Weekly Star Atlas Newsletter #213

Welcome to our 213th 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.

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This week’s update is led by a significant community moment: Santi is stepping down from his role at ATMTA and transitioning into an advisory position.

Alongside that, we have new details on Holosim Chapter 2, further context around SAGE C4, a pair of UE5 patches, and a longer-term creative update with the announcement of a new Star Atlas lore book series!

Let’s dive in!

Star Atlas – Ustur Skeleton [Concept by João Lira]

Santi Steps Down

The big news last week, no doubt, is that Santi is stepping down from his role as VP of Community & Ecosystem to become an adviser. After nearly 5 years with ATMTA, having started as one of the very first Discord moderators and, from there, grown into bigger and bigger roles alongside the company, Santi has decided to found his own company with a childhood friend.

He posted the following message on X (and Discord):

Personal news alert: I’m starting my own company!

After almost five years at Star Atlas, I’m taking a leap of faith and pursuing something I have always wanted to do in my life, but only now feel confident and equipped to do it.

These past few years have taught me everything I know about business. Working every day next to @at_mwagner and the Star Atlas team has been the best experience of my life. Not only that, but I also had the blessing to make friends literally all around the globe. Everywhere I travel, there’s always someone from the Star Atlas community willing to meet or be a local guide. I couldn’t be more grateful for all of this, for all the memories in the Star Atlas Discord, every Brew, and every game night.

I feel now is the time to apply what I’ve learnt at Star Atlas and create value for more people and projects. I am moving to Dubai to start something with my lifelong friend @_osten, a dream we both had since we were two kids playing videogames at his grandmother’s place, and that is materializing now in this way.

This doesn’t mean I’ll fully leave Star Atlas, I’ll be transitioning into an advisor role and plan to continue to be involved in the community and team, just from a different position now. There’s nothing like Star Atlas being created in the world, and I have full trust that Michael and team are the most capable people to build this vision, coupled with the help of the best community in the world.

If you’ve read this far, I wanted to thank you for taking the time, and encourage you to pursue your dreams even if they sometimes feel like too much.

“If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re not big enough.”

Responding to some community messages, Santo later followed up with this message on Discord:

My time at Star Atlas has been the best time of my life, and I’ve enjoyed every single moment of my job. Literally a dream come true.

This decision comes more from things coming together in my life and aligning for me to pursue something I’ve always wanted to do, in fact, I’ve even maintained conversations with Michael about this for a long time, and I’ve made him aware of the possibility in advance. Star Atlas certainly has challenges ahead, but I still maintain full trust in Michael and the team to push through everything. C4 and Zink launches are going to be critical for Star Atlas’ success, and I’ll be here to support, just from a different position now.

As expected, Santi’s departure spooked some community members. When asked to comment on Santi’s departure, Michael (CEO) wrote:

I can appreciate that emotions are running high throughout the community. We’ve been navigating a terrible market environment since 2022, with many complications (FTX) mixed in, and very few opportunities for wins along the way (saw some upside in 2024 for a brief period).

Santi is and has been a pillar of our community since the very beginning, and has formed deep relationships with many of you. He’s also always been very ambitious. I think most would recall hearing him “joke” about taking over the CEO role here at ATMTA. It’s not surprising to me at all that he is founding his own company, and as he noted, it’s something we’ve talked about frequently over the years. I’m incredibly proud of him for everything he’s accomplished for us and the way in which he built, managed, and nurtured this community over the years. We wouldn’t have the dynamic here that we do without him. However, as an entrepreneur myself, I can fully appreciate his desire to pursue his own endeavors. There is zero animosity or bad feelings between us, and I’m certain that he will continue to be a part of this community, involved with ATMTA, and a friend and colleague of mine for life. I congratulate him on this move, and think you all should as well.

In terms of ATMTA, we remain steadfast in our resolve to bring this vision to life. In spite of all of the hardships, tough times, and seemingly impossible feats ahead of us, we’re going to continue grinding forward to deliver. And I personally think we have delivered an incredible amount over the years, particularly considering the challenges that we’ve faced. Especially on the financial side, as we’ve never been fully funded to deliver the full scope of the project. However, in spite all of the failures in the space (just saw 2 games shutting down this week), we’re still here, having fought through all of the hardships, making all of the difficult internal decisions, and managing those resources we do have as responsibly as possible. This was always going to be a long journey. That’s what we signed up for. And we’re still here for the win.

Holosim – Chapter 2

We learned a little bit more about Holosim this past week:

• Jim (Web Director) shared that the team is working with the authors of the SLY Automation Tool to integrate part of their automation into Holosim for Chapter 2.
• Various non-playable characters (NPCs) will make their introduction in Holosim. Each Faction has similar quests, but these are wrapped in different bits of lore. All quests are fully verbalized and will include dialogue of the aforementioned NPCs.
• SAGE and the other NPC avatars will also chime in with notifications if you skipped the daily quest, or your fleet is about to be attacked (possibly).
• In upcoming chapters, the team plans to start testing political substructures in the game, as one of the features they want to add to SAGE after C4.

