Welcome to our 214th 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.

The past week saw an Atlas Brew focused on z.ink and Holosim, and an Economic Forum centered on the first OMO results. While this provided some news, we also gathered additional updates from the DAO and the latest UE5 patch notes. Lastly, we look at an older Discord conversation with Michael (CEO) about the team’s financial situation, before wrapping up with some strong new sneak peeks.

Let’s dive in!

Holosim – Chapter 2

Holosim Chapter 2 is on the horizon, and expectations are that it will launch somewhere over the next 2 weeks.

During the Atlas Brew, John (aka Xcode – Product Manager) showed some new combat-related visuals and provided an example of a quest monologue. Jose (Chief Noot and Lore Guardian), meanwhile, shared some AI-generated teasers on X. Let’s go over it all!

Combat

John shared that the combat interface has been changed. It’s no longer full screen; it’s now a smaller panel, like most UI elements. More interestingly, it is showing fleet icons with timers on top when a fleet is recharging.

Combat itself was changed as well. Now, when you click attack, your fleet will keep attacking until you stop it. Also, combat has been slowed down, so it takes longer. Two equally equipped fleets may need 10 minutes before one is destroyed. This makes combat more strategic as other fleets can be pulled in to help or cause havoc behind enemy lines.

Below are the two screenshots shared by John. You can hear more about these during the last 15 minutes of last week’s Atlas Brew.

Star Atlas - Holosim S1C2 - Combat [WIP]

Star Atlas – Holosim S1C2 – Combat [WIP]

Star Atlas - Holosim S1C2 - Combat [WIP]

Star Atlas – Holosim S1C2 – Combat [WIP]

Video & Teasers

Below is the 1m45s video of SAGE (Sentient AI) and a (High) Punaab, named Seeikolobe Mineefastu, shared by John during the Atlas Brew, as an example of what to expect during mission briefings.

Play Video: Star Atlas - Holosim S1 C2 - Quest Monologue Example [WIP]

And here are five 9-second teasers posted by Jose on X and Discord:

Play Video: Star Atlas - Holosim S1C2 Teaser - SAGE Getting Ready Play Video: Star Atlas - Holosim S1C2 Teaser - Invitation by HOLOSIM Play Video: Star Atlas - Holosim S1C2 Teaser - Andreza Liora (Balifa Grove - ECOS) Play Video: Star Atlas - Holosim S1C2 Teaser - Nova.tcher Summons Play Video: Star Atlas - Holosim S1C2 Teaser - Deacon Howard Dawn

Economic Forum

Last week saw the (delayed) first Economic Forum of 2026, which focused mainly on the initial results of the new Open Marketplace Operations (OMO) program.

Chris (VP of Game Economy) gave a brief explanation of the Difference-in-Differences (DiD) method he used to measure the effect of the OMO program so far. It provided some interesting numbers. For the assets where the team posted a batch for sale, sales prices, on average, went up. In other words, more people bought from the (slightly more expensive) team offering.

Star Atlas - Economic Forum - January 2026

Star Atlas – Economic Forum – January 2026

All in all, the team’s income went up from $130 to $8,267. A substantial relative improvement, but in absolute terms still not that much.

New OMO Listings

Chris also announced that the team would remove all of their OMO offerings the next day to replace them with new batches for a new pool of assets. That said, there is a good deal of overlap.

Here are the new OMO Listings:

  • Armstrong IMP — 20x — 6,572.82 USD
  • Fimbul Sledbarge — 4x — 5,535.63 USD
  • Armstrong IMP Tap — 124x — 595.90 USD
  • Armstrong IMP Tip — 250x — 147.06 USD
  • Claim Stake T5 — 3x — 4,881.25 USD
  • Claim Stake T4 — 42x — 1,265.16 USD
  • Claim Stake T3 — 111x — 422.85 USD
  • Claim Stake T2 — 255x — 133.12 USD
  • Claim Stake T1 — 1,134x — 22.25 USD
  • Calico Evac —66x — 207.60 USD
  • Pearce MR8 — 9x — 1,750.86 USD
  • Fimbul Lowbie — 830x — 11.90 USD
  • Fimbul Airbike — 6,428x — 1.33 USD

Note: These are slightly higher than they were in the table Chris presented during the Forum.

If you want to learn more about all of this, make sure to check out the recording!

DAO Update

A new POLIS Improvement Proposal has gone live for community members who locked POLIS into the Locker. You have until the end of the day (YTC) February 5th to cast your vote.

