In this episode, we recap the latest news of Star Atlas from the past week.
We are looking for guests to be on our podcast. The podcast is a discussion of the past week’s news about Star Atlas. If you are interested in being on the podcast, please contact us.
We are launching a Star Atlas merch store. Please check it out at Intergalactic Gear.
We are creating a “non-guild” guild. If you are interested in learning more, please go to Intergalactic Coalition.
Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Listen on Google Podcasts
Podcast Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi, this is Matt with the Intergalactic Herald. Welcome to our podcast episode number 27. So this is sort of the week in review of news that happened in Star Atlas. Most of the articles that I’m basing, or articles and videos I’m basing this video on are in our news recap. So if you go to intergalacticherald.
[00:00:19] com and look around for the weekly news recap, you can go ahead and sign up for that and get all the links. Helped form some of my opinions. That would be for News Recap number 67. So first just a couple quick things in the things I’m working on. So again, if you’re interested in being a guest on this podcast, always happy to have other people come on and talk about the week in review of Star Atlas.
[00:00:43] So please go again to intergalacticherald. com and look for the contact page. I’m also working on two intergalacticherald. com. Star Atlas projects. The first one is a merch store, so I’m called the Intergalactic Gear. Sorry, intergalacticgear. com. You can go there. I’m looking to get some feedback from people on what kind of merch, merchandise they would like related to the Star Atlas IP.
[00:01:07] So again, that’s intergalacticgear. com. Please fill out. my merch survey. And secondly, I’m in the process of trying to start a what I’m calling a non guild guild called Intergalactic Coalition. Again, that’s intergalacticcoalition. com. So I have an interest survey there. You can learn more about kind of the foundation and what this guild or non guild guild is about.
[00:01:28] So if you’re interested in some of those things Please fill out that survey. So getting in the bulk of this podcast the content section. So first thing I wanted to do is call out a great fellow content creator, Rob Mega, who posts both a kind of weekly recap also called Star OS Chatter.
[00:01:44] But he also publishes a Medium article. So again, if you prefer to consume that content via text, he has a Medium article that matches that. In fact, I think he creates the article first and then goes over it while he records the video. So again, look to on YouTube for RawMega. That’s spelled R A H M E G A, or you can go to intergalacticherald.
[00:02:06] com, look for resources, and I have a Star Atlas YouTube section there. So just quickly to go through some of what was in there, because I did find it very interesting. I give Ramega a lot of credit because he’s really going into the Foundation Room and putting a whole bunch of stuff. Also does a lot of cool Discord screen caps of different Star Atlas team members who are posting.
[00:02:30] So just a couple of things that came out of the last week that that were very interesting to me. And again, interesting in the sense that I can’t keep up with all of this. But I did realize as, as the week went on and a couple of weeks have gone on, someone mentioned that it’s, well, actually that’s kind of the theme of this one.
[00:02:45] So I won’t go into that. There’s another bullet point. But anyways, so some of the things, again, they were posts about you know, talking about cool down periods in Sage labs. You know, how, how scanning works, how different parts of the economy work, burn rate going over the visuals of star labs interface.
[00:03:02] There’s a lot. And then there were some screens, screen captures of the actual interface shared. So there’s, there’s lots of interesting things there. So again, if you’re, if you’re into that, you really want to start getting some of this kind of Not even behind the scenes, but I guess this really in depth understanding of how Sage Labs will work.
[00:03:18] I strongly recommend you to follow Omega ’cause he’s been doing a great job. I, I, I read it and I, there’s just too much , but again, that’s just my style of play and things like that. Moving on start out with, actually we stay a game development video this week on YouTube, so you can go to the Star Atlas YouTube channel for that.
[00:03:38] And I think it was like two or three minutes, but it was really showing a lot of the u e. UE5 looked like racing, predominantly different characters that you could put on the ships the racers anyways which always, it goes back to, sorry, as a quick tangent when I originally was thinking about what ship to buy, of course cost was a factor, and you looked at ships like the Pierce, I’m pretty sure it’s the X4, and I was always like, There’s, there’s no cockpit.
[00:04:03] There’s no environmental system. How’s this going to space? And if you’re in the showroom now, and there is a space when of course it goes into space and the person sitting on it, I, I mean, again, maybe their spacesuits, I get it. What I’m starting to think more and more, they were always designed to be racers.
