Welcome to our 143rd 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 Cards are live! Last week, the team launched the Crew Pack opening experience and added an inventory of Crew Packs to their marketplace. Overall, it has been a somewhat rough experience. Meanwhile, most of the experience is working at this point, though there are still some loose ends for the team to fix.

Let’s dive in!

Star Atlas - Crew [My Crew Cards]

Star Atlas – Crew [My Crew Cards]

Crew – Airdrop

Exactly a week ago, the team airdropped the single-crew Crew Packs to all ship owners whose ships were in Star Atlas programs and/or their wallet(s).

This airdrop was originally scheduled for August 9th, but difficulties prevented the team from getting it done that day. They decided to lift it over the weekend and run the airdrop on Monday instead.

It seemed to have gone well, though some users have reported missing some packs. At the moment, it’s not clear if these claims have any merit.

Component Bundles

The Component Bundle, which was supposed to be dropped alongside the Crew Packs, did not get dropped. To ensure timely delivery of the Crew (before the sale started the next day), the team chose to stick to Crew packs only.

Component Bundles will come later, though the team has not given an official ETA. This is not a problem in any way, as those bundles have no purpose and are not required for anything in-game. When Ship Configuration goes live (2025), there will be an opportunity to open them up and receive the individual components contained therein. That is when those bundles (or rather the components they contain) will, just like Crew now, become a requirement for ships to function.

1.2 Million

Though the team initially expected to airdrop ~2.5 million Crew Cards (in single-crew Crew Packs), that number proved too high. In the end, they sent out close to 1.2 million (1,193,860) Crew Cards instead.

Crew – Sale

On August 13th, 5 million Crew Packs went on sale! You can find these on the Galactic Marketplace, but you can also access these through a direct link in the (new) Crew menu on the Play-portal!

You can buy one of three different 5-crew packs:

In addition, the team also offers 1-crew packs at a 20% premium:

The team’s packs are split 50/50 over the ATLAS and USDCmarkets**.**

Star Atlas - Crew Card details

Star Atlas – Crew Card details

Crew – Pack Opening

The Crew Pack sales went pretty well, but rolling out the Opening mechanic did not, unfortunately. It took a good couple more hours before packs could be opened, and even longer before the opening also worked well. Some of the issues encountered:

  • Opening packs right away did not register the Crew Card with the account
  • Rarity information was displayed confusingly or just plain wrong
  • Toggling “Transfer Crew directly to SAGE” resulted in an error – This led to many opening their packs directly to their wallets
  • The cNFTs representing the Crew Cards were not actually sent to the wallets of the players opening packs. They arrived much later.
  • Crew traded/sent away still shows up in the Crew overview on the Play-portal

Meanwhile, most (if not all) of the serious issues have been corrected. The team is working hard to squash the others as well.

As to receiving the actual cNFTs in your wallet, Brett (Head of Engineering) shared the following:

What happens is when your pack burns our backend detects this and creates images + metadata based on the randomness from the chain. It shows this to you ASAP and then another process goes through and mints the cNFT using this data. It calls the on-chain program which validates the data is what was really rolled and then mints the cNFT. Once it’s minted it should appear in your wallet.

–Brett (aka Buzzec)

Meanwhile, various community members have pulled seven anomaly rarity Crew Cards from the packs, including a Dark Photoli!

Crew – SAGE

The team also updated SAGE Starbased so that Crew could be brought in. Unfortunately, this caused several issues that have still not been fully resolved. Some of the issues experienced:

  • All current/old crew disappeared for everyone (meanwhile resolved)
  • Being unable to add Crew Cards from their wallet to Starbased manually
  • Some ships are inaccessible due to UI issues
  • SAGE shows a different number of Crew Cards than the person owns

With the Crew transition scheduled for Tuesday, August 20th, many are wondering if the team should not delay it. At the time of publication, the team has not commented on that. As such, the latest is that the SAGE crew will still go live on August 20th.

Star Atlas - VZUS solos skin for Tensorian owners

Star Atlas – VZUS solos skin for Tensorian owners

Crew – Trading on Tensor

Finally, though buying and opening packs seem to work well, trading on Tensor has not yet been enabled. It appears this is a team decision, as they want to smooth out the final issues before opening up trading.

In the days leading up to the Crew Sale, Tensor displayed a prominent banner at the top of its website (although without a link). However, it seems that they removed this again recently.

The team has provided no ETA, but trading on Tensor is expected to go live at any moment.

Launch Party Reveals

The community Team hosted a pre-launch party that eventually evolved into the launch party, lasting a little over nine hours! Of course, it took this long because the team struggled in the background to get Pack opening live and working correctly. StarAtlasTV recorded the event, although at some point, shared screens were not being enlarged/focused, which meant they were not visible.

