Weekly Star Atlas Newsletter #202

Welcome to our 202nd 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 week in Star Atlas brings several smaller updates across the ecosystem. The Community Team clarified the mechanics of the Iris Quest daily check-ins, and shared that Holosim bugs got fixed, and the reward distribution is getting close!

From the DAO’s side, PIP-20 and PIP-21 have both passed, establishing the DAO Casters Program and the Rogue Data Hub. The latest Lore Keepers session offered new insights into the Photoli and Tufa, and shared an early glimpse of the forthcoming Galia SP Questline.

Without further ado, let’s dive in!

Iris Quest Clarifications

During the Freestyle Atlas Brew last week, the Community Team clarified the benefit of posting “!gm” every day. Instead of the rewards (1 ticket) slowly increasing day by day, you will earn a one-time bonus after completing a 7-day streak. The 7th check-in will provide a random amount of bonus tickets! You can get anywhere between 50 and 150 additional tickets. And you can get these every 7 days, if you don’t forget to keep your streak up!

On another topic, this coming weekend, October 24th – October 26th, will be the first Double XP Weekend that is part of the Iris’ Blessing event. During this weekend (which starts on Friday), you will earn twice the XP you’d otherwise earn in the officially designated matches. This also means you’ll double your INK reward!

As the z.ink Airdrop campaign likely won’t yet be live by then, the XP earned won’t yet contribute to your score there.

Holosim

We got a few updates regarding Holosim this past week. First off, Michael Caine reported that the issues plaguing Chapter 1 should now have been resolved. This update does not appear to be live on the current Holosim version.

Furthermore, the team is preparing to send out the reward claims at the end of this week. They made a list of all alt accounts they detected (or players shared themselves) and are asking everyone to please check this list and alert them if their account was flagged by accident. So-called alt-accounts are additional accounts spun up by players to game the system and give their main account an edge.

Furthermore, this is your last chance to link your Solana mainnet wallet to your Holosim profile, in order actually to obtain your rewards. Click the cogwheel (settings) in the top-right corner of the Holosim interface to find the option Link Wallet to do so.

For both the alti-list and the wallet-linking goes, this coming Thursday is the deadline! If you try to link your wallet afterwards, you will not get any rewards.

Lastly, the window to complete the storyline quests is still open until further notice. This means you can still obtain a VZUS Solos ship and Solflare skin for now!

DAO Update

PIP 20 & 21 have officially been approved! See the final stats on the voting below:

PIP-20: Establishment of the DAO Casters Program — Elected Content Creators for Star Atlas Ecosystem Promotion

This proposal introduces the DAO Casters—a structured program of five elected content creators dedicated to promoting the entire Star Atlas ecosystem, including the DAO, the game, and broader community initiatives. DAO Casters will be elected through a formal election process (self-nomination, 1 STV round) as a once-off measure (any further extension of this program would require a new proposal). Each Caster will receive a monthly stipend of 360,000 ATLAS, plus an additional 360,000 ATLAS per month to fund giveaways, contests, and promotions. Caster responsibilities will include weekly content, monthly community livestreams, and regular collaborations. This program provides the ecosystem with consistent, engaging, and professional media representation.

Final tally with 122M PVP committed:

• For: 86.56%
• Against: 13.01%
• Abstain: 0.42%

PIP-21: Rogue Data Hub

We request $8,820 USDC for Year 1 from the DAO treasury to fund the Rogue Data Hub (RDH) — a community-operated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product that indexes, processes, and exposes on-chain Star Atlas data. ($2,100 initial, $6,720 yearly maintenance)

RDH ensures developers, DAOs, and community members have reliable, structured, and real-time data for dashboards, tax reports, visualizations, bots, and decision-support tools.

• Initial focus: Marketplace token transfers and trades
• Expansion: All 20 currently active programs listed in the official [Star Atlas Mainnet Program IDs] (https://build.staratlas.com/dev-resources/mainnet-program-ids) (starting with only transfer, mint and burn transactions)

Final tally with 147M PVP committed:

• For: 52.45%
• Against: 37.53%
• Abstain: 10.02%

Lore Keepers

Last week saw another Lore Keepers event, and this was a particularly enticing one!

First off, José (Lead Lore Writer) showed off a video clip depicting the current, early state of the upcoming questline they hope to launch (MVP) this December. In it, we saw a character called Piort exploring the planet Merivia. It showed us a lava field, an airbike hovering, and a few dialogues that hinted at what the Manus Ultima Divina are doing on that planet. José shared that the initial mission will take about 30 minutes to complete. They plan to expand that next year, however.

For the lore geeks, our penguin friend then took listeners on a historic trip, divulging the origins of the Photoli and their relationship with the Tufa (and how that came to be). Alond the way, he also pulled away a corner of the curtains regarding the rogue planet Iris and the Cataclysm.

For lore buffs, this event is well worth a listen. Fortunately, you can still find the recording online, by StarAtlasTV. Note, however, that the sneak-peek Galia video was cut from the recording, as the team wants to make sure it does not leak.

News Bits

Before we wrap this issue up, here are a few additional bits of news from last week:

• The Community Team is hosting a second Galia Game Night later on on Fridays, to accommodate community members who live in the US, or for whom that timeslot works better. This initiative is spearheaded by the latest addition to the moderator team: Jindo!
• The community, in particular James & Aneko, hosted a meetup in Bangkok during Gamescom Asia this past week. If you were there, make sure to post some pictures on X!
• The z.ink Airdrop Campaign is still being tested. No further updates as of yet.
• Chip (VP of Game Product) did not post any developer logs this past week, so no Engineering Bay update this week

Sneak Peeks

This week we unearthed some new designs by Ethan Pflugh (Environment Artist). These are not really sneak peeks in the true sense, but in the absence of new art, we decided to share his work here regardless. Ethan, who only did a brief stint for the team, contributed to Paizul’s Arena, while also creating trees for two different biomes.

That is it for this week. See you in the next!