[00:04:19] They always had this racing component, but they just let the ships go out into space. Okay. Again, you can have fun, but it would always got me like. That’s not how space works. But anyways, the video, back to the video, sorry was showing a lot of this going around the course that’s there or being developed so different ships, different characters and then they had part of the video that was I guess we’ll call it character skin.
[00:04:42] So it was helmets, colors, and then it went into a few other ships with details and color schemes again, IE skins. Very cool. Great that they were showing it. There was some comments about, well, where’s the, the Sage lab stuff? Why are we just seeing UE5? But I think, again, we always have to remember there are multiple development teams, some internal, some outsourced that are constantly being, or doing work, so just.
[00:05:06] to focus on one, again, forget, makes us forget that the other teams are working on it too. So I think it was great. And again, and I think the fact they put it on their main YouTube channel, I mean, they’re, they’re trying to continue to create buzz the about the game in the future parts. And again, if that’s a lead in to play Sage.
[00:05:24] Labs. Excuse me. Totally great. Next topic. Someone actually posted. This is what I was kind of alluding to on all the information in the raw megas chatter report was they posted that they were feeling like they’re falling behind because they don’t have all these spreadsheets and all this stuff and they go away for a few minutes and, and they’re just completely lost.
[00:05:46] Yeah. Personal aside, again, this is one of the problems I agree with this individual, that problem with Discord and chat as the main interface is you just can’t screw up, you can’t follow threads. Again. I know self serving, but this is part of the thing I want to put in my guild. The Intergalactic Herald is a different platform where you can kind of figure out where things are going.
[00:06:06] But, I think in the spirit of the game, there is something to that. But someone commented from the team about Some people like all this behind the scenes data and analyzing spreadsheets and that, and so they were trying to release some of that. And if you think about it from a development standpoint, they have to get all of this core knowledge and formulas and all this stuff worked out before they can put an interface on top.
[00:06:30] You can’t design an interface and figure out, well, how does it work? Again, game design, lots of design, just doesn’t work like that. So so I agree with the individual, again, the, the, the team member posted again, their. Goal of SageLabs, the user interface, and the reason why they said they’re saving more time is so that you don’t need to know all this stuff, you can still be involved in the game without having to have a spreadsheet, without having to know the different burn rates and cool down periods and mining rates and speed and all this, you can actually play the game.
[00:07:04] So, I’m very happy that that That was mentioned again. It may have disappeared because of all the people asking these very specific questions. And again, it’s great that the STAR US team is answering all those specific questions, but not to lose sight of that. Hopefully someone can just start and go into SAGE Labs and do something and feel like they’ve got something for the time they spent, whether that’s a physical asset or just entertainment, so that was really great.
[00:07:31] Also calling out another great content resource AFIA, one of the larger guilds in Star Alice produces a weekly newsletter and again pretty sure most of them are written by one of the founders, Funcracker, and it was again, it’s always a great resource, so go to afia. com. P H I A dot com, wait, double check it’s dot com, sorry, yeah, dot com, and sign up for their newsletter so you can get some information, or again, sign up for my weekly recap and you’ll get links almost always to them.
[00:08:01] But what was very interesting in there that came out that I hadn’t heard was the concept in Sage Labs of the number of star bases and the asteroid field. So, if I read it correctly, and again… If I didn’t or it doesn’t change until it comes out is that the in each of these, they’re starting to come up different words, squares, sectors, I’m not sure that some of them will have star bases and the ones with the star bases will have the asteroid field.
[00:08:31] So if I can read that correctly, I was kind of realizing, I think that means that each asteroid field will be in the same place as a star base. Meaning there won’t be a sector that has an asteroid field without a star base and vice versa. Now again, I’m not sure I read that correctly. Again, it’s just one sentence, so there’s, again, until the game’s out, not 100% sure.
[00:08:55] But I realize that seems to really reduce the number of asteroid belts because there was information in the newsletter, I’m sure gleaned from the other different resources, that there’s only so many star bases that are out there. And again, as I’m, Looking at this now, there’s star systems or star bases.
[00:09:13] Again, maybe I’ve totally misunderstood this, because again, there’s supposedly 10, 201 total sectors. 51 of those sectors host a single star system. Each star system has exactly one star base and one asteroid belt, and each faction only owns 17 of the 51 star systems. Again, star systems have star bases and asteroid belts.
[00:09:37] And then there are the central space stations. out there, and there’s three of those, so that’s how you go 15 plus 1, you get your 16. Now one of the interesting things that I did read too, is again, you can only craft at your faction star base. You can also craft at your central space station, but the key to the central space station is your entry and exit point into Sage Lab.
