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.
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Podcast Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi, this is Matt with the Intergalactic Herald welcome to the Star Atlas Week in Review. This is my 28th podcast of my thoughts about what happened in Star Atlas this past week. Most of the information I’m going off of either articles or YouTube are all mentioned in the News Recap number 77.
[00:00:22] so if you go to intergalacticherald. com and sign up for the newsletter or the News Recap you’ll be able to find all the links to things there. So first start out with just a few things about me and stuff. So one, I’m always looking for podcast guests to be on this podcast to either Promote your Star Atlas Builder.
[00:00:42] If you’re a Star Atlas Builder other content creators, I’d love to highlight them. Or you just want to talk about the Week in Review of Star Atlas. So definitely looking for those different type of people to be guests on the podcast. I already mentioned again, the weekly news recap on intergalacticherald.
[00:00:58] com. Please sign up for that. If you like to get all the great content that’s created by the Star Atlas community. I do have two Star Atlas projects I’m working on. One is called the Intergalactic Gear. It’s a merch store I hope to launch. I’m looking for some input from community members on what kind of merch they like.
[00:01:16] So if you go to intergalacticgear. com, there’s a merch survey there. I’d love for you to fill that out and give me some feedback. And then I also have… I have a other website called the Intergalactic Coalition. This is a non guild guild. Basically, it’s a place for Star Atlas gamers who don’t want to join a guild, but yet still want to contribute communicate.
[00:01:40] Chat with other people have a place to hang out. That isn’t the large star Ellis discord. So I’m looking I have a survey there. If you’re interested in the, that kind of gameplay style love for you to fill that out. Once we reach enough critical mass, I will set up a community. The community software is a little different than discord.
[00:01:57] It’s actually paid, but it’s more about threaded discussions and Email alerts, so you don’t have to always fall behind if you’re not in discord for a day So moving on to the bulk of the podcast which is the content First one that occurred this past week is the claim stakes tier one actually sold out.
[00:02:18] It was interesting I was listening to Let’s see last week’s metaverse nomads and there was they had a guest Unfortunately name escapes me though again username Anyways last metaverse nomads he mentioned how he really thought Claimstakes was a great way to get involved and they were really good priced at about, you know, 30 some dollars each, so you can spend a hundred bucks, get a couple, or get three Claimstakes.
[00:02:45] I don’t know if that was the trigger or if there was other things going on or the release of Sage Labs upcoming. But there were like seven or eight hundred claim stake tier ones still available. Initial ones being sold for USDC by the Star Atlas team. And I forget which date, but sometime in the middle of the week, they were all sold out.
[00:03:08] Interestingly, I had been on my own personal task or, or goal of building up enough Atlas through my ships in the faction fleet to always buy a nether claim stake. I, I think the idea You know, at some time I’ll get into my philosophies on how my game style is. But anyways, the idea that, again, you get a crime stake, you check it every couple of days, and you can harvest the the 4Rs for zero cost.
[00:03:36] So I think this is the foundation of your own gameplay. With the assumption that the 4Rs, again, ammo, toolkits, fuel, and food, are going to be needed in some capacity. To interact with your ships within a game, getting those for free. I mean, I guess free after you purchased one i e a claim stake makes a lot of sense.
[00:04:01] So I I, back when they released them initially, I did get a claim stake tier two bought a few of the claim stake ones and then, I was going to keep buying them, but now that they’ve sold out I may stop trying to remember how many I have now. But anyways that’s been my way to keep my faction fleet ships supplied through Claimstakes.
[00:04:23] Complete passive income, so I, I don’t know what I’m missing here, but I think this is a great thing. So anyways but, but I do think the other interesting issue is, again community interest. A object in the star ecosystem sold out again. Maybe this is speculation. Maybe this is according to market.
[00:04:42] Who knows? I don’t have the knowledge to do. The blockchain analysis was this one person or a lot of couple people was this 700 plus individuals, whatever. But again, it shows that there is some interest. I forget. Somebody said when you did the math there, that was 20, 30, 000 or something. So that was pretty Again, nothing to sneeze at, so.
[00:05:03] But anyways, that’s again an interesting develop as a primary sale on the marketplace actually sold out. Second topic was the crafting tree. So a few Atlas brews back the team did a fun little exercise to show the Potential crafting tree, but without all the links. And so everybody could give their own ideas and whoever got the closest one, a couple of ships.