PIP-26: Star Atlas Crew Adventure Series – Season Production

The Star Atlas Crew Adventure Series is an ongoing cinematic storytelling project that produces AI content rooted directly in Star Atlas lore. This proposal funds the production of one complete season, consisting of:

  • 2 months of weekly episodes (4 minutes or longer each).
  • 3 weekly YouTube Shorts tied to each episode.

The request of 13,143,639 ATLAS covers the entire content pipeline: writing, worldbuilding, environment creation, character development, animation, sound design, original music, editing, and distribution on YouTube and X.

Earlier seasons (1–3) are already publicly released, demonstrating both capability and viewer interest. This proposal provides the resources for the next season, allowing the series to continue expanding the Star Atlas universe and offering consistent, lore-driven media that can attract new participants to the ecosystem.

See https://www.youtube.com/@StarAtlasCrewAdventures for the existing seasons.

  • Requested funding: 13,143,639 ATLAS (max allocation from Ecosystem Fund)
  • Structure: 1-off PIP
  • Author: Hammerhead
  • Voting Opened: Friday, January 23rd
  • Voting Closes: Thursday, February 5th (end-of-day UTC)

Preliminary results (~4 days in, ~90M PVP committed):

  • For: 38.98%
  • Against: 59.76%
  • Abstain: 1.26%

UE5 Patches

The team released two patches this past week, focusing mostly on bug fixes and balancing. Almost all game modes were improved, including gunplay, racing, Siege, and Galia.

Below are the full notes for both patches.

January 22 – Star Atlas UE Patch Notes

General Ship Play

  • Ship Crosshair no longer remains red when aiming at a target without line of sight

Siege

  • Improved boosting feel to be less instant. Adjusted boost camera behavior to give a greater sense of speed
  • Improved hit registration for projectiles, increased time to kill to compensate for shots landing more often

Racing

  • Adjusted race timeout duration 2 mins → 1 min. This timer starts after the first racer finishes
  • Lowered jump pad force in Exinade reverse track
  • Fixed an invisible collision issue near the end of the Exinade foward track

Gunplay

  • Improved Spectator mode clip detection to prevent camera from clipping inside walls
  • Added protections for respawn invincibility remaining permanent if player was respawning during match end
  • Increased melee gap closing player impulse
  • Fixed issue where player incorrectly spawns with a sniper in team rockets
  • Fixed issue where a pickup would break if a player was standing on it when it respawned
  • Increased Win Condition for Team Rockets 20→30
  • Increased Win Condition for Zones 20→50

Galia

  • Balance: Reduced ship prices by half
  • Improved space visuals; Space is much darker and star is brighter.
  • Improved performance & visible stutter during sub warp. Still working on ghosting effect
  • Freight and Data Running missions now better support larger ships
  • Improved visuals of star in Hecteria
  • Added background NPCs to command center room of Nova Station
  • Fixed bug where ships with interiors were getting kicked out of sub warp
  • Fixed bug where payout for bounty missions was sometimes incorrect
  • Fixed missing materials on station exteriors

Progression & Customization

  • Fixed Kill stat tracking for Shockwave Pistol, Shockwave Rifle, and Rocket Launcher
  • Fixed issue where player’s XP can go negative when prestiging. Note: If you still have an existing negative value, please submit a ticket, we will promptly fix manually

Stability & Crash Fixes

  • Fixed a few crashes dealing with Ship Physics, WWise Audio, and ExoSky

Ongoing Efforts for Future Patches

  • New reworked Vehicle Hover Mode flight model to address speed FPS dependency in progress. At a high level, we are moving from our custom physics simulation flight model over to using Epic’s more Robust and proven Character Movement Component. This is already being used in Siege and is much more performant and robust for use in multiplayer.
  • Migration of core Ship blueprint (UE visual node based scripting) logic up to C++ to continue to accelerate development since its easier to leverage AI-Assisted coding when the logic is in C++. This patch already contains migrated code for a lot of the blueprint logic that manages the Ship Equipment (Weapons, Missiles, Tractor Beam, Scanner, etc).

January 23 – Star Atlas UE Patch Notes

Galia

  • Fix lighting exposure issue in Space stations causing severely bright visuals

Racing

  • Properly clear target/targeting on entry into spectator mode
  • Update other racers to have a red name tag instead of neutral white
  • Don’t show 3d target triangles or green leading pip around current target when racing

Ongoing Efforts

  • Tech Debt: Moved all Ship Targeting (T) logic to C++

A Conversation About Financials

Right before the team went on their Christmas/New Year’s holiday, Michael (CEO) responded to some community members who expressed concern regarding the team’s runway and capital raising efforts.

