Welcome to our 144th 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.
Crew Trades are live on Tensor, but that is certainly not all there is to share with regard to the new Crew Card collection! Issues were fixed, art was rerolled, and aptitude roll chances were updated. Besides Crew updates, the Star Atlas DAO Council elections are still in full swing! 22 community members stepped forward, and soon, it will be up to you to vote for whoever you’d want to see in there!
Let’s dive in!
Star Atlas x Tensor – Trade Crew Now
Crew
This past week, all eyes were on the Crew Cards! Let’s go over the highlights!
Starbased Crew Transition Delayed
People were expecting Crew to go live in SAGE Starbased on August 20, but the team decided to postpone this last minute by a full week to this Tuesday (August 27th).
However, with people still struggling to get their Crew into Starbased, the team decided today (shortly before sending out this issue) to delay again:
An Update on Crew in SAGE – Hey everyone, we previously mentioned that the Crew in SAGE update would be happening tomorrow, but we’re not going to be hitting that target. We’re still working on the process of importing and exporting Crew, and we want to make sure to give you a timely heads up.
We don’t want to keep kicking the can down the road. Once the implementation is complete, we’ll announce and give you all a week to prepare. That way everyone knows exactly what to expect.
Thank you for your patience.
Dominic (Sr. Community Manager)
Trading Live
Trading finally went live on Tensor, with the Star Atlas Crew collection going live there this past Wednesday (August 21st). The collection is doing decently well in the charts, being ranked #26 in daily volume and #5 in number of sales (at the time of writing).
Note that the rarity displayed by Tensor has nothing to do with the actual rarity assigned to Crew Cards by the team. Tensor calculates this rarity themselves, based on how often traits appear in the total collection. This includes the OCEAN characteristics and various other traits that really should not be influencing rarity.
You’ll likely wonder why it took the team so long to launch the collection on Tensor. We’ve now learned that this delay was caused by two major bugs that were affecting the minting of the collection. Logically, the team wanted to fix those first. These issues were:
- Art – Crew Card traits were rolling without any regard for the rarity of the card
- Aptitudes – Every aptitude had an equal chance of rolling
Let’s dive deeper!
Art Problem
The team found out that their algorithm to select the various traits (e.g., body, head, outfits, augments, trinkets) for every Crew Card was not correctly taking the card’s rarity into account. Far too many out-of-rarity traits were rolled.
This led to people rolling lots of Epic, Legendary, and even Anomalous traits on Common Crew Cards. The biggest downside is that all Crew Cards started to look like one another because they all have a few shared traits.
What should have happened is that each trait rolled should have considered the Card’s prime rarity. While a common Crew Card could roll a legendary body, the chance of this happening should be very small. Similarly, a legendary Crew Card should have a better chance of rolling a legendary head over a common head.
Art Correction
This issue was big enough for the team to implement drastic changes. They were going to re-roll all art and update the 680k Crew Cards that had been minted so far. However, any Anomalous art trait would be retained.
They decided to reframe the old art to Episode 0 art and the new art to Episode 1. Cards that had been rolled before this change would have both art renders linked from the Crew Card NFT. Cards that were rolled afterward would only link to Episode 1 art.
Most importantly, Episode 1 art is the only official art. This rendition will be used for crew visualization in-game. There is no way to use Episode 0 art in-game later on. The mere presence of that art is just there for nostalgic reasons. Card owners can use it for their PFP, but there will likely be no additional utility going forward.
Unsurprisingly, many people were unhappy with this change, as they really loved the epic, legendary, or even anomalous traits on their Crew. However, to ensure diversity in-game and make the higher-rarity crew feel as such, the team felt forced to push this change through.
It’s clear why the team postponed trading until they rolled out this fix and had re-rendered all art. However, some players had already been trading and selling their cards over-the-counter (OTC) among themselves.
Art Expansion
The upside of re-rolling the art for every Crew Card is that the team could consider some of the early user feedback, especially regarding the MUD characters, and add some new concept art into the mix to create an even wider variety of options.
In short, the following changes were made:
- New MUD hairstyles have been added
- MUD now have increased chances to roll an augment or trinket trait
- MUD have decreased chances to roll a helmet trait (this includes the visors/VR-like goggles)
- New outfits have been added to MUD, Mierese, Punaabs, and Sogmians that offer a wider variety of patterns and colors.