[00:05:27] So they actually published the official one. I want to thank APHIA’s Star Atlas Weekly Newsletter 95 for showing that. And again, I’m sure it exists in other places. But if you haven’t, if you’ve been listening to any of these, you know that I’m not really a Discord fan. Struggles, struggling with Twitter.
[00:05:44] I do like the fact that at least, or sorry, X. I’m going to keep calling it Twitter. Does give notifications when people, you know, mention you or repost or things like that. So that, that’s really great for me when I do my quick checks each night. But. I can’t, I haven’t figured out enough to figure out all the posts that came up.
[00:06:00] Anyway, so, a weekly newsletter, obviously I’m promoting one LoveAtheist. So they had a picture of that one actually just as a quick aside I know that Star Atlas team has lost a lot of employees, so I’m sure they lost a lot of the people that were doing non game development i. e. marketing or communications or whatever.
[00:06:20] And again, I don’t know, there may still be people there. I’m just, you know, we haven’t had a post on the Star Atlas Medium site in a long time. Definitely nothing on their website. Again, they were always kind of inconsistent anyways. I know, I’m old school and… Need to be more on Twitter and discord, but sometimes it’d be just cool not to have to wade through thousands, hundreds of discord messages to find the official post.
[00:06:44] I mean, there are announcement channels, but. Nevertheless, I have to be in Discord. You know, there’s this cool thing called a website. I know, I’m old school. I just, but, just post something. Anyway, so, I don’t know where to find this crafting tree picture. Maybe they’ll release it when they officially restate drafts.
[00:07:00] But anyways, I want to thank Funcracker at AFIA for pointing for putting that out there. Unfortunately, I can’t zoom in really close to, to go through it. So and I guess, to be honest, I I don’t care about this yet until the actual game is released because there’s always a chance it’ll change.
[00:07:16] But it did have some interesting it, you know. Things now kind of the starting point, which are the resources we were able to find at the AstroAgent Stage Lab, and then on the other side, the, the end products, the final state of things. Now, again, I don’t know what an electromagnet does so but I get the general idea of a crafting tree, so it’s interesting once we get into the game, but up until now, it’s just Cool.
[00:07:44] But I think my biggest takeaway from it is that, yeah, now you can start seeing how you obviously have some gameplay mechanics. You find these things, take them to your crafting stations and move them through. I think it will be interesting to see oh, the one thing that isn’t on this crafting tree, there’s no SDUs, the, or the survey data units.
[00:08:04] Anyways, apparently we know these are… Something in the game, but more related to the raffle, and obviously the raffle is related to the golden tickets, and they weren’t on this crafting path tree. So, you know, we got some information, but we still don’t have everything. So but it’s official. There’s something out there.
[00:08:21] So you know, search, search for places. Because again, I don’t know where to tell you to go look for it other than AFIA’s newsletter. I’m sure it’s on Twitter somewhere. Next topic oh, this was just a fun thing happening with the Star Atlas content creators. I just wanted to highlight cause it’s kind of cool to listen and, and just see how these things, but anyways Atlas Theory, one of the content creators is doing a series Zero to Hero, I think it’s called.
[00:08:51] I’m going to get better at writing these things down. But anyways, his idea was back during Escape Velocity, could he start with nothing and play the game? And of course, he couldn’t start with nothing because you still had a thousand dollars, a thousand Atlas kind of entrance fee to get into Escape Velocity.
[00:09:07] But if you grind through that, you got a whole bunch of stuff. Could you start? Basically leveling up with things that were found and could you sell them on the marketplace and things like that. So he released a new video talking about what he’s going to try to do for that kind of concept in another content creator beyond the horizon actually was talking about it and I’m not sure if it was intentional or just off the cuff, but it came up with an idea of challenging atlas theory to a showdown, but kind of threw around some stuff and beyond the horizon Numerous times brings his son on to the YouTube channel and said, Oh, my son can beat you.
[00:09:46] And anyway, it was just a really fun just, you know showdown, I guess they called it. I think they both accepted did some back and forth videos or something. And yeah, so they’re going to both take a character they made up and run it through SageLab. So Oh. I mean, it seems all kind of fun and games, but I guess I have to admit it was, it was really cool and, and spontaneous and well, fun.