Chapter 2 is expected to launch in the last week of January or the first week of February.

SAGE C4

During last week’s Atlas Brew, Jim shared a lot of information about SAGE C4, which we are re-sharing below.

To kick things off, he went into why it took so long to deliver SAGE C4:

• Starcomm V3 — StarComm V2 did not deliver all the improvements the team expected. This meant there was a need to create an even newer, better version.
• Creation of Star Frame — Anchor is not optimized for the complex needs of an on-chain game, so the team had to work on a new one: Star Frame. Then they had to recreate parts of SAGE with that framework.
• Switching to SolidJS — The front-end devs found that the React library was slowing things down too much, so they are re-engineering the front-end using a replacement library: SolidJS.

Before the new game can be made available for testing on the PTR, two more things need to be done:

• Optimization of StarComm V3 to allow the Map View to display 10-20k fleets
• Completion of the game’s front-end (a migration from the internal test UI) — Note that the UI will resemble the UI of SAGE/Holosim. It will be streamlined and improved in terms of user experience, not so much in visual fidelity. The Holosim combat designers (front-end) are working on C4 combat, with an additional UI pass by UX designer Jeff.

On StarComm specifically, Jim shared that if there is ever an issue with StarComm, C4 includes a toggle that lets you play the game via RPC directly. That said, Starcomm V3 is already powering the z.ink website.

Jose (Master of Lore) and Jim also went into features that the team is copying from Holosim. Below is a list of features that are most likely coming to C4:

• Faction Chat — The Faction chat was pretty popular in Holosim, so the team is busy adding this to C4.
• Quests — The team is looking into adding quests to C4 to help people get up to speed. They are looking into giving z.ink XP (zXP) as a reward for completing these. It’s not yet clear when quests will make it into C4, nor if this zXP plan will get approved.
• Automation — Currently being implemented into Holosim, the team plans to (at a later point in time) to bring this to SAGE as well.

Through answering questions, we learned a bit more about what the PTR will look like:

• Everyone starts with the same assets on PTR, including a large sum of zATLAS.
• All 4 parts of C4 will go live on day 1, meaning: Council Rank, Combat, Crafting Habs, and Claim Stakes will all be available when the PTR launches.

Star Atlas Calico Flattop – The first Capital Ground vehicle [Concept art]

UE5 Patches

The team released two patches this past week, focusing mostly on bug fixes. Most of these concerned Racing and the Siege mode, and include a few nasty ones that were plaguing AMD machines. Some of the Galia game mode bugs were also quashed, but many more remain.

Below are the full notes for both patches.

January 14 – Star Atlas UE Patch Notes

Siege and Racing:

• Added tunable acceleration parameters for horizontal, vertical, and strafing movement in Ship Arcade mode. Ships should now have a more inertial feel when strafing and rolling as a result.
• Bumped up the damage multiplier in Racing mode
• Slightly increased respawn delay in racing
• Resolved ship possession issues when players join a session late that could cause an invisible character
• Fixed an issue where invulnerability wasn’t being cleared after the first respawn in races
• Fixed a bug where Ship firing sounds could be heard globally in multiplayer
• Fixed a bug where the Interaction Widget (i.e., “Sit”) would remain visible in Siege
• Fixed a bug where the player can shoot directly behind the ship with VJoy enabled
• Fixed a bug where racers who leave a race prematurely aren’t considered participants for XP calculations at race completion
• Fix a bug where the ship crosshair could get stuck in a partially animated state on death (e.g., Shield break)

Galia:

• Fixed bug where ships with interiors couldn’t sub warp
• Fixed bug where the turrets in the lava cave couldn’t see the player
• Fixed bug where the game didn’t always save after depositing items into the player’s storage container
• Fixed bug where lumanite power cells could be crafted with two lumanite ore
• Fixed bug where mission objectives would break when loading back into the game
• Fixed bug where dying and respawning would break bubbies and jetties
• Fixed bug where bounty missions were looking for planets from the old star system
• Fixed bug where vending machines weren’t showing a preview of the transaction when attempting to sell
• Fixed the missing door in the Arcol liberated lobby
• Fixed bug where a bot was missing from Maerven Station, blocking completion of the mission.
• Fixed bug where delivery missions weren’t failing if the ship/cargo were destroyed
• Melee can now damage ore nodes, saving on ammo
• Removed all X5s from station patrols as they can’t be properly targeted right now
• Fixed a bug where the system was generating Freight / Data Running missions with the current station as the destination
• Fixed bug where the waypoint was missing from Nova Station during the intro mission
• Tweaked ground scatter spacing and chunk width; denser grass for improved visuals.
• Fixed bug where turrets weren’t deactivating after liberating a station

Dogfight:

• Fixed bug where player score was stuck at zero

Progression & Customization:

• Prestige XP boost can now scale up to 50% (previously capped at 25% at Prestige 5).
• Resolved warnings and invalid tags related to firearm skins.

