Weekly Star Atlas Newsletter #132

Welcome to our 132nd 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.

It’s a very short newsletter today, as the past week saw nearly no newsworthy announcements. As hoped, Starbased received an impactful update to crafting. Beyond that, the team provided their updated thinking regarding Passenger capacity on ships, and we found some cool new concept art for the Rainbow Phi (again!) and Ogrika ship weapons.

Let’s just get straight to it!

Starbased

In our previous issue, we mentioned that the team did not manage to get some updates out (two weeks ago) due to last-minute issues but would try again last week. The hope was that these updates would be rolled out last week, but the team managed to get only one of the two features live, with the other one still pending.

Base Crafting Update

On Wednesday, May 30th, the team rolled out an update that added a base Crafting speed to all Starbases, dependent on their Tier. Instead of grinding to a halt when a Starbase has run out of Food, crafting will now continue at this base speed until additional Food has been supplied. Below, we copied the list from last week, showing the base speed per Tier:

Starbase Foodless Crafting Efficiency (per tier):

Tier 1: 20% of nominal speed
Tier 2: 27.5% of nominal speed
Tier 3: 35% of nominal speed
Tier 4: 42.5% of nominal speed
Tier 5 & 6: 50% of nominal speed

This results in a 1-minute crafting job taking 5 minutes when a Tier 1 Starbase has run out of Food. At Tier 5 Starbases and at the CSS, this job would take 2 minutes, twice as long as it would when Food was supplied.

This is a very welcome change, especially for the smaller players!

SDU Upgrade Cost Rebase

It’s unclear what the current status is, but the team has not yet managed to get this update live. The hope is that they will succeed this week. For more information, see last week’s issue.

Passengers

Since the initial passenger stats for ships were published two weeks ago, Chip (Director of Game Systems Design) and his colleagues have been steadily gathering feedback. After going over it, they are considering making a big change: Increasing the Base passenger across the board and allowing all small ships to carry 1 passenger.

This is not yet final, and as such, the numbers in Chip’s spreadsheet will not be updated until closer to the release of the Crew.

Spec bonuses

Chip also clarified that the ship spec bonus multipliers are applied to the Base passenger capacity, not to the passenger modules. Furthermore, we now know that besides Transport-specced ships (2x multiplier), two more specs are enjoying a bonus:

Multi-role
Rescue

The exact bonus multiplier for these two specs is not yet known.

Note: Foundation Room information published with permission from the team.

Sneak Peeks

Though the team did not share any new art this past week, some of the artists hired by / working for ATMTA did! Gary Sanchez (Vehicle Art Director) is for sure on a roll, having added more Rainbow Phi (titan) concepts for the 3rd week in a row! In addition, we have some additional artwork showing off Ogrika ship weapons from Dmitry Blagorodov!

Star Atlas - Ogrika Kinetic Rapidfire XS [Concept Art by Dmitry Blagorodov]