[00:10:07] So, if I’m understanding this correctly, there’s really not a lot of places you can craft, and there’s not a lot of asteroid belts. So there’s a lot of empty space. Now again, we’re supposed to scan for the SDUs, which are part of some future thing, but in the short term they’re part of getting the golden tickets, or other…
[00:10:31] Parts of the raffles.
[00:10:35] Maybe it all makes sense once we start, but it was like, wow, it’s a big empty space. Which, of course, in real life, space is empty. But it feels like, once we know where all the asteroid belts are, and we know what resources are there, pretty soon this does just become a set of spreadsheets. Again, that’s fine.
[00:10:52] No problem. The long term game is about exploration. This feels like it’ll be explored quite quickly, and we’ll be just going through the motions. Again, no problems. But, I was, I don’t know, when I saw A hundred by a hundred grid, oh there’s going to be lots of stuff, but, and maybe again some of it will be because they’ll be apart, or distance from each other, hence the need for fuel.
[00:11:17] But still if you only have, in a sense, not counting your central space station fifteen, seven series sixteen not sure how to, but. Not a lot still of places you can go to your star bases, which is where the asteroid belts are. That’s just not a lot. So we’ll see. Again, still, that could be fun.
[00:11:38] But I don’t know why, it just felt like there should be a lot more, but again, we’ll find out when it’s there. But I do want to thank Fun Cracker at AFIA for putting out the newsletter because again, I get to just read it and not have to figure out all this stuff. The other interesting thing that he put in his newsletter was again, there is this issue of travel speed and so again, there’s multiple speeds you can travel at, obviously there’s multiple distances between the different sectors.
[00:12:03] So again, we’re getting much more details to figure out that there’s, in addition to the mining and the crafting, there is a whole facet to Sage Labs, which is movement. So that’s really cool. Next topic Starfield. So as… Pretty sure it’s released by the time this comes out. Early ac I think it’s early access.
[00:12:23] Maybe it’s not all access. To a game called Starfield, which was made by Bethesda, which I’ve talked in the past on is a major game development studio of, of things like Fallout and Ender Skyri Ender Scrolls? Yeah, anyways. And so some of the comments in different places in the Star Atlas Discord was about, Hey, you know, what do you guys think?
[00:12:44] Some people have access to it. And again, I haven’t seen it. I read a couple industry reviews of it. And, to be honest, I haven’t read enough game reviews recently to know if these are biased game Again, it’s like movie reviews, you know. You go see a movie, hey, I liked it. You read the review, they said it stunk.
[00:12:59] I mean, again. Nothing wrong with reviewers, but take it with a grain of salt because everybody has their own things they enjoy and thus their own things that they like so, But one thing that was interesting that someone posted in the StarOscar discord was something along the lines of, Do I really want to spend that much time in this universe?
[00:13:20] And again, they were referring to the universe of Starfield. Because again, Starfield is designed to be much like similar Bethesda games. A real RPG, role playing game. After I wrote down this comment to remind myself, someone Posted somewhere again about the idea, and again, I just, I don’t play this style game, so I’m not totally familiar with it, is again, It’s the idea of quests, but it’s also really a single player experience, and I was like, oh, Yeah, these aren’t even comparable.
[00:13:48] I mean, nothing wrong with the design idea for an RPG. Bethesda is obviously a great development studio, but Realizing it’s really single player. You’re interacting with NPCs. I’m, again, not sure, but sounds like you don’t interact with any other real people. Or humans. So obviously that’s different. And again, there are other games.
[00:14:11] Again, dating myself a little bit. World of Warcraft, where again, you can play along with other people on raids. But you also can go on quests by yourself to get rewards, loot, whatever. So, it… The question again was do you really want to spend this much time in the universe and again? Everybody has different play styles.
[00:14:32] So I mean back in my youth I could play Game Boy Tetris for hours. So You know, obviously, it doesn’t take a lot to keep some people occupied. Again really damning myself. I mean, if your quarter worked, you could play Asteroids or Pac Man for many minutes until you had to put another quarter in.
[00:14:50] But then we got different games like Super Mario Brothers, which again, was kind of a story in progression, not just, you know, Space Invaders blowing up the same thing every single time. RPGs obviously have this vast amount of content, and again, we won’t even get into the… Actually, that’s a good point.
[00:15:06] Sorry, as a tangent, if you think of something like GTA, Grand Theft Auto, yeah, that, that’s an open world, but it’s still an RPG. You don’t play with other people. Again, I’m, I’ve never been a console gamer, so I’m, I’m not really sure. Anyway, the whole point of all this was, do you want to spend time in the universe?
