Welcome to our 178th newsletter on Star Atlas! This weekly newsletter, published by Aephia Industries, focuses entirely on the development of this ambitious game. Here, we attempt to aggregate all the newsworthy tidbits revealed, primarily by the team, throughout the past week.
This past week, the Star Atlas team introduced The Vantarah, a new group of dedicated community testers selected to help shape upcoming UE5 features. The Economic Forum returned with updates on FIC sniping prevention, food upkeep, scanning changes, and more. We also got a sneak peek at the evolving Galia Expanse resource map coming with C4. And finally, the team is back on Telegram and has confirmed a major town hall is planned for mid-year!
Let’s dive in!
Star Atlas – The Vantarah logo
The Vantarah
This past Monday, the community team invited players to sign up to beta test new UE5 features. Those wanting to participate were asked to submit a Google form before Thursday, 19:00 UTC.
Here is a snippet from the recruitment call:
Star Atlas is searching for a select group of elite testers to become the pioneers among pioneers. Introducing The Vantarah, an officially recognized group by ATMTA, dedicated to testing the earliest builds and features of Star Atlas UE5. While this is a volunteer position, members will receive special benefits, including a unique Discord role and icon as well as asset rewards. If you are passionate about Star Atlas, want to help make it the best game possible, and have the time to test, this is the role for you.
How we are selecting The Vantarah members: 1. Priority will be given to those who are active within the Discord community. 2. Priority will be given to those who have the time required to test effectively.
Out of over 120 applications, the team selected 11 individuals to form the first cohort of The Vantarah. This group of people is expected to test the UE5 game for at least the next 6 months. At some point thereafter, those who perform sub-optimally will be dismissed, allowing others a chance to sign up and get to be part of this group of legends.
During the Brew, Santi (Director of Community & Ecosystem) shared that the group would get early access to new gameplay features and have a chance to earn in-game assets by testing.
On the name, Jose (Lead Noot of Lore) shared the following:
Vantarah is a Sogmian word, that roughly means “Those who returned”. It became one of the most prestigious tittles in Galia only given to those who have visited the depths of the Cataclysm and came back to tell the tale. To be recognized as a Vantarah means that you reached the apex of the explorer career in Galia Expanse, and have faced challenges and hardships that few could even imagine.
Economic Forum #12
The Econ team, specifically Chris and Gareth, shared much information during the 12th monthly Economic Forum (check out the recording). We summarized the key points below! Chris also shared that he has been brought up to speed on C4 and has started his part of the work that needs to be done there.
Econ Forum #12 – Faction Fleet to Rental Market Transition
Faction Fleet Migration
The team shared that since the introduction of Fleet Rentals, $9 million in VWAP has flowed into Fleet Rentals from Faction Fleet (aka SCORE). On top of that, on average, 20x more ATLAS is being earned in Fleet Rentals than Faction Fleet earnings.
The team is still discussing the plans for sunsetting Faction Fleet, but we’ll likely hear something on that later this year.
Econ Forum #12 – FICs sold over time & ATLAS emissions distribution since the launch of Gen 2 FICs
FIC Sniping
All the Gen 2 emissions that used to happen throughout the week now happen in 1-2 days. They are a better deal, and there is low interest in Gen 1 FICs.
Chris expects this problem to grow bigger over time.
Econ Forum #12 – Amount redeemed by player & Number of players redeeming FICs
Chris has spent a lot of time understanding the current Faction Infrastructure Contract-related issues. Players are experiencing various issues, but the team isn’t too happy with some aspects either, primarily the increasing ATLAS emissions that the FIC mechanics cause. Emissions should be 8.5 million/day, but they are closer to 10.8 million/day at the moment. To bring that down and combat FIC sniping, the team came up with four different strategies to combat this:
- Eliminate the Refresh Schedule (easy) — Only refresh when all FICs are out. This will slow down and spread out the claim and reduce emissions a little. However, this does not really address the main problem, as it won’t affect how quickly FICs are claimed (Sniping). That said, the team is strongly considering implementing this.
- Force Crafting to take place at non-redemption locations (hard) — At this point in time, you can craft FICs at the same Starbase as you can sell them. This was not the original intent, but it was difficult to implement. If this were impossible, it would make stockpiling more difficult, but not impossible. It still is, that is why this is hard. It also won’t solve sniping, really.
- Make Gen 2 recipe worse (easy) — Bring Gen 2 in one with Gen 1. Initially, people liked Gen 1, but they have come to prefer Gen 2. Chris wants things to cool off, and this would be a great way to do that. Gen 1 never had these issues, so bringing the two in line by nerfing Gen 2 would be a great idea. As such, it will likely be implemented.
