Welcome to our 225th 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 past week, Michael (CEO) briefly addressed the pending z.ink O.RIGINS airdrop, sharing his rough plans to prevent mass dumping on day one. Meanwhile, Holosim continued to receive steady patches to smooth out its roughest edges. We also got a first taste of an upcoming UE5 patch, introducing a new mission type to Galia.

Let’s dive in!

Star Atlas — Michael vibe-coded a "very rough snapshot of the claims portal." [link]

Star Atlas – Michael vibe-coded a “very rough snapshot of the claims portal.” [link]

Z.ink O.RIGINS Airdrop

Michael shared last week that the current thinking is to drop roughly 5% up front and have the remaining 95% of each player’s airdrop vested over six months or more. There will be an early-claim penalty that sends the forfeited balance back into the pool for people willing to vest longer. This should keep the circulating supply relatively tight at the start, while tokenholders will have a great incentive to stake their z.ink tokens given that the chain’s inflation curve is expected to be highest at the start.

Star Atlas — Holosim S1C2 — Two new recovery options have been added to the hangar menu: Minimum Repair and Remove Crew

Star Atlas – Holosim S1C2 – Two new recovery options have been added to the hangar menu: Minimum Repair and Remove Crew

Holosim

John (Product Manager) spent another week sanding down the parts of Holosim Chapter 2 that had been causing the most friction. The biggest change is simple: destroyed fleets now have more than one bad option. The new Minimum Repair button lets players spend a single toolkit to get moving again without fully restoring the fleet, while Rescue Crew gives them a way to pull crew out safely instead of being stuck behind a full repair bill. That follows the repair-cost overhaul we covered in #224, but this week’s changes feel more practical and a lot less punitive.

A few other clarifications mattered too. John said fleet-to-fleet repairs are now working mechanically, with dedicated repair ships restoring more HP per toolkit through their repairAbility stat. He also confirmed that the current AP cooldowns are only enforced in the UI for now and can still be bypassed on-chain, because he wants more testing before locking that behavior into the blockchain program itself. The warp cooldown, meanwhile, is there to slow excess resource production and inflation, not just to make movement take longer.

Live testing of the last storyline quest has also been moving ahead. The team carved out the middle of the map as a temporary no-fly zone while running tests for the Superphoenix event, and that restriction was later extended by another 72 hours. If this testing is successful, we should see the ECOS Superphoenix pop up on the map soon!

Holosim Changelog

This week saw only one official change going live. We included the changelog below:

v1.2.25

  • Fleet repairs no longer eat your whole toolkit stack — only the toolkits actually needed are used
  • Repair ATLAS costs now line up correctly with how much HP you repair
  • Added Rescue Crew for destroyed fleets — do a quick minimum repair, then pull crew out safely
  • Added Minimum Repair and Cancel Installation buttons in upgrade/crafting flows so you have a recovery option if something gets stuck
  • Fixed upgrade submit failures caused by out-of-sync points epochs — you now get a retry prompt instead of a hard on-chain error

Known Issues

The official Holosim Known Issues page still lists several open issues:

  • BUG-025 Stuck Crew Crafting
  • BUG-026 Mass Crew Disappearance / Asset Loss
  • BUG-027 Ghost Ship / Stuck Craft (Ogrika Jod)
  • BUG-028 Missing Crew (Systemic Pattern)
  • BUG-029 Cargo / Reward Sync Mismatch
  • BUG-030 Can’t Warp to Sector While Another Fleet is Subwarping Through It
  • BUG-031 Crafting Jobs Show as Complete After Hard Refresh
  • BUG-033 Scanning Stack Overflow (All Scanning Broken)
Play Video: Star Atlas - UE5 Elimination Mission Preview [WIP]

UE5

The team shared two short but interesting updates on the ongoing UE5 work. The Galia single-player game mode is set to receive an interesting addition soon, so-called Elimination missions. This is the first use case of the team’s new AI Navigation on Planet Surfaces. To demonstrate this, they shared a new video [see below] on X that shows an outpost (overrun by Jorvik) on the dark side of Merevia. Your task: eliminate their leader.

Play Video: Star Atlas - UE5 Minky Steer Hunting [WIP]

That is not all, though! A second video that was shared shows the player shooting Minky Steers from orbit with his ship. This is the type of combat we need before the much-anticipated Conquest game mode becomes a reality (which is unlikely to come anytime soon).

VZUS solos with the custom Solflare skin [A Holosim Chapter 1 exclusive]

Star Atlas – VZUS solos with the custom Solflare skin [A Holosim Chapter 1 exclusive]

News Bits

But that is not all! Here are some more news bits that are simply too short to warrant their own section:

  • A new PIP, number 31, is close to being published. This will be a proposal to fund the completion and launch of Star Seekers 2, a community-created cross-platform mobile space-combat game inspired by the Star Atlas universe, on both iOS App Store and Google Play Store. Stay tuned!
  • Iris’ Blessing 6th Drawing did not take place this past Friday, April 10th, as planned. It has been postponed to Monday, April 13th (the date of publication of this newsletter).
  • If you participated in Holosim Chapter 1 and completed the storyline quest-chain, you will have new rewards that are claimable in your inventory, including the exclusive vzsus Solos skin (see above).
  • Michael gave a bit more color on how SAGE C4 is expected to feel once it does arrive. In his view, day-to-day play should be mostly passive inside safer zones, with more active spikes coming from raids, conquest, and combat pushes.

While we are on the topic of ship skins made for special occasions, Gary Sanchez (Vehicle Art Director) shared a number of concepts he created for these over the past few years:

Star Atlas - Special skins concepts [by Gary Sanchez]

Star Atlas – Special skins concepts [by Gary Sanchez]

Special: DAO Casters

The first season of DAO Casters is in full swing, and this newsletter is a part of that initiative for the next few weeks. Do check out some of the content of other Star Atlas (DAO Caster) creators:

That is it for this week! Thanks for reading, and until the next!