[00:15:23] And it got me thinking about Star Atlas and the promise, the, the premise, I shouldn’t say promise, the premise of what the game could eventually become does lead to so many different things. Options for play style. Obviously the idea that we’re all together in this universe. So that takes away the single player.
[00:15:40] Can you do role playing? Perhaps. But it got me thinking, is there any plans that Star Atlas is actually going to put NPCs? In fact, I’ve, I don’t think I’ve ever heard them say NPCs in any capacity. Because again, they’re building ships. They’re building an economy. Anyways, it’s just interesting that some people are saying, oh, you know, comparing this because they’re real sci fi.
[00:16:00] And I’m like, okay. And again, not to get into a gigantic whatever. But, you know, Star Wars and Star Trek are not the same things. They’re totally different, but they’re both sci fi, and I could like them both for different reasons. So, again, if you want to play Starfield because it’s out in a week or two, great, go for it.
[00:16:19] But if you’re interested in, say, obviously An open world game where, you know, things are discoverable. You can interact with other people whether that’s for mutual benefit or for combat. Again, the idea there could be ship to ship combat. There could be person to person combat. Again, we’ve seen both styles of guns for ships and guns that the characters can walk around.
[00:16:41] So, again, the ambitious goal yeah. You could spend a lot of time in Star Alice. Again, I know it doesn’t exist yet, but time allows for lots of things to occur. So but to finish up this one, again, subject to something else coming out, it sure doesn’t feel like Star Alice is going to be an RPG, a role playing game.
[00:17:05] It’s a different style. Last topic was one that actually Came up recently depending on when I record this, I listened to different Star Atlas content over the weekends, and it was talking basically this concept of guild domination. And, again, total transparency, I’m not interested in joining a guild.
[00:17:27] Not because there’s anything wrong with the guild. It’s just not my play style. So that’s why I’m thinking of starting a non guild guild for people like myself who also don’t want to join a guild but still want to be part of a group. Again, as I mentioned this whole concept of community has different levels.
[00:17:44] Sounds like Star Atlas is thinking about different levels of the, sorry, the governance with the different DAX, which again, they don’t call them guilds, they call them Decentralized Autonomous Corporations or Companies. Can’t remember which term, but that is, to me, open to interpretation. So a company or corporation could simply be, yeah, we create a resource.
[00:18:09] Could be a ship, like AFIA’s about building ships, but it could be as simple as, I’m a farmer and I make corn. Again, whatever the equivalent is in Star Atlas. So again, if that’s the long term vision that these are corporations as opposed to guilds, it gives, again, a lot more different ways that people can interact, but traditionally and why it sounds like, again, there are lots of guilds and I guess part of this is I recently migrated a website called staratlasguilds.
[00:18:38] com to the Intergalactic Herald due to some. Star Atlas IP restrictions. So I just didn’t know all the guilds that existed except for the ones that are aligned with content creators. And, of course, there’s a lot of guilds listed in that thing. Again, plug. So, intergalacticherald. com slash guilds.
[00:18:57] So there’s, there’s definitely lots of those. But the other aspect of guilds and I’ve always kind of said, Oh, yeah, there’s structure. But I’ve heard this concept of scholarship. And I don’t know. The simplest way that, or the first way I heard about it was so that you could rent out your ships.
[00:19:13] Cool, yeah, I guess. It’d be cool to play around with a big ship for a day, as opposed to having to figure out how to buy it. And, you know, I’m renting it. I mean, no different than a car rental when you go on a vacation. But, my latest understanding, or additional understanding, was that scholarship also gives the ability to leverage time.
[00:19:35] So, not just, hey, cool, I get to rent a fancy ship I can’t afford. It was more of the ship owner gets an opportunity to not lease it out, but the reverse side, you know, not just the fun part, but the fact that if they could do a situation and In business world, this is called outsourcing, you know and there’s lots of cases where a business looks to outsource to a different economy, a different country with a different economic structure and use that arbitrage between the labor pool, again, assuming the labor and the quality of the output is the same, but their cost of living is less due to currency differences or whatever, and they can basically make a profit on that.
[00:20:17] I have no problem with capitalism. I. Wish there was an exploitation of humans, real people, but it happens. As a business owner, I am totally open to the idea and hope to pursue that myself. So there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Same style in a game with maybe having real world economic parts.