[00:10:12] I mean, so I, I really wish the best for both of them. I’d love to fall on. I think it’ll be really cool. I like the I have to give beyond the horizon a little credit. I really, like that he brings his son involved. I have, I have a son older than, than beyond the rising sun. So, but my whole, oh, the, the point was when I learned about Star Atlas a year and a half ago or whatever it was, my idea was to finally try to find a game I could play with my son because I wasn’t into Destiny or Overwatch or whatever he’s playing.
[00:10:41] They just weren’t my type. But when I mentioned, hey, you might be able to earn some money he got interested in Star Atlas. So this was going to be our game. Of course, there hasn’t been a game, so he’s moved on, literally off to college, actually. So but still, you know, there’s the internet. But anyway, so it’s just cool to see another father and son playing because that was sort of my introduction, or that was the reason I got into Star Atlas too.
[00:11:02] One of the reasons. So so again, hopefully that that showdown goes forward. Yeah, I think it could be a really fun little yeah, I just love these kind of spontaneous things that happen in the community. Moving on, another great thing that came out a couple of different content creators were talking about the different tools.
[00:11:18] So there’s been the joke that SageLabs is basically spreadsheet war Spreadsheet Wars Spreadsheet Warriors. So a lot of people have been developing tools, which is great for the community. I really appreciate the, the people that are out there. So one tool I think is built on Airtable called Nancy, which I think is aligned with AFIA brought it out.
[00:11:40] So I saw a couple demos of people running through that on their, on their YouTube channels. And I… Again, need to get better about writing down people’s names and things like that and providing links. But again, you can get most of the information if you subscribe to my newsletter and you watch the video and the video will tell you who they are.
[00:11:56] So this tool is great. They took the spreadsheet that the Stardust team member Chipto released added really I mean, awesome graphics. I know they’re just grabbing the images off the marketplace, but still just putting all that together, drop down boxes, build your own fleets, public or private dealing and run through the spreadsheet numbers that we have.
[00:12:19] And you can learn about your cargo and your speed and stuff like that. Anyways, just great. The team or community members are building these kinds of tools. This is awesome. I’m really in awe of the talent that this community has to help build these tools. And I know people are saying, oh, these will be proprietary and the guilds will keep them secret so they can do that.
[00:12:43] Again, I have no problems with that, you know. Obviously, there’s an economic incentive in the guilds to keep knowledge secret to maximize their profits. Again, capitalism, no problem with that. So but it is cool that some tools are being released to the entire community. So that, that’s cool. But on that same vein, I wrote down a little comment, which is does using a tool take away from the fun factor?
[00:13:09] And I think this is one of those, again, themes I’ve been mentioning quite a bit is if you like. Being a spreadsheet warrior and playing a spreadsheet game. No problem. Go for it But if you just wanted to get in I mean as been mentioned, there’s really no 3d component. You’re literally clicking buttons though more Better more engaging clicking buttons in faction fleet score But is it fun is is a?
[00:13:40] Or, or more to the point, I guess, does having these tools, again, these enhanced spreadsheets take away any of the fun factor of like discovery or going out there? And I, and I think there’s a couple of different ways, or a couple of different thoughts. One I have to admit, the tools really take and give you some idea of what to do.
[00:13:58] Now, of course, you could go out and just explore, try something and learn. But, I mean, again. It’s all based on formulas, so you might as well use a spreadsheet or one of the tools to figure it out. And I think we have to kind of be up front that there was, SageLabs was never intended for public release.
[00:14:18] It was always an internal testing tool. Rack was supposed to be the real thing. So you know, we may not have gotten this kind of stuff, but teams definitely becoming more transparent. They’re sharing more. So again, I guess we’ll wait and see, but I guess where I come more about the fun factor is are we all just becoming accountants?
[00:14:40] We’re all running our spreadsheets to figure out how to maximize profits. Yeah. You know, I don’t know. I mean, I’m not an accountant. I need to hire an accountant to get out of my own business bookkeeping, but You know, some people could find that fun. I mean, accountants don’t think their job’s boring.
[00:14:59] They wouldn’t become accountants. And, and just a quick aside, I mean, As a business owner myself in the real world knowing your numbers, knowing your profit loss statement are very, very important to business. You could have the greatest idea and you could be the coolest, whatever, creative person, anyway, whatever, you know, and if you can’t.