The team hosted many Marble games throughout the party, giving away various Crew packs and ships.

The good stuff starts about 4 hours into the recording, when Michael (CEO) briefly walks around the unreleased Pearce C9 hangar, before passing the mic to Chip (Director of Game Systems Design). Unfortunately, this part of the recording comes with an echo.

Before going into the meat of it, Michael and Chip have some fun with the Fleet Command menu item, which Chip does not actually enter. A little later Michael checks if they should make more Fimbul BYOS Butch ships craftable, to which the community seems to respond favorably.

Next up, Chip and Dom square off in a brand-new, smaller-scale, arena-type Surge map that will be used for the tournament at the IMPACT Summit. Though the visuals were not captured in the recording, you can hear Chip explain the layout and reasoning behind the new map.

At the 4h24m mark, Danny (CPO) joins in to discuss the lore behind the map, one of the biggest alpha leaks provided during the event. He explains that, with the creation of these smaller-scale Arena maps, they wanted to create some overlap with future game maps, in this case, with Ioki, the Ustur homeworld. In Season 0, there is a one-off seasonal event in which the Tufa have invaded the Ustur homeworld. The Council of Peace has come to help them, constructing a forcefield that envelops the whole planet. You, as a player, will help the Ustur get rid of these Tufa invaders.

There are gateways, such as the one featured in the Surge Arena map, that will be one of the ways to pass through the forcefield and reach the planet.

In other words, the Surge map they were showing off is a gateway station in orbit around the planet Ioki.

They then briefly discuss the synergy between Fleet Command and this UE5 experience. Players will see an event pop up indicating that something is going on at Ioki. They can jump into third-person mode and join the battle or keep managing their ships to supply the system with materials.

From here on out, Michael starts discussing the risk/reward tradeoffs in the Safe Zone (where Ioki is) with Danny. This then morphs into a High-Risk Zone discussion between the two, worth listening to. This starts off (4h42m) with Michael going back to his idea of a 2-class ship system, where the GAO ships are treated differently than user-crafted ships.

Much later, after some Crew Pack updates, at the 6h36m mark, Michael questions Danny about the crew art & the delays.

Crew – Art

As there have been many questions regarding the Crew Card art, here is a short extract of the relevant sections taken from our Crew Guide:

Initially, the plan was to release only MUD characters, as the team had made a lot of progress there. However, after the community pushed back against that, the team decided to include all races in the initial Crew Card mint.

However, that posed a problem. There were myriad things for some of the races that did not yet exist in-engine. This is why these 6.2 million Crew Cards combine in-game renders and concept art.

All the base bodies were rendered in 3D, most of which took place inside the game engine. However, some of the female bodies were rendered in the modeling software as they were not ready yet. Then, for the humans, Mierese and Ustur, some of their outfits and accessories were also rendered in-game. That said, the majority of Crew Cards come with outfits and/or accessories that are Concept Art that was painted on top of the 3D renders.

Updatable

Crew members sometimes hold/wear items such as goggles and weapons. In the future, you can customize your crew by replacing those items or simply taking them out.

In other words, if you don’t like what your Crew member is wearing or holding but you like some other stuff that another Crew Card is sporting, you will be able to exchange those items at a later date!

So, don’t just look at the overall picture! Look for cool accessories as well!

Star Atlas Naabathon - Promo Banner

Star Atlas Naabathon – Promo Banner

Short News Bits

Some additional interesting bits from the past week:

  • If you want to contribute to Star Atlas and its DAO and run for Councilmember, register soon as the nomination period closes on August 20th!
  • The Naabathon got a new promo image (see above) showing off all sponsors, including the DAO (see above). Participants will receive a custom Ogrika Ruch skin (see below).
  • ATLAS and POLIS are live on Rain! Top borrowers & traders can earn Crew Packs.
  • Tensorians received a free VZUS solos skin as part of the partnership between Star Atlas and Tensor.
  • The Metaverse Nomads recently interviewed Dan Park (Legal Council @ ATMTA), which is worth watching as they go into the DAO and Dan’s role at ATMTA.

image

Naabathon – Ogrika Ruch skin

Rare Evo Meetup

Some team members were in Las Vegas to attend the Rare Evo blockchain event, and while there, they hosted a community meetup! Santi (Community Director) posted the below picture on X, and it looks like a few Romans made Dominic (Community Manager) eat a sock on the spot!

Star Atlas Community Meetup - Rare Evo (Las Vegas) 2024

Star Atlas Community Meetup – Rare Evo (Las Vegas) 2024

You’ve reached the end of this week’s issue! Thanks for reading!