Podcast 137: Star Atlas Weekly Review

---

Podcast Transcript

[00:00:00] Hi, this is Matt with Intergalactic Caral. Welcome to my Star Atlas Week in Review podcast. This is podcast number 137. Any articles or videos mentioned can be found on my website@intergalacticherald.com. Just look for weekly recap newsletter 185. So just a quick summary of things that happened, star Atlas this past week.

[00:00:19] The Atlas sorry. The Star Atlas community team had two events. One was their Atlas Brew, where they talked about the Dow and then the economic monthly economic form occurred and they talked about the quarter report and some of the other things going on in the economy of Star Atlas. And that was pretty much it.

[00:00:36] Beyond the Horizon, did a recap video, so you can check that out. And a, I did their weekly Star Atlas newsletter, but before I get to that, just a quick couple quick things on things I’m doing in Star Os. One is my website, inactive carroll.com. It’s a great star OS resource website. I have beginner’s guides gi, list of the guilds, many directories for star. Ask content creators and builders and tools that are in things. I have a number of recaps. One my weekly written summary of the star ask. Content that was created can also get AI summaries of the community team events. And then finally, I do have a new, another newsletter you can snap for, which is basically the Star Atlas Discovery discord announcements that the team makes.

[00:01:18] You can get those sent directly to your email, so please check all that out@intergalacticcarroll.com. Do also have a Star Atlas Merch store at intergalactic gear. Not a lot of things available. On the back burner to put some more products there, but it is open for business. You can check that out@intergalacticgear.com.

[00:01:32] Do a merch survey there also. And finally, I am looking to create a Starless community for starless gamers who aren’t interested in joining in Guild, but nevertheless want to hang out with other starless gamers. Please go to intergalactic coalition.com for more information and an interest survey there.

[00:01:50] As I mentioned there were two main Starla community events this past week. One was the Atlas Brew and the other was the e economy form. So I’ll go over the Atlas Brew first. One of the news or two news information or two news items they mentioned, one was on the zinc. The new token. That’s the blockchain that’ll be powering star Atlas going forward, which is a clone of Solana.

[00:02:13] They have actually already. Gather testers who are working to look at the dashboard, which I wasn’t a hundred percent sure what the dashboard is, but hey, nevertheless, still good. And they wouldn’t give any dates on when that testing could be done, but just the fact that some testing’s occurring shows that again, there is forward motion on the zinc system, protocol, blockchain, whatever you want to call it.

[00:02:35] Another part of their noteworthy news was that the Super Phoenix Dow, which again is an organization that is related to one of the large Titan ships in Star Ellis, is starting their own racing league. Part of it. ’cause it’s such a big ship, they’ll have their own racetracks within the ship. So they’re gonna start some racing leagues now with the current UE five version.

[00:02:53] At least I assume so. ’cause the Titan doesn’t exist inside the game yet. Anyway. So some information with that. One interesting thing they’re doing is recruiting for different, roles on that racing league. So again it’s interesting way of doing it. And then the bulk of the Star Atlas Brew was about from a couple members of the Dow Council was there and they gave some updates on things going on the dow on the council upcoming elections occurring.

[00:03:18] If you want to catch up on all that, you can go to Star TB who has a recording of the Atlas Brew, or you can check out my. Event recap of that, which is again an AI audio summary or text if you wanna read it. And you can check that out either in the podcast feed, if you already subscribed, you already got that, or again, you can check that out on my website@intercaral.com.

[00:03:38] Just look for the event recaps. The second event put on by the community or STS community team was their economic form. Again, they do this once a month. This one had the quarterly report some highlights of that. So you can check that out. The whole, I can’t remember, 10 plus page PDFs available on the STS website.

[00:03:57] I do have a link on my news recap. You can check out. Look for news weekly recap newsletter 185 for that. Then. Ah, I had already listened to my own recap, so I didn’t write anything down, but yeah, again different. Things were going on with things, as I mentioned in the past, it is a very dense document, but again, they mentioned that is an academic document more than a game player thing.

