Welcome to our 183rd 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 newsletter is packed with follow-up details from the first Town Hall of the year, which ran over three hours and focused heavily on SAGE C4, UE5, and Holosim. Rather than rehashing the Town Hall itself, the focus here is on the additional insights and clarifications that followed, shared in the Foundation Room and during the Economic Forum.
Meanwhile, a highly contentious PIP is nearing the end of its voting window!
Let’s dive right in!
Star Atlas Town Hall – June 4th, 2025
Town Hall
The first Town Hall of the year lasted a whopping 3 hours and 20 minutes. If you missed it, there are several sources to get you up to speed:
- StarAtlasTV Recording
- Team’s Medium Article (short)
- Our Town Hall Report (long)
Interestingly, the team’s Medium article included a few small details that were actually missing from the Town Hall itself. We added these extras, details that emerged during the Economic Forum on Thursday, and clarifications shared in the Foundation Room to our Report as well.
During the Town Hall, the team primarily shared new details on three major product lines: SAGE, UE5, and Holosim. Instead of trying to summarize the details here, please read the report or article linked above.
Town Hall – UE5 Presentation
Post-Town Hall Clarifications
We mentioned additional clarifications were shared in the Town Hall and the team’s Medium article, which we are listing below:
- Danny (CPO) shared that, due to player-owned Space stations not making it into this round (C4), gas giants will be treated like other claim stakes and will come with their own unique resources.
- When a ship transporting a Claim Stake is destroyed, the Claim Stake will respawn at the Central Space Station (or a nearby Starbase). The player will not lose it.
- Although Claim Stakes won’t be craftable or upgradable with C4, Michael (CEO) responded the following to a question concerning this: “I can’t say if it will be permanent; likely not. But I can’t say when we would open the economy to crafting Claim Stakes.”
- The resources available on a planet are dependent on:
- its type
- the system’s starbase tier
- the Claim Stakes structures implemented on that planet
- Though loot is locked to the fleet that lands the final hit for a limited time, self-destruction opens the loot to all.
- Upon release, the team expects to have over 3,800 craftable (ship) components, including 2,000 weapons, and more than 500 countermeasures.
Star Atlas – Holosim
Holosim
The team officially launched the public test phase of Holosim live during the Town Hall! This free-to-play SAGE “simulation” runs on the team’s internal Atlasnet blockchain and comes with the following extras that may make their way into SAGE at a later date as well:
- Combat — Engage in battles for the first time. Ships are permanently destroyed for now.
- SAGE — Your personal AI assistant trained to help you with all things Star Atlas.
- Route Manager — Automation tools to streamline your operations.
- Tutorial System — Learn the ropes faster than ever.
- Questing System — Take on new challenges and progress through missions.
Beyond what was shared during the Town Hall, Michael shared the following in the Foundation Room:
The timing of the town hall, and release of Holosim was very strategically planned because of some other events we have coming up quite soon. But it did mean we didn’t have enough time to fully polish Holosim, which is fine with me, because it’s F2P and non-consequential. So we are treating it as a soft-launch open beta. Let’s get some more feedback from our community in an open beta format, and get it prepared for a wider push beyond the Star Atlas community. The immediate response is quite positive, which gives me confidence to invest more resources into that marketing campaign (which we have scoped).
Being asked about how realistic the plans are to onboard new players into the main game through Holosim, Michael responded with the following:
If we converted even 5% of Holosim users to mainnet, that would be a win. But at a minimum, it is going to serve as a formidable tool in simply teaching the basics of SAGE gameplay with a very low barrier to entry, and zero risk (aside from a little time invested). That alone makes it a valuable tool in our arsenal for user acquisition and conversion. Separately, as low as that conversion target may be, the real goal here is to create a massive top of funnel. Benchmarking against some other “web3” games like Pixels Online and a few other games on Ronin (which I see as a target for Holosim), they’re boasting 1M DAU. I’m not sure if those numbers are still accurate, but they’ve seen traction largely because of the simplicity of their offering. So from that perspective, if we could bring 1M new people into SA via Holosim and convert even 1% of them, we’re looking at 10,000 new DAU — 10x our current numbers. And then similarly, we have a huge opportunity to promote this across multiple platforms (web and mobile) to a non-crypto native. It’s then on us to build the bridges and incentives to get into mainnet gameplay with real economic incentives, which I strongly believe can happen.
Regarding the quests in Holosim, José clarified that they had not yet completed all the quests and had only launched those that were ready. More quests are coming!
