in growth rate
• average daily mentions across social media have increased 7 times
• social engagement(/sentiment) score is at a 17-month high
• in April 2023, @StarAtlas-mentions on Twitter were the highest since January 2022

Surge Event

A few weeks ago, the team launched the first-ever Escape Velocity Surge Event. This coming week there will be two such events, though they work slightly differently.

Event 1:
Tuesday, May 30, 16:00 UTC – Thursday, June 1, 16:00 UTC
14x higher probability of finding Silver-tier loot

Event 2:
Wednesday, May 31, 16:00 UTC – until a Loot is found!
150x higher probability of finding Platinum-tier loot

Note that this second event has no firm end date, it will continue until someone loots the very first Platinum-tier item!

SAGE

Big news regarding SAGE this week! The team is wrapping up their work on the next module: Extraction & Crafting, though we’ll have to wait a little longer for it will go live. When it goes live, it will require you to bring ships that you actually own! If you do not own any ships, you won’t be able to play this first real SAGE module.

Of course, this also means that, if you want to use ships enlisted in Faction Fleet (aka “staked in SCORE”), you will have to unstake those when the time comes, in order to be able to use them.

Mainnet

Though the above news led some to believe the upcoming SAGE module would go live directly on the Solana mainnet, instead of the devnet (as was previously the communicated route), the team has not yet confirmed this. It may be that there will still first be a short devnet test phase before Extraction & Crafting goes live on mainnet. No doubt, we’ll learn more over the coming weeks, leading up to the release.

If, and when, this module goes live on mainnet, that will have pretty significant implications! The biggest of these is, of course, that it will kick off the economy!

When players are able to extract resources and craft R4, there will be a significant change in sourcing R4 from that point onward. In fact, Michael shared that they will be announcing changes coming to the R4-economy soon!

And…

Some other interesting tidbits that were shared:

• The team will introduce a new loot table (like in Escape Velocity) to continue allowing players to find surprise rewards in the Galia Expanse. However, it will be more difficult and more involved to earn this loot. 
• This release does not yet use Claim Stakes and does not introduce planetary mining. Instead, you will be consuming ammunition to destroy asteroids, and you will be harvesting the materials from those asteroid fragments.
• Tangentially related: There will be a small mechanical change coming to the Faction Claims program. More on that when the team makes their R4-related announcement
• Michael reinforced that, once combat comes live in the release after Extraction & Crafting, you will only be able to attack opposing factions for the foreseeable future.

We expect SAGE – Extraction & Crafting to arrive in early Q3. The team has not announced a (target) date.

DAO – Governance

The Governance platform is going live soon! It will be the next release, following the release of Showroom R2.1 (more on this below).

The Governance framework will primarily consist of a platform where proposals can be debated/discussed, commented on, and voted on. However, these things will come online one after the other, as needed.

Governance will officially be kicked off by discussing the first PIP (Polis Improvement Proposal). After this has concluded, the proposal will be put to a vote, which is when the required functionality for this will go live.

PIP1 will ratify things such as the Star Atlas Foundation and the Star Atlas Constitution.

The team expects these conversations to take some time, as the team will need to bring everyone in alignment. Only after getting through the initial PIP(s), the function of user-created proposals will come online. This likely won’t happen before Q4 of this year (if even this year).

Volant Station Showroom – R2.1

As expected, there was a very clear reason why Danny was invited to the Townhall, as the major news headline is the imminent release of the latest update of the Showroom!

Release 2.1 will go live on Thursday, June 1st!

With this comes a bunch of cool features and updates, such as:

• More flyable ships!
  All 49 ships will be flyable, no matter their current state of development. This goes hand in hand with the updated Ship Specs (V2) having been implemented into the game.
• Brand new HUD
• Reworked physics of flight
• New jetpack mode of travel
  Though this “only” comes with the basic tier, it will surely be a popular way to move around the level and get back to your ship (if you accidentally fell off)
• Introduction of the Photographer career
  Upload screenshots to Discord from within the game to join a monthly competition. The winner will receive their shot as an SFT. This is all done automatically!
• Single-player ground racing
  We know that8 player PvP racing is coming, but for this first version, you will have to satisfy yourself with racing solo. You will still compete with everyone else on the leaderboard, however!
• Updated dogfighting arena
  That starting area has significantly expanded, and you will now be able to use XS ships to participate. This does mean that the waves have become more difficult as well!
• Marketplace integration
  The team put the full Galactic Marketplace in Unreal Engine 5. It offers the same functionality, though it is limited to only ships.
• Other surprises
  More surprises are coming with 2.1, but the team would like to keep those a secret at this time.

If you want to learn more, we definitely recommend a read-through of our Townhall Report, as a ton of details were shared by Danny on what to expect in this upcoming release.

Videos

The team shared several videos, demonstrating the new options available in Showroom R2.1, such as:

• A demonstration of the Jetpack
• Flying around in the clay model of a VZUS ambwe
• The updated dogfighting arena

Experimental Mode

There is more, though! There will be a toggle that enables players to jump into maps that are mostly done, but contain game modes that are not fully done yet. The team would love to get feedback on these modes from the community.

As Danny put it: This will allow the community to see what they see. In other words, it allows the team to share stuff they are working on. Being able to share this early allows them to get feedback before putting in more time to expand upon the game mode and finalize it.

Pearce X6

The team finished the Pearce X6 ship and had VertPaint create a cool video using solely in-game footage. You definitely want to check this one out!

Last, but not least

Out of seemingly nowhere, Michael (CEO) shared the following: “Mobile app is going to be fun. Ties directly into racing and complements the game economy beautifully.”

Now we have some ideas on what this may mean, but they are so far in the realm of speculation that we will refrain from sharing those thoughts here. But it’s something you can perhaps noodle over in the meantime!

To properly wrap up this issue, here are some ustur Feet-pics: