Welcome to our 191st 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.
Community Week 2025 has wrapped, marking another high-energy celebration of everything Star Atlas! From the thrilling Team vs Community UE5 battles to the Joni Awards and COPA presentations, the event was packed with action, recognition, and fun.
The UE5 Summer Patch also launched, featuring improvements like polished gameplay, progression via EOS, and the introduction of Play-to-Earn mechanics. Meanwhile, the Holosim Beta closed, with Ustur taking the crown in Season 0, and with the top 1000 players earning a cosmetic badge. Lastly, don’t miss the upcoming community meetups in Valencia, Utrecht, and Cologne this August!
Let’s dive in!
Community Week ’25
The second-ever Community Week took place this past week, in the middle of summer, and it looks to have been a major success! Kudos to the Community Team for all the time and effort they put in!
We’ll go into the major events below, but let’s start with a short highlight of a new event this year, the UE5 Team vs Community battles.
UE5 – Team vs Community
One of the new additions to this year’s Community Week was the Team vs Community UE5 Surge battles. The team played eight games against community teams with straightforward rules: whoever got to 30 points first, or had the highest score after 10 minutes, would win. One of the absolute highlights was the comeback of the team in their game against Coexist. In less than a minute, the team managed to fight their way back up, all the way to 29-29, and then scored the last point needed right before Coexist could.
After losing to them during the community-organized Iris’ Quest, this was a great revenche match!
Also worthy of mentioning here is that there was only one team that managed to win against the team, and that was Quimera‘s first team (they participated with both their A and B teams).
This whole event proved to be a spectacular new addition to the Community Week!
Community Week 25 – COPA
COPA
The 2025 edition of COPA took place on Tuesday this past week. The 10 guild finalists each had 10 minutes to present their vision and progress.
In the end, the judges decided on the following top placements:
- Star Atlas Italia (SAI)
- BULK
- Aephia Industries (AEP)
The differences were minimal, with there being a 1-point difference between each subsequent pair in the top-4 positions. Therefore, an honorable mention for Quimera, as they ended in 4th place.
If you want to rewatch the show, check out the recording by StarAtlasTV!
Community Week 25 -Joni Awards
Joni Awards
The 3rd-ever Joni Awards ceremony took place this past Friday, and, without further ado, below are the categories and their winners:
- Community Member of the Year: @[Λ] Neo_AArmstrong [EC]
- Content Creator of the Year: @beyondthehorizon#2620
- Most Popular Guild of the Year: Aephia
- Best Community Tool of the Year: Eveeye (by @Ryden)
- Star Atlas IP Project / Business of the Year: Star Atlas TV (by @vb | Star Atlas Mod)
- Community Helper of the Year: @《VΛ》Jindo
- Best Gunplay Player of the Year @Q | Hakmer
- Most Knowledgeable Member of the Year: @[AEP] Lerinor
- Most Entertaining Video of the Year: The Star Atlas Summit Experience (by @Atlas Theory & @Shaddix1 | Star Atlas Mod)
The “Best Gunplay Player” and “Most Knowledgeable Member” categories were duked out live during the ceremony with a Free-for-all deathmatch game between the four nominees in case of the former, and a live quiz in case og the latter.
If you want to (re)watch the event, you can now check out the recording here!
Star Atlas Summer – Town Hall Pt. 1 – UE5 Summer Patch
Town Hall – UE5 Summer Patch
The Town Hall was almost entirely focused on the launch of the UE5 Summer Patch, bringing features such as:
- Progression (off-chain, using Epic Online Services)
- Fully polished Paizul’s Arena
- Various gunplay improvements
- Dedicated servers
- Missions in the Galia mode
As always, StarAtlasTV recorded the Town Hall, and we wrote a written report if you prefer to read through the highlights quickly.
Before the team jumped into the UE5 update, they officially released the first of 3 cinematics that led up to the launch of Season 0. Check out this 3-minute clip (with updated audio compared to the IMPACT Summit preview) now!
Play-to-Earn
Play-to-Earn is back! You can now play UE5 and earn Crew Packs based on your skill and dedication.
The Join Session screen now displays a list of dedicated sessions across the different regions in the world. Here, you will find sessions for two weekly game modes that you can join, one for Gunplay and one for Racing. To earn XP, you need to log in with a wallet, and you need to be playing in one of these two matchmaking sessions. The XP earned in both gunplay and racing is the same, so you can choose the mode that fits you best!