[00:20:37] So I have no problems with all that, but it would again, it gave me another reason why I don’t. Seem to want to be a part of the guild now again I have no problems with the guilds using Outsourcing ie scholarship if I’m understanding the concept correctly to leverage their assets to Maximize the time by having someone else Use that thing and can produce that and again if it’s not exploitive then it’s perfectly fine So, one winded way of saying, the more I learn about guilds, the less I want to be part of one.
[00:21:16] And again, this is not a negative. I think they’re great. But part of the domination was they, somebody mentioned, Oh yeah, we might, a guild might take over a sector and, and, and protect the re, the useful resource on there. And if someone comes in there, they’ll, they’ll blow them up. Or, again, this is where the.
[00:21:33] battles the guilds get in for domination of resources and things like that. And this was part of that we kind of like, again, and again, I’ve seen some videos of EVE Online. And I think, again, a lot of those guild battles are what makes for great videos. But again, I guess it comes down to, again, that’s not my play style.
[00:21:56] I’m not, I’m not interested in that. I want to hang out with some people. I’m not. Totally antisocial. But again, if you want to be antisocial, you should be able to do that, too. But, interestingly, after this, I was kind of thinking, Ah, this again, I just, is this what Star Atlas is going to become? Either I thought it, or immediately whoever was talking about it mentioned it, and then I realized, oh my word, they’ve already planned for this.
[00:22:17] So, Star Atlas has already said there are going to be multiple zones. The, the, Low risk zone, medium zone, and high risk zone. And I remember the biggest differences. Let me see if I remember. So There’s no combat in the low risk. There’s combat in the medium risk, but if you get destroyed you just lose your Cargo, but you can respawn.
[00:22:42] So you don’t lose There’s no permanent destruction, but in the high risk zone, and again, this is a really cool mechanic. It is permanent Destruction. So again, that ship you purchased, which is actually NFT. So again, that’s cool. You can trade it or sell it, whatever, buy one. You would actually lose it.
[00:23:01] The ship would literally never come back, but the reward is that stuff in the high risk zones are way more valuable or some, some metric to justify the risk. So I realized, wait, Cool. Just don’t go there then. You know, I mean, if you can’t have combat in the low risk zone, guild domination of a low risk areas is, there’s, there’s nothing.
[00:23:29] I mean, again, if you can’t destroy, you don’t need defenses, right? Because defenses only need if there’s an offensive potential. So you might say in the medium risk zone, you need defense because it could be Somebody could attack you, but the Downside is you lose some Temporary intangible thing again again the game’s not there yet to know what’s the pros and cons of each side but again, I realized that if My understanding or my thinking is correct starless has actually allowed that multiple play styles can exist within the one Metaverse slash ecosystem.
[00:24:10] And so, cool. Makes me still feel like my, as my vague understanding of what I want to do in the future continues to morph as I learn more and we, and the game gets to something. Just made me realize again, cool. Great. There can be scholarships, there can be guilds, they can have all this. I could just fly around and can’t get shot.
[00:24:30] Cool. Awesome. And then maybe I have some things that are riskier. Anyways. Sounds all cool. So again, guilds, awesome. If you want to join one, please do. If you’re not really thinking you want all that stuff and you just want to hang out, again, trying to start a non guild guild, intergalacticcoalition. com for people that are…
[00:24:51] So that’s all I got to ramble on about today. So again, if you’re interested in rambling with me, please go to intergalacticherald. com, go to contact, send me a note, and we’ll see if we can schedule a time. I’d love to chat and go over the week in review. with another person. While you’re there, please look for my weekly news recap to sign up for, and then you’ll get links to lots of the Star Atlas community, content creators, articles, videos, as many are, are, well, I shouldn’t say all.
[00:25:24] They’re, they’re ones that are interesting to me. So I guess it’s, it’s curated. I find it interesting, so I hope others do too. And Finally, just again, my two Star Atlas projects intergalacticgear. com, which is my merch store. Please fill out the merch survey. I’d love to get some feedback from you.
[00:25:42] And of course, obviously get you on the mailing list. So as things come out, I can keep you updated. And then plugged it a number of times, intergalacticcoalition. com. Again, I’m trying to see if there’s interest in starting a non guild guild as just another organizing. mechanism within the Star Atlas ecosystem, so please go to intergalacticcoalition.
[00:26:02] com. And that wraps it up for podcast number 27 of the Star Atlas Week in Review. This is Matt with the Intergalactic Herald. Have a great week.