Welcome to our 35th newsletter on Star Atlas! This is a weekly newsletter, published by Aephia Industries, that is focused entirely on Star Atlas . Here we try to aggregate all the newsworthy tidbits that were dropped by the team throughout the past week.
Official news
Star Atlas released issue #11 of their roadmap scan - ONI Dream Within a Dream — Part II: Star Atlas Roadmap Scan #11.
State of the Economy
As mentioned in our previous newsletter, last week saw the release of the very first Star Atlas State of the Economy Report. This (from now on) quarterly publication will provide the community with a bird’s-eye view of the Star Atlas economy. This first edition goes into:
- The first Census of the Star Atlas Universe
- The introduction of the labor force as a key concept in metaverse econometrics
- Star Atlas contributing roughly 1% to the total global crypto adoption in December 2021
Key Report Highlights
The report touts the following points as the key takeaways:
- The growth in the labor force drove aggregate daily ATLAS wages to increase by 18% since the beginning of 2022.
- The size of the labor force grew 49.1%.
- The average wage per ship declined -27.1%.
- The aggregate employment rate per ship decreased 3.7%.
Showroom
The team is busy wrapping up the first pre-alpha build of the showroom for imminent release! Interestingly the art team - who were done - got called back to apply some additional polishing. Meanwhile, the blockchain and gameplay teams are busy getting the wallet and authorization integration finalized.
SCREAM
Two more departments, game design & blockchain, moved their status from prototyping to building last week! That leaves both UX and UI still in the prototyping phase and Game Economics in the R&D phase. Further highlights are that the blockchain team has worked on the very movement, and the star systems program, while the UX team has been continuing their work on wireframes and interaction flows, with a focus on crafting flow and refining inventory management.
Galactic Marketplace
Starting off with blockchain, the team last week officially reported that the marketplace has been fully audited and is now ready for production. Meanwhile, the front-end team reported that their code is 95% complete and hooked up to the devnet, where they started testing. This week they will be sharing the link with internal teams and moderators as well, to start training people and gather early feedback.
POLIS DAO
With most of the work completed, the front-end department is working hard to finish polishing the high-fidelity designs. Then, for blockchain, the ATLAS staking program has been submitted for an audit last week, and the team will work this week on linking it up to the marketplace to apply the incentive structure.
General
Ship Rarity
Danny (CPO) gave us an update on ship rarity, stating that it will be inferred dynamically in the future. At present, ships have been assigned rarities based on the complexity of building them in the game. This means that rarity is not based on the actual total supply at this time. In the future, when ship crafting goes live, the rarity indicator for ships will change to be based on the actual number of ships in the game.
Crew
Additionally, Danny revealed that the crew members that will be air-dropped at some point in the future will come with aptitudes that are relevant to the station they are supposed to man. This means that their aptitudes won’t be completely random.
On the topic of the rarity of crew members being dropped, he stated that the team is not yet sure if all crew dropped will be common, or if their rarity will be related to the ships that they are dropping for.
Ships
VZUS Solos
The VZUS Solos, VZUS their foray into XXS-class ships, is now available at the Galactic Marketplace. The Solos is a racer ship and debuts the first XXXS slot for weapons (sporting two of them). Their selling point seems to be the hull reinforcement, which is an XS-class slot.
Ship Progress Video’s
This week saw the release of 3 alpha (work-in-progress) clips showing off some of the ship grayboxes in the Unreal Engine! Check them out below:
The 3rd video’s link was not shared yet, so it can only be viewed through twitter, or by downloading the file directly.