XP earned is tied to a Character Group (species & gender pair). There are 14 groups in total, and you’ll need to work on several to get access to the rewards:
- Human Male
- Human Female
- Mierese Male
- Mierese Female
- Sogmian Male
- Sogmian Female
- High Punaab Male
- High Punaab Female
- Profound Punaab Male
- Profound Punaab Female
- Ustur .1
- Ustur .2
- Tufa
- Photoli
To earn any of the rewards, you need to have reached certain Prestige levels. When you level up a character group to max level (20), you will earn one prestige level, and the normal level will reset back to 1, allowing you to level up the character group again, earning you the second prestige level.
The following rewards can be earned:
- Silver 5 Card Pack — Level 20 (Prestige 1) with 4 different character groups
- Gold 5 Card Pack — Level 20 (Prestige 1) with 8 different character groups
- Platinum 5 Card Pack — Level 20 (Prestige 1) with 12 different character groups
- Diamond 5 Card Pack — Prestige 10 times across 12 different character groups (this pack starts with Crew Card rarity at epic)
In short, you are not levelling up a Crew Card. Instead, you are levelling up the Character Group the Crew Card belongs to. This progress is not stored on-chain, but is instead stored inside Epic Online Services (EOS).
Note: Ledgers are currently not yet supported in UE5. Please move the Crew Card(s) you mean to use in-game to a hot wallet and connect this one to the game. As progress is not stored on-chain at this moment, you are not losing out on anything by doing it this way for now. The team is working with a 3rd party to get proper support set up.
Holosim Beta Finale
The Holosim beta ended this past week, though the game is still live and will remain that way until close to the launch of the first real season.
The Ustur faction managed to redeem the most contracts during the period the beta was live, just edging out MUD. As such, they are the winners of Season 0! Below is the final tally:
- USTUR — 34,134,755 POINTS
- MUD — 29,869,593 POINTS
- ONI — 11,057,775 POINTS
Looking at players, [AEP] Lerinor took the top spot on the leaderboard, followed directly by [CATain] Shadowmoon and ***Solaris* 0siris. It was a super tight race till the very end:
- [AEP] Lerinor — 225.372.794 XP
- [CATain] Shadowmoon — 225.215.011 XP
- *Solaris* 0siris — 224.500.979 XP
Rewards
The team shared the following regarding what you can expect as rewards:
Gold, Silver, and Bronze badges will be awarded to the Top 10, Top 300 and Top 1000 respectively (with a few exceptions).
As you may know some players found and executed various exploits throughout the open beta. While this might have been frustrating to some, it was very helpful for our team to see these exploits first hand so we could address them. Rather than exclude those players from the leaderboad completely, they will get to keep their rewards, but their spot on the leaderboard will be shared with the next person in line. This way, someone who was using an exploit won’t bump someone else to another lower reward tier.
For example, if a player who was flagged for using exploits ranked #7 on the leaderboard, they will still get the “Gold” badge, but the Gold and Silver tiers will include one extra spot. So the player who is ranked #11 on the leaderboard will also get a Gold badge, and the player who is ranked #301 will get a silver badge.
Cosmetic badges will only be awarded to players who have linked a mainnet wallet to their Holosim account using the in-game settings menu before 23:59:59 UTC August 11th. So make sure you’ve linked your wallet! Rewards will be airdropped to that linked address later that week.
To make this extra clear: If you want a reward, make sure to have supplied your wallet address before August 12th (UTC)
Community Week 25 – Community Carnival
Community Carnival
A new feature introduced to the second Community Week was the Community Carnival. The whole week, community members could earn tickets through various activities, which were then used in raffles taking place on Saturday.
The community could play regular Rumble Royal and Gartic team, hosted by moderators. They could challenge each other with Rock, Paper, Scissors, and they could gamble against the bot itself. All of these activities allowed them to earn carnival tickets (often requiring them to put these on the line first). On top, the team gave away codes you could claim during the main events, and you could predict the winners of various events and earn tickets from those who bet on the wrong outcome.
All in all, the tickets significantly boosted Discord server activity, and many had a lot of fun challenging each other and seeking more ways to gain tickets.
On Saturday, during another live event, the community team wrapped up the Community Week with twelve drawings, one for each of the prize categories on the above poster.
Note: If you missed it and want to know if you won anything, please head to the Star Atlas Discord and check the #sola-qint-bot channel.
And with that, the Community Week of 2025 was a wrap!
Community Meetups
August has meanwhile kicked off, and there are three community meetups taking place this month:
- August 6th, Valencia (Spain) — Food & drinks and Santi will be there!
- August 15th, Utrecht (Netherlands) — Food & drinks and Santi will be there!
- August 23rd, Cologne (Germany) — Comet! The biggest of the three, with multiple team members (developers) expected, and over 100 people expected to join. This meetup coincides with Gamescom, making for a great visit!
That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading, and until the next!