Welcome to our 206th 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 brought a steady stream of updates across the Star Atlas ecosystem. First of all, the Atlas Brew centered on the upcoming Galia Game Mode overhaul, set to begin rolling out right before Christmas. The team walked the community through early footage and new mechanics, highlighting the progression systems and tutorials that will arrive with this update.
On the governance side, Council Elections for Term 3 are entering their final campaign week, and three active PIPs remain open for voting—two of which close tomorrow.
Lastly, Danny shared a snapshot of ATMTA’s product stack, the first Iris’ Blessing raffle winners were announced, and a new Abu Dhabi meetup was confirmed for December 12th, coinciding with Solana Breakpoint.
Let’s dive in!
Galia Game Mode – Single Player Campaign
The Atlas Brew past week was all about the Galia Game Mode expansion, of which the first sliver is coming online around Christmas. During the Brew, Brad (Gameplay Engineer) and José (Lead Lore Writer) showed early, work-in-progress footage of new mechanics and surroundings.
Brad started by explaining he sees this more as an overhaul of the Galia Game Mode. The mode lacked a clear sense of progression and a tutorial that helped introduce players to what the game mode had to offer. These were the key points they wanted to address.
Important: This is an entirely off-chain, single-player experience. You won’t be able to use any of the assets (e.g., ships, screw) that you own, and playing this game won’t reward anything on-chain either.
The Galia Campaign mode adds:
- Inventory system (as seen in the Sneak Peek last week)
- Harvesting items from plants and ore nodes
- Equipping items & using usables (e.g., healing)
- Transferring items between your cargo and a ship’s cargo (both offer limited space)
- Vending machines & NPC vendors, you can sell items to, and acquire new ones
- Crafting of many items, such as (better) weapons and ship components
- Buying ships & Ship components (upgrading shields, weapons, etc)
- Crafting & placing habs on planets
- Missions/quests
In essence, the missions will provide the tutorial, while progression will occur through the acquisition of better equipment and items.
Star Atlas – SAGE portrait
Storyline
The character SAGE, whom you may have met in Holosim, will make an appearance in the game mode as well. She won’t be there in a physical form, but she will be supporting you by providing instructions (through audio). In a nutshell, the first part of the mission consists of you crashing on a planet, getting your bearings, determining what happened to the rest of your crew, and evacuating the planet.
Once you manage that, you will find yourself on a space station. There, you will meet an NPC who will give you a questline that instructs you (among many other things) to free six different space stations that the Jorvik pirates took over. Of course, this becomes increasingly difficult with each subsequent space station.
When you free a space station, civilians will return to their posts, and additional vendors will come online. Simultaneously, freeing a station will also unlock the resources of the associated planet. Meaning that more items will become available to you as you progress through the quest chain.
Brad showed off a lot of videos and some in-game demos, so definitely do check out the recording of this Brew. Below, we posted some screenshots, but these really do not do the videos any justice.
Star Atlas – Galia Campaign (SP) – One of the planet’s biomes
Star Atlas – Galia Campaign (SP) – Piort, your character
Star Atlas – Galia Campaign (SP) – A small dealership at your starting space station
DAO Update
The council elections for the 3rd term are ongoing, and the three governance proposals we highlighted last week are all open for a few more days to gather your votes! Please note that the voting window for two of these PIPs closes tomorrow.
Council Elections
The Council Elections for the 3rd term were launched nearly two weeks ago, and the self-nomination window has since closed. Of the seven candidates we listed last week, one dropped out due to personal issues, leaving the following 6 to run:
- Emperor
- Q | Morangø
- 𝐋ᴀɴᴢᴇʀ
- ROME | Winston
- [ECL] YassFreeks
- [EMP] jith blade
The campaign period lasts two weeks, and you can find out more about these candidates and ask them questions in the new DAO channel that was created for this purpose on the Star Atlas Discord.
Next, let’s examine the state of the Polis Improvement Proposals that are still open for voting.
PIP-22: Iris Bounty – The Arena
This proposal seeks 11,000,000 ATLAS and introduces Iris’s Bounty: The Arena, a program that empowers Star Atlas community members to host tournaments and gaming events by co-funding them with the DAO. Instead of flat grants, the DAO provides a 2:1 funding match for organizer-secured contributions, with DAO matching funds split between prize pools and organizer compensation.
- Requested funding: 11 million ATLAS
- Structure: 1-off PIP
- Author: King Bryan, Santi, Signal
- Voting Opened: Wednesday, November 5th
- Voting Closes: Wednesday, November 18th (end-of-day UTC)
Preliminary results (~12 days in, ~123M PVP committed):
- For: 97.51%
- Against: 2.17%
- Abstain: 0.32%
PIP-23: Refresh of PIP-4 the Ecosystem Fund
This proposal continues the Star Atlas Ecosystem Fund and establishes a budget of 20% of the Star Atlas DAO’s Treasury.
- Structure: 1-off PIP
- Author: Council
- Voting Opened: Wednesday, November 5th
- Voting Closes: Wednesday, November 18th (end-of-day UTC)
Preliminary results (~12 days in, ~93M PVP committed):
- For: 73.19%
- Against: 25.96%
- Abstain: 0.85%
PIP-24: DAO-Supported Hosting Service for SLY Assistant
This proposal introduces a DAO-Supported Hosting Service developed and operated by community member Arty, specifically dedicated to hosting the SLY Assistant automation tool.
- Requested funding: 675 USDC for a 3-month trial
- Structure: 1-off PIP
- Author: Arty
- Voting Opened: Thursday, November 9th
- Voting Closes: Wednesday, November 22nd (end-of-day UTC)
Preliminary results (~8 days in, ~54M PVP committed):
- For: 49.68%
- Against: 48.83%
- Abstain: 1.93%
Star Atlas – Land vehicle (Concept Art)
News Bits
Before we wrap up this issue, there are three smaller news items for you:
ATMTA Product Stack
Danny (CPO) shared the following image in response to a question about how the various products in Star Atlas all tie together. He quickly crafted this image as a response:
ATMTA Product Stack
Iris’ Blessing Raffle
The first Iris’ Blessings raffle took place this past Friday, during the first Galia Game Night event on that day. Prizes should already have been distributed (claimable in your Inventory), but you can check out all the winners in the new channel on the Star Atlas Discord server.
This also means your ticket totals have been reset, and now have roughly one month to accumulate new tickets for the next raffle.
Breakpoint 25 Meetup V2
Meetup Abu Dhabi
Lastly, a new Star Atlas meetup was announced last week. It will take place in Abu Dhabi, on Friday, December 12th! This coincides with the Solana Breakpoint conference taking place there as well, and therefore, the expectation is that a good few Star Atlas enthusiasts, and perhaps some team members, will be there to join.
This meetup is being organized in collaboration with the SuperPhoenix DAO, whose new Super Phoenix Sports branch is organizing a racing tournament on the same day, which will be live-streamed during the event!
If you plan to attend, please register in time through the Luma link.
Sneak Peek
Ivan Leon, a Senior Technical Artist who worked on Star Atlas for the past nine months (but has since left the company), posted some cool samples of his work online!
You can find more samples on his Art Station page, but we primarily wanted to draw your attention to this versatile weapon skinning system he worked on:
That is it for this week. Thank you for reading, and until next time!