[00:15:22] Make your numbers pencil out and you can’t make a profit. Well, you don’t have a business. So again there’s nothing wrong with all this, but again, I think some people have kind of stated and I don’t know, I kind of half and half, you know, is this fun? But again, we’ll see. And, you know, building the economy, profit loss statement.
[00:15:43] I mean, again, this all does feel like spreadsheets. So you know, we’ll just see. Yeah. It could still be fun. I just And again, a lot of games that no one would ever not say is a game had grinding involved. And this is a new phenomenon. This has been going on for years, if not decades. So yeah. So, just, just me rambling.
[00:16:04] Next topic delays and transparency. So at some point actually I was busy a couple of nights, so I, I wasn’t keeping up with the Stardust discord, but popped in at one night and they were talking about a lot of people and forget which channel being all upset again about missed deadlines.
[00:16:22] Or missed delays. And I guess I’ve been around this Stardust community long enough that I just don’t. Yeah. Even believe not again. It’s not that I don’t believe or that they’re sincere with dates. I just, again, we’ve had so many of them. It’s, it’s, again, there’s a reason why the four to six is the internal meme, but I actually thought about this for a second and I realized I think, I think the starless team could have done a little bit better.
[00:16:51] And again, I don’t mean this in at all in a negative way, but I think after the layoffs when the three remaining co founders were on the town hall or whatever we call that meeting I praised them for their level of really, I mean, they, they shared so much about the inside development, what the plan was, all the roadmap, some dates were mentioned if I remember correctly Maybe not in that one, but again, at some point, this SageLab had some dates, two, three weeks, and then it, that was delayed because they realized the UI could be improved sorry, user interface.
[00:17:27] But I, I do think that they have done, since the layoffs, an incredible job of being incredibly transparent about all the ongoing development. So, I guess my next part is sort of with constructive criticism bent. This past week, we were told, and I remember on the Atlas Brew, CEO Michael Widener saying, the star path, the referral program, will come out next week.
[00:17:53] Okay, week’s over, it didn’t come out. Didn’t, didn’t need to say that. No one would have had a problem if said it’s coming. And in fact, before that was stated, it was coming at the same time as Say’s Lab. Again, no problem. But I didn’t hear any reason why and the week ended. Just this morning I finally listened to the Atlas Brew that came out this past Wednesday.
[00:18:15] So I’m recording this on a Saturday, so two or three days ago. And it was brought up that oh yeah, it, we, yeah something happened and probably next week. And, and, and see this, this is, this is the problem I guess is. I wouldn’t have had any problem if they said, yep, it’s coming out at the same time as SageLab.
[00:18:33] And then we were told SageLab has been delayed because we want to improve the interface. And as we saw a demo on the latest Atlas brew, yeah, I mean, this looks way better than the previous screenshots. We’ve also obviously missed the late August, early September timeframe. And definitely, I’m sure there is a portion of the community who apparently was on Discord saying, Hey, this, this is crazy.
[00:19:00] They’re never making these deadlines. Fair. That is fair. They did not make their deadlines. I again, just wonder, and again, in constructive criticism, if you had stopped giving dates and now you start giving dates and then you miss those dates. Again, all of this will be forgotten as soon as the game is released.
[00:19:23] Partly it could have been frustration too, because apparently there’s some sort of playtest going on with some, quote, select community members, and I think some community members wondered why they weren’t picked. So, I, I want to first say I’m totally happy with the transparency that the team is giving, but I think maybe…
[00:19:41] Even more transparency might be in order. And to me, this is just simply putting it in a central form, not just a post on Twitter or somewhere in the foundation room. There’s an announcement channel. Now it’s to the group. Hey, it’s not coming out this week. Here’s the reason why, which again, we’re giving it the at west brew.
[00:20:01] We’re looking for this bug. We had this issue with something on the Solana mainnet. Again, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just naive, but I still think one, if you’re gonna set a date, you need to hit it. And if you don’t hit the date, you need to explain why you didn’t hit the date. That’s all. Again, I, I have clients in my business for marketing.
[00:20:23] If I say I’m gonna get to it by the end of the day, I need to get to it by the day. If I need to stay up late, I gotta stay up late. So usually I don’t tell them what, when I’m going to get it done, I set the expectation. But again, I’m not trying to be critical of the team. But I think some of the most recent and again, I didn’t read any of the messages cause they’d already scrolled through my discord.
