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]
[00:00:05] Hi, this is Matt with Intergalactic Herald. Welcome to… My podcast, Star Atlas Week in Review. This is podcast number 29. All the information I’m going off of can be found through different articles, videos postings on the internet. And if you go to intergalacticherald. com and look for news recap number 78, you’ll find all the source material I’m going off of, so.
[00:00:27] If you’d like to be a guest on this podcast, I’m always looking to bring people on, either to talk about themselves if you’re a Star Atlas creator if you’re a Star Atlas builder, love to have a chat there, or if you just want to chat, ramble about the week in review for Star Atlas also looking for community, Star Atlas community members for that.
[00:00:46] I already mentioned, if you would like to get caught up to date, I go ahead and curate all the other Star Atlas content creators and create a new, a weekly news recap. You can go to intergalacticherald. com, sign up for that. There’s many, many places, including a pop up, so hopefully that’s not too hard to sign up for.
[00:01:04] And also just wanted to do a little self promotion of two of my Star Atlas projects. One is a merch store trying to launch called the intergalactic, or sorry, called intergalacticgear. com. Right now I’m in the building behind the scenes, but I’m also interested in getting feedback on what kind of merch you’d be interested in.
[00:01:22] So if you go to intergalacticgear. com, fill out my merch survey, greatly appreciate it. Plus, you’ll be on a mailing list for future announcements about the merch store and I don’t know, I’m still trying to figure it out, but like, you know yeah, special deals and promos that will be given to people that have signed up for the to be part of that community.
[00:01:41] Also, I am looking to start what I’m calling a non guild guild for startlists. That’s the Intergalactic Coalition, intergalacticcoalition. com. Still working to formalize all my thoughts. Thoughts on this, but basically it’s a place for starless gamers who aren’t interested in joining the Guild for whatever reason.
[00:01:59] Don’t like the structure, don’t have the time, but yet still want to hang out in a more exclusive group community than just the starless discord. So I’m trying to create a space for people to do that using different community platforms and discord that are more. attuned to threaded discussions and email alerts so you can kind of stay connected but not have to log in just to find out what’s going on.
[00:02:22] Basically not a chat platform, though it will have chat. So if you’re interested in that I have a survey there you can fill out so I can contact people there. And again, that’s intergalacticcoalition. com. So let’s move on to get into the main content for this podcast. If you’ve been listening again, these are kind of just random things that came up on the past week in Star Atlas that I wrote down that I just talk about and go through that.
[00:02:45] So the first one I wanted to talk about was as we’re getting closer to the launch of Sage Labs many people have mentioned, Oh, I don’t want to use my ledger. So again, a ledger is a hardware wallet, so you can keep your private keys completely off. Your computer off the internet and things like that.
[00:03:02] People are saying, I don’t want to do that. It takes a lot of clicks and all of this. I’m totally fine with that, and I’ll go ahead and explain why. One I started with the Phantom Wallet, which people recommended. Didn’t give any thought to it. Understand the difference between you know, making sure not to give out your private key and things like that.
[00:03:21] But I had a personal experience where I was using that. And we were out of town, on vacation. So I was, you know, even using my computer. And one of the Quote unquote hacks went around even though it was talking about a different wallet than phantom a wallet I had never heard of nor touched.
[00:03:40] Anyways, my account was drained now. I didn’t lose a lot of money in the Under 100 bucks in USDC. Fortunately, none of my star atlas assets were deemed interesting, but my USDC was and nothing Phantom said it wasn’t them. Somebody else said it wasn’t them all this back and forth, even though people lost money Lost assets.
[00:04:03] Did the sole scan, saw my money move from one wallet to another, but again, it doesn’t really matter. There’s no way to get it back. So I’m totally not having a problem with blockchain. I think it’s a great technique, resource technology. One of your, I would call it for, for identification for independence from centralized organizations.
[00:04:26] But the one thing I always have a problem with people that say all that is what happens when something goes wrong. I do not believe I did anything wrong, but my assets were removed. Who, who am I going to blame? Phantom? Sure seems like it was them since I didn’t have the other wallet. They said it’s not us.