[00:04:22] So again, there were some different things on how star ais the economy’s performing. So I won’t. Go over those here. ’cause I didn’t write myself any notes. They also did talk about the first season or second season, first official season of Halim. Did write down a couple interesting notes. One first time I think I’ve heard that the Halim team was quote, less than 10 people, which, I didn’t even know if it was more than two people, so that’s cool. To get some insider theme. They mentioned 436 battle passes were purchased which again were ways to have, enhancements to your gameplay, but again, still represents not a ton of income, but still the fact that people are willing to pay.

[00:05:01] And they mentioned 508, or sorry, 5,844 total players were in this season of the halls. So again, that’s a thing. Now I wasn’t sure if that was wallets or actual players ’cause there was a whole big controversy about people doing alternate accounts for different ways to manipulate the game. I’ll.

[00:05:21] They used the word player, so I’ll just say that too. They did mention wasn’t, I think intended, but they did mention a few things about Sage. I think it was more in the q and a section. One thing that was interesting was the fact that it was the answer was predominantly focused on whether or not sage is profitable.

[00:05:37] ‘Cause apparently when Atlas is down, which it is and Salon is up, which it is that really changes that profitability dynamic. Again, economy form, totally get it, but it was but what about the game? But again gotta read the. Who’s speaking and things like that. And I’ll have a couple, I think I’ll have a little more to say on that.

[00:05:55] I can’t remember if I wrote some of that down. I can’t remember. But anyways, I’ll try to remember. And then the final thing or sorry, two final things. One was on the ship redemptions, they mentioned that the Mamba X was going up in price. To now be closer to origination price. And I definitely will have something to say about that in a minute.

[00:06:13] But they also alluded to maybe there’ll be some new ships available for crafting. So it’d be good. And then one person asked I think really a great question and I actually got least my recollection, the most specific answer is what would be a good number of daily active users to be good? And two numbers were thrown out, which again.

[00:06:31] It makes this wildly different, but one was 10,001 was 50,000. So I guess kinda was thinking with Halim there was 5,800, 10,000 would be good. Now again, Halol SIM’s free to play. Sage has requirements for being involved. IE you gotta buy ships, you gotta pay fees, things like that. But. As been mentioned past, I pretty sure hopefully in public places Michael Wagner co has mentioned.

[00:06:56] Yeah, some of the other games have a hundred thousand and if we could just get a fraction of that, that would be enough to prime the pump and keep things going. Yeah, definitely it feels they’re aware of new acquisition of players and that was a great question and it was a straightforward answer, so I think that was great.

[00:07:10] So anyway, so yeah, that was pretty much it this past week. But again, this is the cadence. Always the Atlas, Peru seems to be always a Thursday extra one, whether it’s the builder hour, the economy form or lore keeper. So you get those two events. Not that I ever go to it and it doesn’t really have news, but they also have the traditional Friday night or somewhere Friday night, not my Friday night game play.

[00:07:31] And then yeah and then I think there’s some other, during the week, some Atlas Brews other language, la German and Spanish. I think maybe Portuguese. I can’t remember. There are some other events. It’s just, again, they’re not. Sorry, I can’t speak the whole language so I don’t attend.

[00:07:48] Anyway. So moving on to my next segment, which is kinda my thoughts on the state of Star Atlas. This past week I actually changed up my listening style. If you’ve listened before, I unfortunately leave the economic form to the last one and I get tired. Just when I did it first because I had had listened to my ai summaries that I had done early in a week.

[00:08:05] So I already knew what was coming, but yeah, it was actually. Much better if you’re not as tired. So I got more out of it. So that was cool. And I did want to compliment the econ team. That their form is and again, I don’t want to put any kind of whatever on other things ’cause they’re all having their place.

[00:08:22] But the econ team has been very consistent, very predictable. Always the first Thursday of the month. Very good communication. They bring slides, and what I realized it was. Cool about it is because it’s once a month, it’s really showing the progression. Regardless if it’s positive or negative, is showing progression of different or this specific aspect of the game.