Stability & Crash Fixes:

• Addressed numerous crash scenarios captured via Sentry logs
• Added Sentry 1.4.0 with log support for live builds.
• Updated to Wwise 2025.1.4.9062

January 15 – Star Atlas UE Patch Notes

Siege:

• No longer able to target dead ships
• Dead ships now properly hide their status bars above them
• Adjusted Boost speeds in Siege for all ships
• PIP marker (green circle) and weapon gimbal cone now scale based on distance to target – larger and more forgiving at close range, tighter at distance. Improves close-range dogfighting UX
• Hide the PIP marker and reduce the name plate for targeted ships when the line of sight is lost

Racing:

• Fixed an issue preventing race results from loading at the end of a race
• Fixed an issue where racers who leave remain frozen in their current ranking in the race standings
• Fixed Race Jump Pads having inconsistent results, frequently causing a jump to be missed
• Improved Pulse and Ruch Hover mode handling

Gunplay:

• Address an issue where the max fire rate for shockwave weapons was abnormally high

Galia:

• Various performance/crash fixes in the EXOSKY Plugin that drives our planet tech

Progression & Customization:

• Fixed cooking/packaging issues causing a few remaining invisible Mierese characters

Stability & Crash Fixes:

• Fix issues with AMD GPUs rendering Ribbon-type Niagara effects, most noticeably impacting Shotguns and Gateway sky

Star Atlas – Ustur Skin variants [In-Engine – Concepts by João Lira]

Book Series – The Convergence War

During the latest LoreKeepers, Jose announced he is planning to write a 12-part bookseries, called The Convergence War. The first three books will be written from the vantage points of the MUD, Sogmian, and Ustur, respectively. Another 9 books will add additional color to the many other factions that exist in the Galia Expanse.

During the event, he shared the summaries of the first three books, which you can find below. Note that it will likely take a while before the first book is published, as Jose is even busier now that he has to cover for Santi’s absence.

Book I — The Promised Paradise

For the descendants of humanity, history is not a chain of coincidences. It is a pilgrimage. When confirmation reaches the inner sanctums of Manus Ultima Divina, the unified government of humanity, that a human explorer, Gyun, has discovered the Cataclysm, a region of space saturated with effectively limitless Genesium, the response is immediate and irreversible. This elusive region appears to fulfill the final promise of the Revelation that guided humanity away from Old Earth, not merely survival among the stars, but a holy land of it to settle eternally. Paradise.

At the pinnacle of MUD authority stands the Holy Family of God’s Chosen, the Gotti lineage. To them, the Cataclysm is confirmation. Proof that humanity’s exile, expansion, and dominion were never random acts of desperation, but deliberate steps along a divinely sanctioned path, one they are supposed to lead. Yet paradise does not arrive in unity.

With the death of the Patriarch Vincenzo Gotti, fractures begin to form within the Holy Family itself. The Gotti throne, once unassailable, becomes contested ground, and the discovery of the Cataclysm transforms from revelation into arena. Beneath the divine authority of the Gotti’s, humanity’s great powers turn against one another. The Holy Servants proclaim the Cataclysm sacred ground, demanding consecrated claiming and absolute doctrinal supremacy. To touch it without the church guidance is heresy. To delay is to doubt.

The Pearce Council, architects of MUD’s galactic expansion and enforcers of colonial obedience, see something far more practical: a strategic singularity. Whoever controls the Cataclysm will control the balance of power across the galaxy. Their answer is decisive action, seize it before anyone else can. Scientia raises alarms. Infinite Genesium violates fundamental laws of physics. The Cataclysm, they argue, may be an existential anomaly rather than salvation, something capable of ending civilizations faster than any war.

The Senate, already weakened by decades of divine centralization, pleads for restraint. Treaties. Shared oversight. A moment to think. But as fleets mobilize, their authority erodes by the hour. And in the shadows, The Synod prepares quietly. While others argue over faith, science, and sovereignty, the merchants move to control logistics, contracts, and trade routes, knowing that ownership often outlasts both belief and force.

Yet humanity’s divisions do not end within its own halls. At the edges of Manus territory, ECOS apostates lurk in the dark. Striking settlements, sabotaging infrastructure, and spreading chaos across the colonies. To them, the Cataclysm is not paradise, but the final proof that the Gotti must never be allowed to stabilize its dominion. Beyond human space, tensions with the Xenos empires rise rapidly. Borders strain. Old grievances resurface. And the infinite possibilities represented by the Cataclysm threaten to shatter the fragile balance between species.