[00:04:44] Okay, that’s it. Now, for all the problems with centralized government, centralized banks, whatever there’s, there’s always something. I could go and call support. I could talk to the bank. I could figure something out. And most times, you know, again, my credit card’s been swiped, I can’t even count how many times in my life I’ve had to get a new credit card for fraud.
[00:05:04] And normally, to the best of my remembering, I never did anything, though there was one instance of someone in my family who did something. But again, social engineering is a thing too. So I’m totally I understand crypto, but I don’t like the fact there is no way to undo things which I think is Going to always going to lead to the fact that this is never going to meet, well I don’t need to go on if crypto is good or bad.
[00:05:32] I’m just saying, back to Ledger. I got a Ledger after that because a lot of people talked about it. And I understood the reasons, the private keys on this little, in effect, mini computer. Just not ever connected to the internet. Not sure on the exact technology when I approve something how that part never gets on the internet.
[00:05:50] I think I understand, but I got an IT background, so I’m always like, there’s never perfect security, but I’m going with the theory that it’s not on, the private keys never get off the device. Anyways, given that Sage Labs is the first aspect of the game that seems to be truly a game, and you’re gonna be interacting a lot, and you’re gonna be working with your assets, whether that’s your single ship, Or your big ship, or your whole fleet.
[00:06:22] The idea that people are saying, Well, I just don’t want to click too many times. That’s blockchain gaming. I’m sorry. That’s the trade off to be on the blockchain. Other games, they don’t have this issue. Just play the game. So, again, I get it It’s annoyance to have to click a lot, or at least what we’re assuming is clicking a lot.
[00:06:41] Now, again, Star Atlas has talked about developing these profiles, which will allow for less clicks, and I think, again, they’re well aware of this as a barrier to entry. But, just wanted to kind of point out, I get it, but, again, if you put it someplace else, you’re using your real ships. They have, you know, they’re assets.
[00:07:02] If you don’t protect them with a hardware wallet, I think you’re just, again, You know, just like we say, this isn’t financial wise, well hey, buyer beware you know, do your own research, whatever. Anyways, again, not trying to totally say people are wrong, not wanting to click on a ledger, but I think, again, you’re missing the point, and this is the compromise we’re making to be in blockchain gaming.
[00:07:22] Okay, okay, enough of that soapbox. Moving on. Well, I guess moving on to another touchy subject, or as I’m starting to learn this, the Starrhouse community calls them spicy. But anyways there was something that came out on the discord that there was some a Sage Lab play test. Okay, cool. That makes sense, that people as they move forward development would bring in other voices, other people to look at it.
[00:07:45] But again, there were lots of people, or I shouldn’t say lots of people, there were some people that said hey, this is giving those playtesters an unfair advantage. And the Star Atlas community managers were mentioning, well, you know, they’re under NDA, they’re under this, you know, we need to test the game.
[00:07:59] It’s definitely blown over. Again, one good thing about looking a week past, you know, I already know the outcome. Everybody already knows the outcome. So I think, again, this was an interesting one of maybe misjudging how people would respond to the idea of a playtest, which, again, in gaming. In software development in general, there’s always testers one way or another because the team is never the best candidate because they’re just too familiar with it.
[00:08:24] They need some outside perspectives. But again, I think the main point that some of the community members are making, well, this is play to earn, they’re getting an unfair advantage, why don’t we all get the chance to have an unfair advantage? Again, my personal thoughts on it are almost irrelevant because what the team decided is, great, we’ll come out with a form.
[00:08:44] In fact, it was, I think, deadline, November, or sorry September 15th. I’m recording this on September 16th, so I’m assuming the second play test is already occurring, other people got invited.
[00:08:58] you know, lesson learned. So again, I think it’s one of those that there was some definite I think legitimate reasons and not being well spoken and again, I think this is kind of an ongoing thread. And again, I don’t mean this to be negative to the Star Atlas team, but more of, again, the constructive criticism they’re learning to again, they haven’t built a game before.