[00:08:38] I really think that was great. Really appreciative of the Twitter DevLog that has started. I just have always had a hard time following in Twitter and stuff. I do try to repost those, but yeah, so it’s still good. And it shows that, different people with different, techniques is perfectly fine. And of course the Atlas Brew is always great. It is consistent. It’s just a number of different topics from week to week. Great that we heard more about the Dow, haven’t heard about them in months. Yeah, it’d be great if the other departments could get on that kind of same cadence.

[00:09:06] The other thing that was interesting was, oh, I was gonna talk about yeah. The relationship between the token prices. So I was being down and so being up, but I do think it’s interesting the and again, it was the. Economy form, so I makes sense. But the focus at Sage is about profitability and they had mentioned, and I’ll get into it later about more fun things do like craft ships, and I’ll talk about that topic in a second.

[00:09:29] But just that’s the fun part, that everything else is the profitable part and. I don’t know. I wrote this note to myself and now I’m thinking differently of it as but that’s okay. If we all know that the economy aspect, IE sage, the supply chain, whatever you wanna call it, is really, truly an economic game.

[00:09:48] The, it’s fine. Some people like checker, some people like chess it, they’re games. One takes more strategy, one takes not as much strategy or whatever, pick whatever game you wanna say. But. What was also interesting though was this point of the profitability, sorry the token prices are really there.

[00:10:05] So if one’s down and the other one’s up, it pretty much makes it unprofitable. And given that both of ’em, at least in my perspective, of how these things are controlled or completely random, why is Solana up today and why is Atlas down? Yeah, but there does seem to be a relationship as far as active users and other things.

[00:10:26] I guess I’m more curious about this than I was in the past. ’cause I was thinking more as a game first. And Atlas is just the token you buy things for. So does it really matter? Solana obviously is the blockchain, but you need it for fees and I get it. If it costs more to play. Sorry to do actions and Solana costs more, then that doesn’t really make much sense.

[00:10:48] But the fact that this was predominantly, basically a calculation and when the calculation doesn’t work, you don’t play. Yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, it, I don’t know. It just doesn’t sit right. And I guess where this leads to the next thought I had was is, what is the major driver of engagement then?

[00:11:07] Again, I guess we’ll just focus on Sage. ’cause again, Halim is a different product with a different audience, with a different purpose. But Sage is definitely the foundation of what Star Atlas is supposed to be for getting the interface or whether it’s web browser or fleet command or whatever.

[00:11:25] That’s just an interface. There’s still this ideas on the blockchain. There are these smart contracts that are basically allowing you to mine and move and. Eventually have combat, but definitely mind move and craft. And if that’s the major game and you want to drive, engagement is the only way you can drive engagement is whether or not it’s profitable.

[00:11:47] And again, that shouldn’t be a problem. You have our different definition of fun. You could say something’s a game or not. But work isn’t fun or again, not to get into that. But if it was fun, it wouldn’t be work or whatever, but work is something you do. Spend your time cha exchange your time for money and hopefully the whole system works.

[00:12:09] But games are never that. So is this just a work? And in that case then, yeah, duh. If it’s not profitable, don’t do it. So I don’t know, I just, again, this thinking about things slightly with a different perspective and. If it is so focused on the relationship with token prices and things like that, and there is no engagement just for the pure entertainment value, I guess then will this ever work or is this one of those kind of fatal flaws of, or is this to me, a fatal flaw of crypto gaming in the sense that if crypto gaming is only gaming with crypto?

[00:12:48] If I wanted to go play something fun, I have. A number of RTSs sitting on my computer. I can click in one second that I bought three or four or five years ago and I can just go have fun. It doesn’t cost me a cent. Don’t need to worry about blockchain, don’t worry about crypto. Or having a hot wallet where it’s updated.

[00:13:04] What’s the price of crypto? I just go play and an hour later I’ve had entertainment. But if cryptos only. Crypto gaming’s only really difference is, Hey, I own this asset and maybe this asset could be more, but hey, the token price went down and I have no control over the token price. As a single gamer, it’s some gigantic factor of some other thing going on.