- Change Mint (recipe) each cycle (medium) — This would require a lot of communication, but would still definitely result in useless assets floating around. If players can not offload old recipes, then that will be pretty rough. As such, it likely won’t be implemented.
A community member suggested implementing a FIC 3 recipe, which would require FIC 1 and FIC 2 as base input. This notion seemed to resonate with Chris, who suggested it could provide a smaller reward but then still offer something to people when Gen 2 orders dry up.
Redeemable XXS Ship
The Econ team is strongly considering introducing an XXS ship for redemption, but it will not be competitive with the current ship recipes. Instead, the idea will be to align pricing with the actual origination value, ensuring whales will not jump on it and will deplete the offering within a day. By ensuring the bigger ships are more interesting for bigger players, this XXS ship should instead become appealing to smaller players, as the other ships would be mostly out of scope for them. At least, that seems to be the idea.
Food Update
Very soon, the team will remove the requirement to supply Food to Starbases to speed up Crafting. Instead, Crafting will always run at 100%. Players will be able to keep supplying food to get LP, but the crafting rate will be unaffected.
Scanning Update
Up until now, the Food consumption for Scanning was scaled to the number of Crew each ship requires to operate. However, this means that commanders pay about 0.5% of their food supply for a scan, while an XXS ship loses about 20%.
It will soon be scaled to the ship class instead, which will effectively mean that Commander-class ships will see a 20x increase in Food consumption, while XXS ships stay the same. All other ships will fall in between those two numbers (except Titans).
Another scanning update is coming to scanning ships. With this update, they will get a 50% reduction in scan cooldown!
Fleet Rental Scores
The team will tweak the weights based on the feedback it received.
C4 Sneak Peek
In a surprise move, Danny (CPO) shared the image below with the community. It’s not an actual game interface; it’s something he admittedly (vibe-)coded to visualize & edit the newly planned Galia Expanse map, showing the availability of all the (new & existing) raw resources.
Note that this image does not represent the final state of the game’s map for C4. The Econ team has not yet vetted it, and it has not yet gone through testing either.
A mysterious image….
Answering a question in Foundation Room, Danny shared that, at this moment in development, each Faction has 6 resources exclusive to their region of space (both MRZ & SZ). He cautioned that this number could change before launch. On a similar note, looking at the total number of raw resources, the team is “pushing into the 3 digits”.
DAO Updates
As we did not report on these last week, for the sake of completeness, here is the result of the three PIPs for which voting wrapped up a little over a week ago:
PIP-12: Iris’s Bounty: The Feast — This proposal introduces “Iris’s Bounty: The Feast,” a program designed to allow Star Atlas community members to apply for funding from the Star Atlas Ecosystem Fund to host small-scale social events. These events aim to strengthen the community and foster deeper connections among players. The program allocates $10,000 of Atlas from the Star Atlas Ecosystem Fund, with a maximum of $500 per request. Applicants will be required to provide event details, expected attendance, and estimated costs to receive funding, streamlining the process compared to drafting a full PIP.
Result: Approved (65.36%)
PIP-13: Implementing Term Limits for Star Atlas DAO Council Members — This proposal establishes term limits for Star Atlas Council members to ensure fair turnover, prevent governance stagnation, and encourage fresh perspectives in DAO decision-making. It updates the existing election framework by introducing a two-term limit, after which a Council member must sit out at least one full term before running again. This is accomplished by replacing Section 4.4, “Term Limits,” of PIP-10 (Star Atlas: Council: Second Term & Beyond) with a new set of term limit rules outlined in Section 4.2. This proposal ensures that governance remains dynamic, decentralized, and resistant to entrenched influence, aligning with the DAO’s principles of transparency and equitable representation.
Result: Rejected (68.48%)
PIP-14: Deepening THEO Integration into the Star Atlas Economy — This proposal requests 10,000 USDC as a one-time development cost for a focused, fixed-term 6-week project aimed at enhancing Star Atlas’s economic ecosystem. In simple terms, we’re asking for 10,000 USDC for a 6-week effort to upgrade THEO with better economic tools, prepare it to connect with Star Atlas systems, make it smarter using DAO knowledge, delivering an improved web version immediately and a package for potential future in-game integration, with a commitment to repay the grant from initial fees.
Result: Approved (92.65%)
News Bits
To wrap things up, here are two more important bits of news:
- After a multi-year hiatus, the official Star Atlas Telegram community has returned!
- During the Atlas Brew, Michael shared that “The biggest Town Hall ever” is coming “in, or around July”!
That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading!