Weekly Star Atlas Newsletter #177

Welcome to our 177th 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.

Surprise stealth updates? We’ll take them! While there’s no major official news from Star Atlas this week, the team quietly pushed a significant SAGE UI overhaul live, without a formal announcement or changelog (yet). We also got several high-quality beauty shots of the fully modeled Pearce X5, including a full 360-degree video. Get ready for one of the shortest issues of the year so far!

Let’s dive in!

SAGE Labs – UI Overhaul

In a surprise move, the Star Atlas team released a significant update to the SAGE Labs UI this past week, without any formal announcement or changelog (so far). With development currently focused on Fleet Command and C4, this overhaul came as a surprise to everyone.

The update relocates key actions from the sidebar to contextual buttons directly overlaid on the map. Fleets present in a sector now appear just beneath these action buttons.

Talking about sectors, the sector grid has been removed. This paves the way for the upcoming C4 update, which will transition the game from a sector-based positioning system to a global coordinate system for all entities on the map.

Clicking on a star system now brings up Starbase options, such as hangar and operations. Selecting a fleet from the new row below switches to fleet-specific actions, including warp, mine, dock, and self-destruct.

If you didn’t have the experimental background enabled previously, the first thing you’ll notice is the updated backdrop. This new background, which was previously optional via settings, has now become the standard. Another major change is the Fleets Overview panel, which has been simplified into a clean list of fleet tiles that pop up at the bottom of the screen.

All in all, this is a significant and well-received overhaul that sets the stage for even bigger changes with C4.

Pearce X5 Beauty Shots

Now that the full, high-quality model for the Pearce X5 has been completed, the team has been showcasing it on X. We’ve gathered the best-looking shots, along with this nice 360-degree video!

News Bits

To wrap things up:

• If you are a fan of the Star Atlas lore and you missed the Lorekeepers meeting this past Thursday, then you can now check the recording!
• Michael (CEO) reiterated once more that the current plan is to have all Starbase upgrades persist with the release of C4.

That’s it already for this week! Thanks for reading!