Welcome to the first newsletter on Star Atlas of 2023! We hope you all had a great time during the holidays and are looking forward to all this new year will bring! This weekly newsletter is published by Aephia Industries and focuses entirely on Star Atlas. Here we try to aggregate all the newsworthy tidbits that were dropped by the team throughout the past week.
The team returned from their holiday on January 3rd, and though nothing big was revealed since then, they have answered some community questions. We took the most newsworthy of their answers and put them in this newsletter for you. But before we get to that, let’s look at what lies ahead this year!
What to expect for 2023?
As we start a new year, it might be good to look forward to what we can expect this year.
SAGE
The internal SAGE tech demo will start this month, in January. During this time, team members will playtest the game to see if everything works as planned. If this is the case, and progress on the UI is going well (this still has to be completed, all blockchain programs have finished), then the devnet release may come online in February.
Note that there is no official information on when the devnet release may go live. If things go less smoothly, it’s likely that the devnet release will slip to March (or even later) instead. Q1 is currently the target date.
Showroom
As presented during the Breakpoint keynote by Michael (CEO), a few more pre-season releases will be forthcoming before Season 0 (nicknamed: Star Atlas Alive) kicks off. With R2 having been launched in mid-December 2022, this year should see at least two pre-season releases, specifically R3 and R4.
The following is currently known about these two releases:
Release 3
This release will introduce a way to craft building materials used to expand the Space Station (Volant Studio is part of the MUD Central Space Station) and, most importantly: The warp gate that will unlock the rest of the galaxy!
These building materials are made using resources gathered in SAGE as input.
Release 4
This release will bring forth Showroom-SAGE interoperability. It’s unclear what this will look like, but there is a big focus on ship skins here. This release specifically will introduce the ability to craft custom skins!
Short Term
Before we get to R3, patch R2.1 will go online, which will bring:
- Upgrade to Unreal Engine 5.1 (allows for larger maps)
- Adding the train (lobby of sorts). The first arrival in the Showroom will then drop you at the Train station.
- Group Chat & Proximity Voice Chat
- Possibly: Ground racing
We have no target dates for any of these releases. R2.1 will likely go live in Q1, and -given the tight planning- R3 might go live in Q2. However, we’ll have to wait for the team to confirm any of these dates.
Mapping out 2023
The team is, like last year, currently busy brainstorming and finalizing the actual schedule for this year. The info on SAGE and the Showroom we mentioned above is according to the state of affairs at the end of 2022.
It’s very possible that the team will, like last year, change some of its plans due to new developments, information, or ideas that have popped up during the last few weeks and months.
It’s unclear when the team will finalize their plan for 2023, but we will let you know when they do!
Podcast
Interestingly, one item -announced for a 2022 release- has not yet seen the light of day and is overdue for release. In early 2022, on April 21st, the team announced through a press release that they teamed up with Audio Up to produce an 8-episode audio-only series that will be delivered through a podcast titled Moon Station Six.
The target date for this release was Q4 of 2022, but we’ve heard nothing since the original announcement.
However, we’ve confirmed that it is still very much on the team’s roadmap and is slated for release this year. No further specifics were shared at this time.
State of the Economy
On December 31st, the team released their Economic Report for Q4 of 2022 and a separate, accompanying appendix.
As always, these are great to read and provide interesting graphs and information on how the player base reacted to the rollercoaster of events of the previous three months. Do not gloss over the appendix, there are a lot of interesting graphs in there!
To finish 2022 and prepare for 2023, we released the third Star Atlas State of the Economy Report! 🌌 🚀
In our latest publication, you will find updates on the following:
🌎 Star Atlas Census 👩🚀 Labor Force & Employment 📈 Statistical Methodology
News Tidbits
General
- The team is organizing various workshops this month, allowing them to determine the best items to work on this year.
- Danny hopes to be fleshing out ground-based PVP this year, but this will depend on the aforementioned workshops.
- Characters/crew members will be configurable like ships, which means there will be armor slots and armor.
Showroom
- VR - Since returning to the office, Michael has been teasing a Virtual Reality-mode becoming available in the showroom, with news about this coming relatively soon-ish.
- Danny (CPO), in response to a question about the level of interactivity inside of ships: “We’re using the Floydliner to get to gold standard […]. We [will have] have weapon racks, I definitely want to activate the [various] monitors, but we’re tackling gameplay controls first, like sitting in a gunner/pilot seat and all the controls that go with it.”
- The team’s objective is to finalize some multi-crew ships this year, including the Pearce C9.
SAGE
- Map visibility - In response to concerns that some folks might create “side visibility” tools to visualize SAGE location data that resides on the blockchain -giving them an advantage- Danny stated that he is “making it a priority to diminish the need for any side visibility tools at all”. In practice this will likely mean that there will be a view where all the (important) public information is visualized
- Space Stations - These will be able to be used in SAGE V1. V3 will however greatly expand on their use. In V1 their primary purpose seems to extract gas from planets & refine into fuel.
- Claim Stakes - do not come with any mining capabilities out of the box, a mining drill needs to be constructed to be able to mine.