DataRunner Sale
During the Town Hall, the team announced that they would temporarily offer Data Runner ships from the second GAO wave at a 50% discount. This sale ends today, so depending on when you read this, you may already be too late.
The sale is specifically for:
- 280 Fimbul BYOS Rangers @ 1048 USDC — 122 were left for sale (around the time of publication)
- 400 Opal Rayfams @ 430 USDC — 394 were left for sale (around the time of publication)
The sale is not in ATLAS, as one may expect, but in USDC. Referral discounts still function for these sales, allowing you to get the ships at an even lower price point.
Economic Forum #13
A day after the Town Hall, the Economic Team, specifically Chris (VP of Game Economy) and Gareth (Analyst), joined Santi (VP Community & Ecosystem) to host the 13th episode of the Economic Forum.
First off, the Economic Dashboards have been relocated to a more prominent position on the governance platform. You can now access them using the following URL: https://govern.staratlas.com/economy, or through the new header button (located in the middle) on the platform itself. Beyond the dashboards, quarterly reports can now be found here.
Star Atlas – Ecosystem Dashboards
Aside from the dashboard, the remainder of the Forum was primarily focused on initial Holosim statistics and SAGE C4.
Economic Forum #13 – Presentation
Chris explained that Holosim should really help bring people in from countries with a 3rd world economy. Additionally, plans are in place to monetize this product in the future. Before they get to that, however, they need it to be more stable, while also gaining a better understanding of the retention and the economy. There will likely be a few resets before (it’s not clear if these are in line with, or beyond, the seasonal resets José discussed during the Town Hall).
Reviewing the points listed in the above image, he noted that the average player saves 30 cents per hour compared to when playing the game on the Solana mainnet. This is clearly a substantial amount!
C4
Chris shared that there will be approximately 5,000 resources in C4, which represents a significant upgrade from our current state. He shared the following numbers:
- 75-80 new raw resources
- 150 new intermediate components
- 2000-3000 ship components
- ~1000 different buildings (for use within Claim Stakes & Crafting Habs)
When a ship is destroyed, its full cargo is dropped in a cargo pod. When it is being salvaged, dice will be rolled to figure out how much of it you get. The rest is burned. As mentioned during the Town Hall, salvage ships get a bonus to this random roll.
When asked about why HRZ mechanics are being applied to the MRZ with component configurations being burned, Chris mostly referred to Danny (CPO) as the person from whom this idea originated. That said, he added that he would not easily pass up the opportunity to get things blowing up.
He then spent considerable time reviewing the economy of ship configuration destruction, including preventing players from trading attacks (and thereby gaining LP).
On the topic of Claim Stake upgradability, Chris mentioned there were important economic reasons to prevent this from happening, despite earlier messages that upgrading would be possible. There is a limited amount of space for T5 Claim Stakes. If every Claim Stake were to become a T5, there are nowhere near enough slots for these. Additionally, it would either become super expensive to do, as they can not undercut the Claim Stake prices the team sold these for at the tail end of 2023. That said, he did leave the door open just a little, so this could still change.
FICS & LP
Perhaps one of the more interesting revelations was that the plan is to eliminate Faction Infrastructure Contracts completely when C4 launches. The thought process is that ship configurations will fill that hole, as players will be in great need of these, especially when conflict takes center stage in the gameplay, as the team hopes.
This means Loyalty Points will become the only route to earn Atlas emissions. But with the removal of FICS, the team is able to greatly increase the related Atlas pool again. Chris is well aware that this also brings back intra-faction competition, but he is working on a way to mitigate this. He has not yet provided any details.
All in all, it was a very interesting event, worth listening back to!
DAO Update
Meanwhile, voting for PIP-17 has been open for over a week, and it will remain open for only a few more days. It proves to be a contentious and polarising one, as nobody has abstained just yet, and it only has 59% of the votes in favor at the moment.
PIP-17: Star Atlas Ecosystem Media Expansion — This proposal seeks 10 million ATLAS to begin funding an expansive, DAO-aligned content initiative including short-form video, music integration, educational one-pagers, player engagement, and a professional short film tied to the Star Atlas metaverse over the next four months. All ATLAS will be held within the ecosystem and not converted into USDC. The funding will directly support content creation, in-game activity, and long-term value generation for the DAO.
Results around time of publication: 58.97% For | 41.03% Against | 0% Abstain Closes: Thursday, June 12th, end-of-day UTC
You’ve reached the end of this week’s issue. Thanks for reading!