We missed this in our last newsletter of the year, but we wanted to share this still with everyone here, as Michael was pretty open about the struggles they experience in that area.

If you want to revisit the conversation yourself, it starts here (on Discord).

This is way out of context now, but I was tagged earlier about our various capital raise efforts, and thought it would be helpful to provide some context here about our intentions. Simply put, we *have* been continuously active in pursuing various investor interest since 2022. Without going through the full timeline, what I can say is that:

  • We’re open to raising capital
  • It’s not a question of valuation
  • There are other implications to us raising capital at the studio level that can make this more challenging

Generally, the environment for raising capital on gaming products and as a game studio has not been strong since 2022. This is true in both traditional markets, as well as web3, with VC interest waning globally. Deals are getting done, but a lot of those are also seed round deals, which we aren’t positioned to participate in given historical revenues and maturity of the company.

Some of the biggest blockers for us in particular are related to the sheer scale of the product roadmap. We’re looking at a $350MM+ production budget to bring the game to a full v1. If we were to raise, we need to raise $20-$30MM check size to move the needle at all. That’s already a large bet to take, and even moreso when considering it’s a fraction of the total required raise. Now, we can get around that by structuring a raise around a particular phase of the roadmap — shipping a very specific product. But we haven’t identified any credible VC that is willing to take that bet.

And elaborating on my point about “complications” with us raising VC, the deal becomes particularly complex when communicating our intention to transfer the IP to the DAO. As you can imagine, most investors would be less attracted to investing in a company that is going to transfer it’s core value (IP) to a third party. So, we’d need to identify a VC partner that can understand how we ultimately capture long term value, post-IP-transfer. Otherwise, we’d have to compromise on our entire philosophy of a player-owned universe, which I’m not willing to do.

So, it’s not for lack of effort, or because we don’t want to raise at a particular valuation. It’s because we haven’t been able to identify a suitable, aligned venture capital group that is willing to take the bet on us. In spite of our historical success. Which has been difficult (impossible) to do in the market environment over the last couple of years. But I’ve had dozens of conversations with VCs to see if that option opened up to us.

In response to a follow-up question (if we need more money), Michael added:

Yeah, more money would help. We continue operating on a limited budget with reduced resources given our current balance sheet. As I’ve said, we can get by essentially indefinitely, but that comes at the cost of team size. More money = more features + faster development

Being asked if he feels pressure, he shared:

Yeah, I feel pressure given how this year went. Revenues were probably the worst of our entire history

The convo ended on a slightly more positive note (after words of support):

Thanks man. To be clear, I still have absolute confidence in our future, and we’re not going to give up either way. But I know we could accomplish a lot more with more capital.

News Bits

To wrap the news up for this week, here are two more newsworthy tidbits for you:

  • During the Atlas Brew, Jim (VisualJC – Web Director) accidentally let slip that Backpack is the primary wallet partner for the z.ink L1 chain.
  • After Santi’s departure, the selection process for the Econ Vantarah briefly stalled, but it should resume soon.

Sneak Peeks

This past week saw a barrage of art uploaded to ArtStation, and we are posting some samples below. Make sure to click the links to see many other variants and angles!

Exinade

Edward Denton (Lead Environment Artist) shared work done on the Exinade Race Track:

Star Atlas - Exinade Race Track - Posted by Lead Environment Artist Edward Denton [In-engine]

Star Atlas – Exinade Race Track – Posted by Lead Environment Artist Edward Denton [In-engine]

Star Atlas - Exinade Race Track - Posted by Lead Environment Artist Edward Denton [In-engine]

Star Atlas – Exinade Race Track – Posted by Lead Environment Artist Edward Denton [In-engine]

Star Atlas - Exinade Race Track - Posted by Lead Environment Artist Edward Denton [In-engine]

Star Atlas – Exinade Race Track – Posted by Lead Environment Artist Edward Denton [In-engine]

LAR-4 & Starbase

Ainsley Langford (3D artist) posted some LAR-4 and Starbase art as he worked on both space stations:

Star Atlas - LAR-4 Spacestation - Posted by 3D Artist Ainsley Langford [In-engine]

Star Atlas – LAR-4 Spacestation – Posted by 3D Artist Ainsley Langford [In-engine]

Star Atlas - Starbase - Posted by 3D Artist Ainsley Langford [In-engine]

Star Atlas – Starbase – Posted by 3D Artist Ainsley Langford [In-engine]

That was not all, though. Check back next week for more!

That is it for this week! Thank you for reading!