Weekly Star Atlas Newsletter #128

Welcome to our 128th newsletter on Star Atlas! This weekly newsletter, published by Aephia Industries, focuses entirely on the development of this ambitious game. Here, we try to aggregate all the newsworthy tidbits revealed [mainly by the team] throughout the past week.

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Last week was pretty quiet. The biggest news was that the team made a change to the minable resources in Starbased. Other than that, we have a few small Roadmap updates and Busan pulse Sneak peeks. Fortunately, it looks like we’ll have more to share next week! Solana Crossroads is taking place in Istanbul, Turkey, at the tail end of this week, and it should come with a few new announcements from Michael! Last but not least, a small community meetup will be organized on May 7th in Istanbul as well!

Let’s dive in!

Solana Crossroads

On May 10th and 11th, a two-day (community-organized) Solana conference will take place in Istanbul, Turkey, and Michael (CEO) will be speaking!

As mentioned in a previous issue, Michael has been on the road for a good few weeks now, going from one conference to another. So far, he has been on panels only during the big events. However, at Solana Crossroads, he is actually presenting, allowing him to talk about Star Atlas more in-depth.

Now, Michael has teased that he will drop some cool things during his presentation. So far, we’ve heard that:

• A new video will be shown, its contents unknown
• Crew (Cards) will be shown off
• An announcement will be made regarding the availability of Crew (if all goes well)

Of course, things can change, but you will likely want to tune in when Michael is on stage! It looks like that will happen at 17:10 on May 11th, Istanbul time (14:10 UTC / 10:10 AM EST) [note: this timing can still change]! Unfortunately, it is not clear if there will be a live stream (it does not look like it), but no doubt someone will attempt to make a recording of Michael’s presentation!

Showroom IRL – Istanbul @ May 7th, 20:30 (Istanbul time)

Istanbul Meetup

On Tuesday, May 7th, there will be a real-life meetup in Istanbul, mere days before Solana Crossroads kicks off! Notable team members Michael (CEO) and Miguel (Chief of Staff) will be there to hang out with any community members who are making the trip! Members from the Turkish Star Atlas DAC, COEXIST, have helped organize this event.

If you are considering joining, then make sure to register!

Starbased

On Saturday, May 4th (or Sunday, May 5th, depending on where you live), the team implemented some changes to improve the availability of the mineable resources. Lumanite, a resource required for every Starbase upgrade from T1 on, had only been available in one MRZ system per faction. Now, the team has added Lumanite to the only MRZ Star system that previously only offered Silica. With this change, Lumanite now has two sources to choose from, with the new source being much closer to the CSS than before.

Starbased – Old Resource Map [Courtesy of the Dark Core Roasters]

Starbased – New Resource Map [Courtesy of the Dark Core Roasters]

One additional change was made to the Ustur map specifically. The resources for two systems, MRZ 34 and MRZ-22, were swapped. This means that the Silica/Lumanite system moved from MRZ-22 to MRZ-34, while the Copper/Carbon resources, previously available at MRZ-34, are now available at MRZ-22.

This last change was likely made to make Copper and Carbon more accessible to the Ustur faction, as they previously had more difficulty accessing it than the two other factions.

Roadmap Updates

The team updated its roadmap slightly last week. Below is an expanded version of the changelog shared by the team:

• Added In Progress (purple) and Completed (green) badges where applicable – Most of these can be found in R2.2 and the Pre-season, but the purple badges can be encountered in some of the later seasons as well
• Added a new item: Facial Rigs Pt.1 to Release 2.2
• Moved Tiers 3-5 Racers to Season 0 – Previously, Tier 3-4 was in R2.2, and Tier 5 was part of the Pre-season

Regarding those new purple In Progress badges, it is interesting to see the team is already working on features that are scheduled to go live with Season 6. Notably, controlling fleets, switching between RTS and FPS view, and fleet battles are displaying the purple badge. Then again, as it looks like the team is recreating SAGE 3D in UE5 [Note: this has not been confirmed], this could make sense and would explain why the team is working so far ahead of their planning.

As to the new feature that was added to the Roadmap for R2.2., here is the description of Facial Rigs – Part 1:

Facial rigs is a fancy way of saying face animations. Seeing things like a character’s blinking eyes, moving mouth and shifting eyebrows.

This will be handled in stages and this first stage is more detailed high level work for things like cinematics. This high level work will allow us to provide further estimates for next steps.

Sneak Peeks

It’s been a while since the team last shared some sneak peeks with us, but this past week, they shared a few images of the single-seater Busan Pulse ship, rendered in-engine! This ship is an XXS Racer, which the team has yet to put up for sale. It being a racer makes it likely this will happen anywhere between now and the release of R2.2.

Star Atlas – Busan Pulse [In-game]

You’ve reached the end of this week’s issue! Thanks for reading, and until next week!