It is in this moment, of revelation, fracture, and imminent war, that Charon Gotti, the young heir of the Holy Family, inherits dominion over hundreds of worlds.

Can she unify a divided humanity beneath a single vision? Can she hold paradise without tearing civilization apart? And can she defend mankind from the enemies gathering beyond its borders?

Learn the story of humanity’s most dangerous pilgrimage in the first volume of The Convergence War: The Promised Paradise

Book II — The Sovereign Vow

For the Sogmians, the universe offers no meaning. Meaning must be forged.

They do not believe in destiny, prophecy, or divine favor. They believe in the Du’pra, the vow-bound moral system through which existence is justified in a cosmos that neither cares nor explains itself. A Sogmian life is not measured by hope or salvation, but by the obligations one accepts, and the discipline to uphold them when certainty erodes.

When reports of the Cataclysm reach the Sogmian court, claims of infinite Genesium, limitless expansion, and civilizational salvation, they are not met with awe, nor fear. They are met with restraint.

Abundance, the Sogmians know, is not a gift. It is a test. Civilizations do not collapse from scarcity, but from excess, when restraint dissolves, and with it, the last defense against self-destruction.

At the center of this response stands Empress Paizul. Rejecting interpretations shaped by human theology or imperial ambition, Paizul invokes a rare and binding clause of the Du’pra: the Sovereign Vow of Direct Verification. She will not judge the Cataclysm from afar. She will not rely on foreign intelligence or second-hand conclusions. She will go herself.

Leading a vanguard expedition alongside her consort Bekalu, Paizul ventures into Cataclysm-adjacent space—not to claim it, nor to deny it, but to understand it. What they encounter confirms her deepest concerns. The space surrounding the Cataclysm is already unstable. Pirate fleets move with unsettling coordination. Remnants of the Fallen House Akalma operate with reckless violence, untethered from consequence. Long-held assumptions about the region fracture under direct observation.

The Cataclysm does not behave like an empty frontier. It does not behave like neutral territory. It behaves as if it is exerting influence.

Sogmian sensory perception—far more attuned than that of most species—registers a lingering pressure, subtle but undeniable, intensifying as they draw closer. Something is present. Something that responds to proximity. Yet these disturbances are not the most dangerous truths Paizul uncovers. Beneath the anomalies, beneath the violence, beneath the false promises of abundance, the Empress discovers a revelation so destabilizing that it threatens not only the future of the Sogmian people, but the fate of the entire Galia Expanse—a truth that will help ignite the most devastating war ever recorded.

Discover this, and many other secrets, in the second book of The Convergence War series: The Sovereign Vow

Book III — Those Who Wait

For the Ustur, patience is not weakness. It is doctrine. They believe transcendence is not seized through force or fortune, but earned through discipline, restraint, and the long refinement of the self across generations. While other civilizations race to shape history, the Ustur endure, waiting for reality itself to reveal its deeper structure.

The discovery of the Cataclysm challenges this belief.

As reports spread across the galaxy, of infinite Genesium, impossible abundance, and accelerating expansion, Ustur philosophers look past the rhetoric and trace the patterns beneath it. Matter behaving improperly. Entropy slowing. Accumulation defying expectation. To the Ustur, these are neither miracles nor heresies.

They are signals.

At the center of this forbidden inquiry stands Timpo, a heretic who abandoned the Path of Illumination and turned toward direct engagement with material reality. Cast out by orthodoxy and erased from official record, Timpo nonetheless succeeds where patience alone would not. He finds a way in.

His discovery fractures the Ustur order. Some see corruption, proof that material abundance poisons transcendence. Others see stagnation exposed for what it truly is: hesitation mistaken for wisdom.

One voice rises above the division. Elder Ombra, among the most influential of the Elders, sees the Cataclysm not as temptation, but as opportunity. A mechanism capable of compressing millennia of waiting into deliberate, controlled transformation. Acceleration, not abandonment, of the Ustur path. Under Ombra’s influence, the Council, guided by First Elder Mother Craven, makes a decision that will echo across epochs.

They will not conquer the Cataclysm. They will not sanctify it. They will inhabit it.

The Order of Those Who Wait is dispatched, not as settlers, nor as warriors, but as long-design agents tasked with observing, adapting, and reshaping the Cataclysm into a crucible for Ustur evolution. As their vessels vanish into Cataclysmic space, the galaxy remains unaware that the most patient civilization has made its most dangerous choice. They have chosen to stop waiting.

Discover the moment when endurance gives way to acceleration, and witness the decision that will reshape the fate of an entire species, in the third book of The Convergence War series: Those Who Wait

That is it for this week! Thanks for reading, and see you!