Welcome to our 227th 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 week’s update centers on a clearer look at SAGE C4. From a pre-recorded crafting demo to a longer UI showcase, we’re starting to see how the next version of the game is shaping up. Alongside that, Holosim is gearing up for a more combat-focused Phase 2, while DAO voting on PIP-31 moves toward its conclusion. A few smaller updates round out the week.

Let’s dive in!

SAGE C4

Last week’s Atlas Brew 201 gave us the clearest C4 update of the week. José (Lore & Community) demonstrated the upcoming crafting flow and said the build currently contains 3,150 recipes. More importantly, we could finally see how the interface is meant to work, with players drilling down from ingredient requirements into sub-recipes rather than being left with a single, opaque crafting tree.

José also said the team is “really close to finishing” the requirements for the initial C4 PTR test. That is still not a date, but it is one of the stronger progress signals we have had in a while.

To top it off, the team released a 4.5-minute video on X this past Saturday, showcasing the C4 User Interface and various gameplay elements, including navigating the map, composing fleets, crafting recipes, and building crafting habs.

We also got a clearer sense of what the next version of that UI may look like. Jeff Wagner (Product Design Director), this week’s special guest on the Atlas Brew, described a future where players interact more directly with planets, asteroid belts, properties, and fleets through contextual actions on the map. Additionally, he is working towards allowing players to select multiple fleets at once by drawing a selection rectangle with the mouse. But that may take a bit.

https://youtu.be/iMabeiF67qs

Holosim

During Atlas Brew 201, John (Product Manager) warned that Chapter 2, Part 2, will be more experimental and that moderation will become more proactive. Players who continue to abuse known issues risk being removed from the leaderboard and losing prizes. That is a firmer public stance than we had before, but most will agree it is necessary.

Now that Phase 1 has wrapped up, John and Chris (VP of Game Economy) are going over the exact reward distribution of that first part. Going forward, the Superphoenix Boss event rotation will continue, allowing all players to finish their related quests. Mining achievements won’t count towards the Phase 2 leaderboard, but do still count towards your zXP if you care about this (for the z.ink airdrop campaign). Phase 2 is not yet live, but it may go live later this week. John and José are busy preparing new achievements for this combat-focused phase. This also implies that this chapter will not end after 8 weeks but will likely continue for a few more weeks.

John also reiterated that Season 1 will continue on the current Starbase-based branch for as long as needed, while Season 2 will begin only once the SAGE C4 engine is mature enough to serve as the new Holosim foundation.

Holosim Changelog

Below are the notes for the two patches that rolled out last week.

v1.2.26

  • Superphoenix Community Boss Event — faction-scoped notifications alert your faction when a Superphoenix boss spawns or is defeated, with click-to-navigate deeplinks that pan the map to the boss fleet or sector
  • Boss event quest credit — engaging a Superphoenix boss fleet now correctly triggers quest progress for boss-specific objectives
  • Community notification category added to notification settings — boss spawn and defeat alerts can be toggled independently (enabled by default)
  • PvP combat latency instrumentation — added behind-the-scenes telemetry to measure end-to-end volley latency (RPC confirm, indexer lag, poll cadence) for upcoming combat reliability improvements

v1.2.27

  • Chapter 2 Leaderboard — Part 1 rankings are now frozen at the Chapter 1 snapshot. A new Part 2 tab (Coming Soon) will show combat XP rankings when combat achievements go live
  • Leaderboard sticky row now shows your live XP (continues counting up with achievement and quest claims) while your Part 1 rank stays locked at your final Chapter 1 position
  • Fixed leaderboard showing rank #0 and incorrect XP for players ranked outside the top 300

DAO Updates

Last week, PIP-31 remained the only active governance story. It is open for voting for a few more days, but the numbers are moving against it.

PIP-31: Star Seekers 2 — Mobile Game DAO Funding Proposal

This proposal requests 13,000,000 ATLAS from the Star Atlas DAO Ecosystem Fund to complete and launch Star Seekers 2, a cross-platform mobile space-combat game inspired by the Star Atlas universe, on both iOS App Store and Google Play Store.

Structure:

  • Requested funding: 13,000,000 ATLAS
  • Structure: 1-off PIP
  • Author: PG Metaverse OG
  • Voting Opened: Friday, April 17th
  • Voting Closes: Friday, May 1st (end-of-day UTC)

Early results (~9 days in, ~45.5M PVP committed):

  • For: 34.0%
  • Against: 53.4%
  • Abstain: 12.6%

News Bits

To wrap up this week’s news items, here are some smaller bits:

  • DAO Casters Brew — The DAO Casters hosted their first of three DAO Casters Brew events, a community-led end-of-month gathering in the Star Atlas Discord’s amphitheater. During the 75-minute event, your favorite Star Atlas content creators discussed Star Atlas, their content, the DAO, and questions from attendees. The next one will take place on Sunday, May 31st.
  • SCAM Alert — The team sent out a warning on Discord after some players received an email suggesting they could claim their “Annual Access Pass” using the attached reference code. This was a clear scam, but the criminals behind it made a good attempt at replicating the Star Atlas look and feel.
  • Embercoil TTRPG Campaign — The sign-up phase for the first-ever, live-streamed, Star Atlas-themed table-top roleplaying campaign, hosted by José, is ending later today. If you wanted to throw your hat into the ring but forgot, you have a little bit of time left after the publication of this week’s issue.

DAO Casters – Subscriber Raffle

Last week, we hosted a small raffle for newsletter subscribers, as part of the DAO Casters program. Five of you were randomly selected as the lucky winners, each receiving 72k ATLAS!

For privacy reasons, we’ll only list the abbreviated wallets of the winners of this raffle. Thanks to everyone for participating, and thanks to the Star Atlas DAO for making this possible!

Congratulations to the winners. Your ATLAS will arrive within 24 hours of publication:

  • KXT…JFC
  • 3mr…5T2
  • AL8…Gjs
  • 7EF…s87
  • 4zm…w7J

That is it for this week! Thanks for reading, and until the next!