Welcome to our 55th 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.
Another riveting week has ended, culminating in the team releasing a Medium article (aptly sub-titled “The Road To Tomorrow”) and two extensive PDF documents. One of these offers a fancy summary of the sales details from the Medium article, and the other represents the first part of the game manual for SAGE, focusing on its economics and the transition from SCORE.
Both the Medium article and associated PDF introduce the details of an 8-week sales extravaganza, that offers 4 different ways in which the community can contribute to the length of ATMTA’s runway (see our previous newsletter if you missed the big news).
Golden Era: Start Sequence
The team has titled their upcoming 8-week sale, the Golden Era: Start Sequence. It consists of four paths the team has defined that allow the community to step in and help the team. Of course, the community will get rewarded for doing so, primarily through discounts and special skins.
The four paths are:
- Sale of 3 Titan ships at a discount
- Sale of 6 selected GAO Wave 2 ship models at a discount
- Sale of Claim Stakes, required to assume ownership of land on planets in space
- Sale of 10% of available land & habitats on all three Central Space Stations (CSSs)
There will be two windows during which these sales will go live. The first window, starting this week, will see both the titan ships & GAO Wave 2 ships going on sale. This phase will last 4 weeks in total, after which there will be another 4 weeks, in which the land sale commences, meaning both the CSS land and claim stakes.
There is a lot more to it, so we’ll go into all of these in much greater detail below!
As a final note here: Phase 1 of these sales should kick off a little later this week, possibly on Wednesday!
Titan Sales
There are 3 titans in production within the team, and all three will be going on sale this week. The team chose to implement a time-limited, decreasing discount setup, where the maximum discount (80%) will be available only in the very first week. Every week thereafter this discount will be lowered by 10%. This campaign will last 4 weeks in total.
There will be 3 titan ships on sale, from three different factions (2 major and 1 minor):
- 1x Pearce T1 (MUD)
- 1x Busan — The Last Stand mrk. VIII (ONI)
- 1x Fimbul ECOS Superphoenix (ECOS)
To put this into context, the team shared that there will be 18 titan ships in total, 3 for each faction (3 major & 3 minor factions). Each of these titan ships has been assigned a (VWAP) value of $5 million. This means that there will remain 15 titans left for a future sale (at, or around, their VWAP price most likely).
The best deal will be during the first week, when the discount is 80%, resulting in a price of exactly $1 million. Every following week will see the price increase by $500.000, likely resulting in significantly reduced interest.
Finally, it’s good to note that these titans will be the only ones ever sold that come with a custom, commemorative skin. Though this is likely not that relevant to their potential buyers.
Ship Sales
The team has selected 6 ship models from their current GAO 2 offering, of which less than 98.5% has been currently sold, and will offer them at a steep discount over the next 4 weeks. Similar to the titan sale, the team chose to implement a decreasing discount setup, resulting in the ships being sold at the highest possible discount during the first week (this week).
The following ships will be discounted, starting at 80% and declining with 10% per following week:
- Fimbul BYOS Tankship (commander)
- Pearce D9 (capital)
- Busan Maiden Heart (capital)
- Ogrika Sunpaa (large)
- Fimbul Mamba (medium)
- Pearce R6 (small)
Similar to the titan ships, any buyers of these ships during this special sale will also receive an exclusive ship skin for them.
Compensation
To compensate any previous owners of these ships, the team has decided to airdrop them one additional copy of the ship, for each of these ships they bought. To facilitate this, they took a snapshot right before sending out their announcement. In other words: It’s of no use to quickly buy these ships at this time, in hopes of receiving another one.
Claim Stakes
Before looking into the actual upcoming sales, let’s first go over what Claim Stakes are and how they (roughly) work:
Claim stakes are physical objects that must be transported to a chosen planet in order to lay claim to a plot on its surface. Claiming a planetary plot grants the owner access to extracting available local resources.
The above is a direct quote lifted from the Start Sequence document that was released late last week. Since the beginning, it was always the team’s intent to make mining a non-trivial profession that would involve the need for various buildings (assets), crew members, and locations to produce output and to allow users to tweak these to improve their output.
In SAGE (formerly known as SCREAM) mining plays a big role as well. To keep things simple, the team decided early on to leave all of that additional complexity out of the first iteration of that game, to be able to release it sooner. The idea was that you would only need to send ships (with crew members) to a planet to collect already mined resources by fictitious facilities on the ground.
However, in an effort to increase revenue in the short term, the team has now decided to start selling these land-based mining assets as well and is subsequently looking into integrating them as soon as possible into SAGE. The team’s target is to get land-based mining implemented into the mainnet release of SAGE, early next year. It looks like this is not yet guaranteed to make it, and the team expects to share more information on this soon.
Claim Stake Sales
When phase 2 launches, 5 weeks from now, the team will for the first time ever sell Claim Stakes, and the other facilities required to perform the actual mining. These include Mining Drills and Powerplants and Space Stations. Previously, these had been airdropped as a reward for Rebirth poster buyers only, which is why some people already own these.
There are 5 tiers of Claim Stakes in total. A Tier 1 Claim Stake (the cheapest and simplest one) will allow you to extract common resources from that patch of land. Each subsequent, higher tier raises the bar for the rarity of resources that can be extracted. See the list below:
- Tier 1 Claim Stake - Common resources
- Tier 2 Claim Stake - Uncommon resources
- Tier 3 Claim Stake - Rare resources
- Tier 4 Claim Stake - Epic resources
- Tier 5 Claim Stake - Legendary resources
Besides a Claim Stake, you will also need to acquire at least one Mining Drill, Powerplant, and Space Station (through which the resources flow and are collectible by ships).
