Welcome to our 26th newsletter on Star Atlas! This is a weekly newsletter published by Aephia Industries, that is focused entirely on Star Atlas . Here we try to aggregate all the newsworthy tidbits that were dropped by team members throughout the past week.
Roadmap
Star Atlas released Roadmap Report #5, where the story of lieutenant “Wenn” continues!
Showroom module
Not much news was shared this past week on the Showroom’s progress. The team seems primarily busy polishing, such as replacing placeholder assets with the final models and tweaking the lighting.
Galactic Marketplace
The Atlas staking program is currently being implemented, while user testing of the marketplace has begun. Meanwhile, the team collected valuable feedback from community members that were selected for this testing round and will process this during the coming week.
POLIS DAO
End-to-end testing, plus validation through testing and simulation are ongoing, as the audit process for the on-chain programs has kicked off. All of this is signaling that development is coming to completion!
SCREAM
The team this week shared two short clips (as part of the Roadmap Report) of one of the many prototypes for SCREAM that they have been working on.
According to Danny (CPO), these clips show some of the foundational core mechanics of the game board. Specifically, it shows ships using warp gates to jump through a simple galaxy map. Though this is just a prototype, when SCREAM launches, a map similar to this one will be the “game board” where all missions and other activities will take place. The team shared it is working on refining the map prototype this sprint, to get closer to its intended layout & scale.
Being asked about these clips, Chip (Game Systems Designer) shared that SCREAM will no longer be contained to just the Security/Safe Zone (SZ), but will also include the Medium Risk Zone (MRZ) for its gameplay.
Furthermore, Chip explained that the Ship Configuration, and Crew systems are not part of the initial SCREAM release as they are focusing on getting a lean release out as fast as possible but are on the intended feature upgrade list.
Finally, Danny & Chip revealed that SCREAM won’t include asteroid-mining mechanics, but will instead offer a variant of planetary resource extraction (mining). The team is planning to introduce asteroid mining in a later iteration of their UE5 game instead.
Mining
We learned a few more tidbits concerning mining and ships. The Armstrong IMP (Industrial Mining Platform) capital-sized ship will be the first (and to begin with, only) mining ship able to mine asteroids (not planets). All other mining will be done through mining structures built on land. The smaller Armstrong ship to be released this year, the medium-sized Armstrong IMP Tap won’t be able to mine asteroids but is instead meant for land-based ship mining.
POLIS
According to Danny, POLIS-based gameplay will come at a later time in the roadmap. Currently, his approach to such gameplay is to have a Politician career path, which will come with story-driven mission givers, missions, and rewards surrounding the functionality/game mechanics.
Sandbox Competition
Sandbox & Star Atlas launched an art contest that requires the creation of a Star Atas character using the VoxEdit software. Entries can be submitted between May 2nd and May 15th, after which both companies will judge and select a top 10 who will all receive SAND-tokens and Star Atlas ships. The USD equivalent of the prize for 1st place is roughly $60.000!
Solana
This past weekend, the Solana chain experienced a major outage that brought it down for about 7 hours. During this time the chain could not be used for any kind of transaction. A thread on Twitter explains roughly what went wrong, and what went into getting the chain up and running again.
Solana has been having difficulties for quite some time now, and the Solana team is working hard on implementing improvements to reduce the significant impact bots currently have on the network. Another Twitter thread goes into some of the upcoming changes to combat the instability.