[00:13:27] I don’t know, maybe this is why crypto gaming hasn’t caught on, is it’s crypto gaming. It’s not gaming, it’s crypto gaming, and if crypto is the only driver for it. Then what is it? If it’s not profitable, then why are, why would anybody do it? And if profitability is determined by token prices going up or down?

[00:13:48] Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s the first time really sunk in that, is this a fatal flaws? So I don’t know. I’m still would like to play a game. About star Atlas, but I guess if the whole thing’s crypto and prices go down and yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know. I guess we’ll just see.

[00:14:04] But anyways, that’s a thought. Hopefully that’s why you’re listening just to hear thoughts and I don’t have to have solutions. I don’t know. Anyway that was my thinking on the state of Star Atlas this past week and then talking a little bit more about my journey and I was mentioning about the.

[00:14:16] The origination price of the Mamba X. I guess I understand the choice to line more with the original origin price. Obviously I wish I had known that, but again, I’m sure they didn’t even know that because yeah, doesn’t feel like it’s even doable to mine all that information. I guess I take a little bit of whatever, this is funner, and I’m like, this is to me not fun.

[00:14:39] And I know it’s early in the game, if it was always set that’s how you got that ship. Again, I’m not faulting that the game is changing. I totally get it. And they’ve been pretty upfront that this is the best time to do everything and it’ll be harder and more expensive down the road. I get it.

[00:14:55] That’s fun. But if we’re now getting to the point where the price. To redeem the ship is pretty much the same price as buying the ship. Then doesn’t the fees to do all the actions from Solana just make it, like, why would you even do that? So I guess my theory had been on all this is that I could invest time, be patient, run it for six months, whatever, and you just quote, unquote, grind away.

[00:15:26] You’ll be able to build it up. Yeah, you could say the goalposts are moving and now it costs more. Okay, fine. Regardless if it, even if it wasn’t that, let’s just say it was always that origination price, so you can buy the ship, the origination price, or you could mine all these resources and craft and get that same thing.

[00:15:45] But if all the things that go into it cost the same, right. Money. But then you have to do crafting, which takes time, and you gotta pay all the fees again. I know zinc’s gonna take away that, but again, there’s still fees. Then it would make absolutely no sense to do a redemption strategy. If in the end it isn’t equivalent, it’s more expensive.

[00:16:10] Now, I could be completely wrong on that analysis. I didn’t, I haven’t looked at how much more each of the resources, because I thought time was the thing. So yeah, I don’t know. I, yeah, I don’t know. I need to do more research. I’m not at all. Sure that this is the right thing. ’cause again, once I found out again it’s, was it 10 x or 20 x more?

[00:16:32] I’m like it took me months to get just the basics. And again, some of these are really far away and there is no way on. So fees that can be practical. Yeah I don’t know. I think it seems to me there needs to be a time component. I am okay with time. But the time has to reduce the inputs. I don’t know.

[00:16:54] I’m not even sure I’m saying that but anyways short term, yeah, I don’t get it. Sorry. And again, I guess Wales can do this because they don’t have the same transaction fees ’cause they can do a whole bunch of more things anyways. Again, it’s maybe just for the whales right now. We haven’t heard about small players in a while, so I don’t know.

[00:17:12] Anyways, so what does it mean for all me or for me on my play? Again, this mom X idea I had months and months ago seems to be completely dead. Maybe I’ll change my mind when zinc comes out. ’cause at least there I would be indirectly. Gaining some other commodity for my investment of Solana in the short term, knowing that eventually the Solana one will go away can justify that.

[00:17:36] But as of this moment, yeah, I’m still gonna keep taking a break from Sage ’cause I just now I can’t justify anything in it. If the goal that I had other than the daily redemption of. Loyalty points or some, I don’t know. Again, I never got into that one, so it’s completely foreign to me. It’s not worth, it’s bluntly, it’s not worth my time to figure it out when I probably barely will get anything.