Further details regarding prices & supply will be made available in mid-December.
Central Space Station - Land Claims
Besides Claim Stakes, the team also plans to sell cosmetic land and habitats (habs) for the three central space stations (each major faction owns one of these, located at its center) during phase 2 of these sales.
The lands sold are residential in nature and are meant to be used for social gatherings. Commercial land plots will be sold further down the line.
The team plans to sell a maximum of 10% of all available land claims during this 4-week window, split into 4 waves containing 2.5% of the total available land each.
Once a wave sells out, the next wave will go for sale right away. If a wave is not sold out, then it will remain open until the end of phase 2.
The first wave will start at the highest possible discount of 15%, with each subsequent wave sporting a reduced discount:
- Wave 1: 2.5% of total land @ 15% off
- Wave 2: 2.5% of total land @ 10% off
- Wave 3: 2.5% of total land @ 5% off
- Wave 4: 2.5% of total land @ 0% off
Packages
These land claims will come in 6 different tiers (one more than most other assets), with the tier determining the size of the land plot and habitat. The higher the tier, the bigger everything gets.
Instead of requiring you to buy every asset individually, the team will bundle land claims, habitats, and several other items (e.g. crafting station) into packages. In the future, these assets will have to be purchased (or even build in case of the latter) separately.
Ships
These packages will also come with ships that are as of yet unsold. Some can be found in the GAO - Wave 2 document, while others have never been heard of previously. The following ships will be provided:
- Tier 0: no ships
- Tier 1: Calico Scud
- Tier 2: Calico Scud & Calico Maxhog
- Tier 3: Calico Scud, Calico Maxhog & Ogrika Niruch
- Tier 4: Calico Scud, Calico Maxhog, Ogrika Niruch & Opal Rayfam
- Tier 5: Calico Scud, Calico Maxhog, Ogrika Niruch, Opal Rayfam & Fimbul Mamba EX
Next to ships, the package will also come with a ship skin. It’s not yet clear which ship will benefit from this, though the Calico Scud would make for an obvious choice.
Landing pads
Each tier 1+ habitat will come with a landing pad of a certain size. These sizes are:
- Tier 0: no landingpad
- Tier 1: XXS
- Tier 2: XXS
- Tier 3: XS
- Tier 4: S
- Tier 5: M
Perks
Owning a land claim package comes with a number of perks:
- Increased cargo space at the CSS
- Increased crafting rate for R4 resources (at the CSS)
- Receive priority in selecting a specific plot location on the CSS when lot selection opens. Plot selection will be implemented by hosting an auction for each individual plot.
- Whitelisted for future commercial plot sales
External Funding
Besides creating options for the community to help out, the team has also been in talks with a good few potential investors. Talks are currently ongoing, but due to NDA’s the team is unable to comment further on these.
They did share however that ATMTA is currently focusing on three main targets:
- Solana Foundation Grant - The Solana Foundation might award a grant, but up until now they have been helping the team by providing feedback on their pitch deck and introducing them to relevant parties in their network,
- Expansion and interoperability with several other blockchains, both Layer 1 and Layer 2, and their ecosystems
- High-level discussions with numerous venture capital firms, as well as crypto and gaming funds. The team shared that they had ongoing discussions with numerous funds and firms that operate in and bring expertise to the web3 space.
The *expansion and interoperability with other blockchains *part raised some eyebrows in the community, though Michael has never made it a secret that the team would like to reach out to users of other chains if possible. How this would work exactly is unclear, however, as the team has not shared further details on this.
SAGE
SAGE will be able to profit from the above sales in the following way once it launched on the mainnet in a few months:
Central Space Station Land/Habitats:
- You’ll have increased storage in your CSS
- Your R4 crafting rate will be increased at your CSS
- Both of these scale with the tier of the land claim
Claim Stakes:
- If the plans of the team pan out, then you might need these in order to be able to mine in SAGE. If not that, then they will at the least significantly boost your mining output.
The target release date for SAGE on devnet is still December 2022, with the mainnet release still planned for Q1 2023.
SAGE - Manual Part 1: Game Economics
As mentioned in the introduction, there was another interesting document dropped by the economics team last week: Part 1 of the SAGE game manual.
This document goes into the transition from SCORE to SAGE, the economy in SAGE, how resource extraction works from an economical perspective, and other details, all focused on the economic properties and levers in this upcoming game.
It’s far too much to be able to summarize in this newsletter, so make sure to give it a read when you can spare some time!
Chip (Game Systems Designer) did let us know that he will be working on part 2 over the next few weeks, which will really go into the actual game mechanics.
CORE Ep. 1 - Extended Sale
People trying to buy the exclusive Magic Eden cover of the first issue of the Star Atlas: CORE graphic novel during the last few days of its availability window had to return home empty-handed.
Magic Eden was using Serum markets for its SFT sales, and due to the security issues that became apparent after the FTX collapse, that version of the comic became unavailable before the official end of the sale window.
To alleviate this issue, the team has decided to extend the sales window for CORE issue 1 on their Galactic Marketplace, to allow potential ME buyers to find their way to that marketplace instead, while also giving them time to sort out this problem for future issues.
At the moment this newsletter is being delivered, there are still 77 days left for you to acquire the first issue.
Polkastarter: Game Awards
The annual Polkastarter Game Awards are ongoing and you could help by voting for Star Atlas for the People’s Choice Award:
Don’t miss your chance to nominate your favorite GAM3 for the “People’s Choice Award” this week🔥
The ONLY category with 100% community voting.
Nominations on our website NOW LIVE⬇️ https://t.co/p0niqHY1RY https://t.co/0NZL1maeKK