Weekly Star Atlas Newsletter #226

Welcome to our 226th 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.

Last week, we got our first glimpse of Ship Configurations in the upcoming SAGE C4. Meanwhile, in Holosim, the Superphoenix event went live, giving players their first chance over the past few days to take on the ECOS Titan ship. On the governance side, PIP-31 opened to fund Star Seekers 2 and will remain open for voting for two weeks. Lastly, applications are now open for players looking to take a seat at the table in the first official Embercoil RPG campaign.

Let’s dive in!

SAGE C4

Possibly the highlight of last week: During the Atlas Brew, José (Lorewriter) showed off a video demonstrating Ship Configurations in SAGE C4. This is a major slice of upcoming gameplay that we had not seen revealed before. Check it out:

Holosim

The main story for Holosim Season 1, Chapter 2, last week was that the Superphoenix event finally left test-state ambiguity and became a real, live event. The official post framed it as a cross-faction boss event running from Friday, 17 April at 0:00 UTC through Tuesday, 21 April at 0:00 UTC, with repeated encounters across all faction territories: Akalma Exile for MUD, Pavo Passage for Ustur, and Zenith Door for Oni. The Superphoenix and its support fleets spawn and move toward a target sector, with damage counting toward the quests Breaking the Wings and Fall of the Superphoenix.

John (Product Manager) filled in the operational details on Discord: the event rotates every three hours, and each run should last about 1.5 hours, with extra defenses spawned around Pavo while the team tuned things for the weekend.

The team has logs for everyone who hit the support fleets and the titan, so retroactive kill credit can be awarded after the fact. John also said a single hit on the support fleets and a single hit on the Superphoenix should be enough for quest completion, with the Pavo rescue path acting as a fallback while bugs were being sorted out.

Chapter 2 – Part 2

When the Superphoenix event ends, a leaderboard snapshot will be taken for the first prize pool. Mining achievements still earn zXP through the end of the chapter, but they no longer count toward leaderboard placement, while combat achievements affect the leaderboard but do not award zXP. The second half of Chapter 2 is now expected before the end of the month, bringing a rebuilt combat-focused leaderboard, a new in-game store, and in-app purchases, followed by a second prize pool.

Atlas Brew #200 added a few roadmap details. John said that after the Superphoenix event and the launch of the in-game store (where additional crew members can be acquired), the Holosim codebase will get its own dedicated repository. It is currently part of a monorepo for the entire play-portal website. This new repo will then become the platform for Chapter 3 development. That same split also brings the first limited form of mobile accessibility to Chapter 2: not a fully mobile-optimized Holosim, but enough to open the app on a phone, dock ships, manage crew, and do some crafting. The key point is not “Holosim mobile” as a standalone product. The key point is that the post-marketplace branch is becoming the bridge into Chapter 3 infrastructure.

DAO Updates

Last week, PIP-31 moved from teaser to live vote. The proposal asks the DAO to fund Star Seekers 2, a community-built mobile game set in the Star Atlas universe.

PIP-31: Star Seekers 2 — Mobile Game DAO Funding Proposal

This proposal requests 13,000,000 ATLAS from the Star Atlas DAO Ecosystem Fund to complete and launch Star Seekers 2, a cross-platform mobile space-combat game inspired by the Star Atlas universe, on both iOS App Store and Google Play Store.

Structure:

• Requested funding: 13,000,000 ATLAS
• Structure: 1-off PIP
• Author: PG Metaverse OG
• Voting Opened: Friday, April 17th
• Voting Closes: Friday, May 1st (end-of-day UTC)

Early results (~2 days in, ~9.0M PVP committed):

• For: 55.4%
• Against: 44.6%

Embercoil Campaign

The biggest lore development of the week was not a wiki page or a fiction drop, but the launch of Embercoil, Star Atlas’ first official live tabletop RPG campaign. An application form is now open for players who want to join the first campaign, with a deadline of April 27.

During Lore Keepers #20, José described Embercoil as a podcast-style, live-play RPG set in an unexplored corner of the Star Atlas universe, with community members joining the cast. More importantly, he said the outcomes of the campaign will become canon in Star Atlas lore.

José also said the system itself was designed from scratch for this setting rather than being a simple Dungeons & Dragons reskin, and that if the project works, he would like to publish the campaign books and supporting materials later as official Star Atlas products. He even floated the idea of broader community participation in the show itself, from concept art and map creation to music.

Sneak Peeks

Pathfinder Studios posted some never-before-seen concept art of the Busan eyes for a Moment ship that they produced:

In addition, during the Atlas Brew, some concept art was shared of vzus drones:

DAO Casters – Subscriber Raffle

If you read this far, we have a surprise for you!

As part of the Star Atlas DAO Casters Program, we’re able to give back to you, our readers, with a total of 360,000 ATLAS in prizes!

If you’re subscribed to the newsletter, simply fill out this simple, short form within the next 7 days to enter the raffle. We’ll randomly select 5 winners, and each will receive 72,000 ATLAS (~13 USD at the time of publication).

That is it for this week! Thanks for reading, and until the next!