[00:20:42] I guess I’m just. Mentioning more transparency with centralized announcements, even if, again, it’s in Discord, there’s an announcement channel, use it. Could go a long way to smoothing over a lot of these especially when no one would have batted an eye if you just said, ah, four to six weeks type of thing and, and moved on from that.
[00:21:01] So again, not trying to be whatever. A couple of final things There were some from more information that came out of that Atlas brew on Wednesday about SageLabs and what I thought was two interesting takeaways and sort of the tips strategy is one sure is sounding like SageLabs is all going to be about having multiple fleets.
[00:21:21] So fleets that are designed for mining, fleets designed for transportation and fleets designed for crafting. So that makes perfect sense. But be interesting to see how that works, but I didn’t note and I replied somewhere in discord. I think it was, ah, God, I remember I got to write down more things.
[00:21:41] But anyway, some team member was mentioning that they were making sure that Someone with a single ship could still have fun and say jelop and I wanted to, I commented or replied back. I really appreciate that because again, nothing wrong with guilds or people with massive fleets who can easily break it up into three different things.
[00:22:00] But again, what if you just have one ship? Are you going to be able to mine something and travel back and craft it all with just One ship. Hopefully that gameplay style is supportive. Again, we’ll find out when it comes out. But, I personally like the idea of the multi fleets. It’s more management it’s more of understanding strategy, some tactics, so I think that’s really great.
[00:22:22] But don’t wanna… Hopefully the team doesn’t lose sight, or again, maybe it’s just not this release, but I truly think long term that Star Atlas needs to be able to support just individual gamers with Not zero resources, but some resources. And again, I think the barrier to entry, you know, I’m Haven’t seen the rate as prices, but traditionally all Console games have been 60 bucks a game So, you know not asking for a free option by any stretch but you know that someone with with a minor investment can can get into the game and and Do something and then of course have a, have a way to level up with the, the primary input is time.
[00:23:05] And nothing yet has said that that’s not going to be the case. But I just thought it was interesting that someone internally was advocating for single ship players. So but back to the multi fleets another word or phrase that came out was factory supply chain style gaming. And again, that may not be your interest.
[00:23:24] You were looking for the space adventure combat. UE5 AAA game, and you now get a spreadsheet game that involves supply chains. Again, some people say accounting is boring, some people say supply chain is really boring. This is a quick slide. The current CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, was the supply chain guy. He wasn’t the Steve Jobs.
[00:23:47] So, you know, sometimes you can say supply chain people rule the world eventually. So but anyways, it was just interesting that… see more and more how Sage Labs is really going to be this multi faceted multiple thing, which again, coming from Faction Fleet these changes are awesome, just even if I don’t find that play style.
[00:24:06] My cup of tea, which I may or may not, It all comes down to the question of how much time I have in a given day. But it’s all still interesting. So I just want to point that out. And that wraps up the kind of content bulk of this podcast. So just to close out again if you would like to be on the other end of this conversation interacting with me, again, I’d love to have some podcast guests.
[00:24:26] Again, we could talk about the week in review of Star Atlas, or love to have you just talk about if you’re a content creator, what kind of content you’re creating, love to promote you. Or if you’re In the Star Atlas build program love to also give a microphone to people who do that. If you want to find out all the information I do please just go to intergalacticherald.
[00:24:47] com and subscribe to my weekly news recap where you get all the I curate all the content. Star Atlas content creators, videos, articles, put them all in one place so you can find everything and then just again if you’re interested in Contributing some of my projects. I’d love to get some insight from you if you’d be interested in someday purchasing some Star Atlas merch So please go to intergalacticgear.
[00:25:12] com and fill out my merch survey or if you’re not really Interested in joining a guild you are that single ship gamer who wants to Talk with other people in that kind of same interest. Maybe we’ll start sharing some strategies about how you can maximize a small fleet, or you only have an hour, or you only can play on the weekends like myself.
[00:25:34] And you just want to hang out and chat with people. That’s the kind of non guild guild I’m hoping to get together. So please go to intergalacticcoalition. com and fill out the interest survey. So I have some contact information for you if you’d like to do that. And thank you very much for listening to me ramble for whatever this was.
[00:25:53] Until next week, this is Matt with Intergalactic Herald.