Welcome to our 40th 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 the team throughout the past week.
Official News
The team released a new issue of their newsletter: The Atlas Star ✧ Issue #9. In it, you can find a summary of the 426Live event, the continuation of the lore, and some background on the Mní flower, a rare piece of flora found (or perhaps not?) within the Star Atlas universe.
Next to that, the team hosted another Town Hall last Friday, during which they shared a lot of new information.
Slope Wallet Exploit
On August 3rd, over 8000 Solana wallets made with the Slope Wallet were drained of their liquidity. This triggered many crypto personalities and companies (including Star Atlas) to recommend using a hardware device to store your crypto, such as a Ledger.
Unfortunately, on-chain analysis by the team found that roughly 25k worth of tokens was stolen from a couple hundred wallets among the Star Atlas community.
POLIS DAO
Now that the POLIS Locker has been launched, the team is looking forward to the ATLAS Locker and the Proposal section of the DAO.
During the Town Hall, Michael shared that the team made a game-time decision not to lock all their POLIS, but instead only 8.5 million of it at this time. In the future, they will increase the amount of POLIS locked when necessary, to maintain roughly a 65% share of the total voting weight.
ATLAS locking
Michael shared some updates on what to expect when the ATLAS Locker is released this summer:
- There will be a 6% seller fee added to peer-2-peer transactions on the Marketplace (excluding the team).
- 33% of this fee will flow to the Star Atlas DAO and the rest goes to the Star Atlas team.
- When locking ATLAS, you can reduce the fee in 5 steps, up to a maximum discount of 85%.
- ATLAS locking will yield POLIS. The amount of POLIS received depends on each person’s share of ATLAS staked.
- Once ATLAS is locked, you will immediately benefit from Marketplace fee discounts and POLIS rewards.
- There is no minimum lock-up duration. However, withdrawal takes 3 weeks with benefits stopping immediately.
Progress
The UX team has been working on designing the ATLAS locker. They (again) plan to finish this work in the coming week. Alongside, the Blockchain team is on standby, having completed the shadow factory and ATLAS locker code. They will work on Proposal activation and quorum parameters next.
SCREAM
The team released a new development video for SCREAM, showing off some of the new 3D models that have been created exclusively for SCREAM.
During the Town Hall, Chip (Game Systems Director) shared two new bits of information:
- As players build and upgrade starbases around the map, ships can move faster within the space their faction controls.
- Crafting: First, players must load resources onto their ships and dock these to a starbase controlled by their faction. The number of crew members on the ships docked is the number of workers that can craft in that starbase. Therefore, the more crew members present, the faster that player’s crafting speed. Players can dock multiple ships and the number of crew members will accumulate. There is no limit to the number of ships that can be docked in a single starbase.
Progress
The Game Design team finished prototyping to key components:
- starbase upgrading, and
- the extraction of resources from planets
Meanwhile, the Blockchain team reported that they finished the Player Profile program and integrated the Points program and Point Store programs. Additionally, they integrated the crafting & cargo programs, and are working to develop the fleet program.
Next, the Game Economics team onboarded a new Game Economist that will work on both Star Atlas and SCREAM. The Web team worked on mining, starbase crafting, and starbase upgrading. Finally, the Art team is close to completing starbase concepts and will now work on converting these into 3D assets.
Showroom
During the Town Hall, Michael shed more light on why the Volant Studio Showroom has not yet been released. A new opportunity presented itself to the team in the form of a new potential partnership. The team decided it was strategically a better decision to postpone the pre-alpha release and work with this new partner to elevate the experience.
The team still expects the pre-alpha of the showroom to be released during the next #426Live event (which has not yet been announced).
The “full” showroom is still targeted to be released in October. The following details were revealed on Twitter after the Town Hall:
- There will be a multiplayer cap of 32 players. This is due to the limitations that come with UE5 out of the box. This is not an indication of future multiplayer gameplay.
- Text chat will be enabled, with the team looking into the possibility of including voice chat as well.
- Servers are instanced, meaning players can establish their own servers and invite people. This will allow guilds to host meetings in their own private, password-protected environment.
Progress
There were only a few updates to the progress report regarding the Showroom. The Art team finished bug fixing while the UX/UI team worked on integrating updates for product distribution. The Core Gameplay team finished their work on wallet integration. Next to that, they have been busy preparing for the product distribution and starting this week they plan to start testing the distribution pipeline.
Ships
Last Thursday, the Ogrika Sunpaa, a large freighter, was released on the Galactic Marketplace. There are 1400 of these epic, Punaab-built, ships available.
Other News
- The team sent out a reminder to visit the iBUYPOWER website and confirm interest in the purchase of the Star Atlas-themed computers (if indeed interested).
- The first issue of the Star Atlas comic book is done. However, the team is still trying to optimize distribution.
- Michael confirmed that the team is researching lending ships. To that end, he revealed that the team found that a player borrowing a ship from a lending market has the potential to earn a share from the ATLAS earnings and progress in the game using that borrowed asset.