[00:18:01] I need much simpler to understand concepts with the caveat being time. But again, I wait on that. And again, it sounds like zinc is closer than it was a few weeks ago in the fact that they’re doing testers. Definitely if they’re talking about maybe new ships, hopefully they would be cheaper, then I could easily see.

[00:18:19] That’s something that’s intriguing. And again, that’s fine. Different scales again. Maybe the whales go after the big ones, but I guess they’ll probably wanna go off the small ones too. I don’t know. So anyways, yeah, a little down, but again, it just, I don’t know, just didn’t. I’m fine with them changing the game.

[00:18:35] It just, I don’t know what I’m trying to accomplish, especially when fees are so high. And then just last thing ’cause of course I could alternatively start looking at Hal Sim. Totally agree. It’s a good idea. Totally think it’s a great product, all those benefits. It just wasn’t what I was in interested in when I first learned about Star Atlas.

[00:18:53] And again. It, I know it’s a similar gameplay. In fact, people are saying it’s much funner because you can level up faster, you get more things. Again that’s all fine. I would love to be a whale. I know. Never will be. But yeah, again the original idea was, at least in my mind, was that Star Atlas would have this progression.

[00:19:12] And I’m okay with the time commitment, but yeah. Hall Sim just requires way too much time, in my opinion, to get that factor when it just goes away every six weeks or something like that. So again, in the end just doesn’t fit my lifestyle. That’s okay. God exists. I’m happy it exists. Love it. If it would be made into a mobile version.

[00:19:36] But given that it changes and Yeah, I think beyond the horizon was talking about the different levels and yeah, maybe if you’re in the top 300, you get $5 and a skin. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s just, yeah, and I’ve said it I think in the past that’s just not my time.

[00:19:53] But again, if I haven’t stated in a while, good time to maybe way to end this up. The thing I’m really fascinated with Star House as a gaming concept is the, definitely the ownership aspect that blockchain provides. Whatever ownership that is, whether that’s materials, ships, claim stakes, whatever, you own things and those things have potential value to someone else.

[00:20:15] Totally love that idea. Love the sci-fi aspect. Going out, exploring, mining, all those things. And team’s definitely moving there. Lots of talk on C four on the things that’ll come. Again, as I mentioned a couple weeks back, this could be the final gameplay thing. So again, after many years would make sense we’re at this and then they keep building on top of this.

[00:20:36] So makes perfect sense in the foundation. Yeah, that’s still what I’m interested in, and I think I kinda alluded to maybe claim stakes and C four is something that. Might fit in with those kind of things, with, trading, getting more specialized, things like that.

[00:20:50] So again, it still all feels there, but in the short term, yeah, Hal Sim seems like a great product. Good idea, not really interested in a six week churn through different things. Yeah. Just, it’s just not me. But again, some other people are liking it and I’m glad it exists. So anyways, that’s that’s kinda it for this week.

[00:21:10] Thanks for listening again. Drop it up. Totally open to any other guests on the podcast. I know I haven’t had very many, but again, it’s still something I’d love to do. So again, that could be other team sorry, other community members who just wanna talk about the We can review, definitely open to helping promote other people’s content creators or builders within the space.

[00:21:27] Please go to intergalactic carroll.com. Look for my contact page. You can reach out to me there, or of course in Discord if you’re in there. Do check out wire. You’re at my website. Do have tons of different star atlas resources from beginner’s Guide Guild directory builder directory tool directory, things like that.

[00:21:43] Check out the different recaps. I have weekly content recap. Event recaps. And then of course you can sign up and get your star Atlas team announcements from their discord and directly your email. So all that’s at inter carroll.com. Please check out my merch store, star atlas merch InterG gear.com, and love to really get a community of fellow star Atlas gamers who don’t want to be aligned with the Guild.

[00:22:04] But nevertheless, we just wanna hang out and chat and who knows where we could take that inside the game. Please check out intergalactic coalition.com for that. Other than that, hope you had a great, past week in Star Atlas this is Matt with the Inter Car. Have a great week ahead. Okay.