Let’s look at the new art that was added:
New MUD Art
New Human (Male) Hairdos
New Human (Male) Outfits
New Human (Male) Outfits
New Human (Female) Hairdos
New Human (Female) Outfits
New Punaab Art
New Profound Punaab Outfits
New High Punaab Outfits
New Mierese Art
New Mierese Outfits
New Sogmian Art
New Sogmian (Female) Outfits
New Sogmian (Male) Outfits
Aptitude Problem
The Art roll issue was not the only issue that plagued the initial 680k rolled Crew Cards. The team found out that every Aptitude had an equal chance of being rolled. This, however, had never been the team’s intent.
Since the total amount of Crew Stations (available over all ships) that give XP to a certain Skill differs greatly between any two skills, the team’s goal was to ensure aptitudes that had the least amount of crew stations would also get rolled the least.
Command, with its associated crew stations being the least prevalent, should have had the smallest chance to get rolled of all aptitudes. Fitness and Flight should have had the greatest chances to get rolled.
So, the team updated the weights for every aptitude to make sure that new Crew Cards would adhere to the rarity as originally envisioned and intended. You can find these below:
| Aptitude | Chance |
|---|---|
| Fitness | 26.24% |
| Flight | 22.06% |
| Hospitality | 16.35% |
| Engineering | 12.61% |
| Operator | 10.76% |
| Science | 5.23% |
| Medical | 5.23% |
| Command | 1.53% |
Aptitude roll chances (same for minor, major & anomalous)
Now, re-rolling the Crew Art is one thing. Re-rolling the Aptitudes is quite another. So, fortunately, the team refrained from doing so. This means there is currently a significant surplus of Command Aptitude Crew Cards out there, but as more Cards get minted, this should slowly correct itself.
Upcoming Changes
The team is working on getting the following changes in:
- Crew backstories
- Share feature
- Adding full res PFP downloads in layers, full body, or headshot
- Adjusting Punaab eyes
- Updating Ustur cloak (to prevent clipping through other layers)
- Adding the “background” of your cards to the “My Crew Cards” viewer
- Adding your SAGE crew to the “My Crew Cards” viewer
DAO Council
A few weeks ago, the community approved PIP-3, which meant that a 2-week period was kicked off during which community members who want to voluntarily help out the DAO could nominate themselves.
Now that the deadline has passed, 22 community members have stepped forward. As described in PIP-3, having more than 20 candidates means there will be a 2-round voting process. The list will be narrowed to the top 12 individuals during the first round based on your votes. Then, during a second round, from that group of 12, the final five members will be chosen to form the inaugural DAO Council for the next six months. The first round of voting will start on September 14th and will last exactly one week (until September 21st). The second round of voting will start after Breakpoint.
Get to know the Candidates
Before voting starts, the community gets a chance to get to know the nominees through various means. One of the avenues for this is the new #council-candidates channel on the Star Atlas Discord. Here, the community team created a thread for each candidate containing information from their application form.
Additionally, the Atlas Brew this Wednesday (August 28th) will focus on the Council nominees by giving each of them a 5-minute window to introduce themselves.
Voting Mechanism
Unlike previous PIPs, the voting will work through a ranked-choice voting mechanism instead of a simple yes/no vote. This allows you not just to pick one candidate who gets your vote but instead order the list of candidates according to your preference so that no vote goes to waste! The team is currently working hard on implementing this voting mechanic, and we’ll explain this voting system in more detail when we’re getting close to voting opening up!
Star Atlas – IMPACT Summit
IMPACT Summit
Preparations for the IMPACT Summit are in full swing! On September 21st, the doors will open early morning, for a day full of Star Atlas goodness!
Though access is free for everyone, if you are attending, it is definitely smart to register officially as well.
Star Atlas – Surge
Surge Testers Needed
This past week, the team sent out a call for testers of their new, smaller-scale Surge game mode. In last week’s newsletter, we mentioned the team was demoing their upcoming 4v4v4 Surge game map during the Crew launch party. It looks now like they are ready to start testing the new map in earnest before showing it off at the Breakpoint & the IMPACT Summit.
Only serious gamers are considered; they are looking for folks who can devote a lot of time to testing in the next few weeks.
Originally, Dominic (Sr. Community Manager) mentioned they would be opening the form for 24 hours only. However, if it is still available when you read this, you can always try to see if a spot is still available!
You’ve reached the end of this week’s issue. Thanks for reading!