[00:09:21] So or sorry, they haven’t built this game before. I know some of them have background in gaming and development and things like that, but this is different. And so I think the radical transparency is important realizing that. You know, even minority voices are still important things. And, again, whenever you’re doing anything within the community announcing it, explaining it, I think goes a long way to explain to the community.
[00:09:47] And, again, I… I know I’m kind of harping on this over a couple of different podcasts. The Foundation Room is an exclusive group, so posting something there is not announcing it to the community. There’s an announcement channel in Discord you got a Twitter account again, you don’t have to put it on every social media platform or on your website, though, still think they’re, but I mean, at least consistency that you’re always posting what’s going on and things like that.
[00:10:10] So again. Just another development, which I just think is just part of the community growing, the team, the StartList team you know, lessons learned. Again, these are all natural. I don’t think there’s anything to blow out of proportion nor do I think, oh yeah, again, I have a different play style, so somebody got in there early.
[00:10:30] I wasn’t going to be out there on day one trying to make money anyways. Anyways, moving on. A couple different videos came out about kind of different play styles, how you might set up fleets within Sage Labs. And kinda as those comments have came out, I’ve done my own little thinking or, or somebody brought it up.
[00:10:48] It was really kind of starting to become, you know, Hey, we’re gonna go out and get resources we’re gonna craft, but it sure feels like the, the one thing in the middle. That people kind of talked about, which is a transportation fleet is actually starting to sound like it could be the real critical thing because you have to move your resources, both from the asteroids to the star bases for crafting and then ultimately from the star bases to the, your faction central station, which is the only in and out of the game air quotes to the real world where you can move assets.
[00:11:23] So yeah. There’s a lot of movement of these things. So I am really starting to become more and more curious about, well, how’s that really going to do? And then kind of, well, what ships actually allow you to do that with any sort of efficiency? Cause in the super, or extra, extra small, small, whatever they’re all fighters or racers.
[00:11:44] Some specialized things like the miners and the, and the repair or rescue. But I, and again this is just my lack of going through all the ships because I knew I can’t afford them or buy them so I didn’t learn about them all. But where are all the freighters? Again I think almost all the ships have some sort of cargo space but where’s the small freighter?
[00:12:08] Eh, we’ll find out. And again, again, this isn’t the long, this isn’t the final game, you know if I remember correctly, after the first what they call Galactic Asset Offering, there was a next, second one, which then got paused, so there’s lots of ships that were, have never seen the light of day, so I don’t know, in the grand scheme of things, the, the total ships that exist, if that’s even the finite list but it sure feels like there’s not a small, greater, which I wish there was.
[00:12:37] But I could be wrong, and again, that’s just me not getting so involved yet until, well, it actually gets released. On that same kind of vein one of the other things that came up in the videos was in addition to kind of how you’re going to structure your fleet. I think it was Beyond the Horizon, so hopefully I’m giving credit where credit is due, had a video which talked about roles or careers within SageLabs.
[00:12:57] And I think he did a really interesting thing. Talking about, Hey, you know, there might be just people that are, and again, I say people because their ships may or may not dictate a certain play style, but they may choose to have a place. So, so some people may just be, and again, I should have wrote it down, but you know, just focused on finding one resource and bring it back, putting it on the marketplace and they’re fine with that.
[00:13:20] So again, it was start of kind of how, Hey, I see this now more of, yeah, you could actually figure out your own. Special, specializations or again, play styles that you, the player, the gamer want to do, and then you may focus on that. And again, there could be people that for example, I’m starting to think more and more that SageLabs is really one aspect is I think it came up in the latest brew that I listened to this morning.
[00:13:46] Could just be about these, these SDUs, which again have some sort of long term thing, but really are more to get in the lottery, which is about the golden tickets, or sorry, the, the, not the lottery, the raffle, whatever term, but, you know, that kind of feels like the thing to do for a while. And don’t worry about the game per se, because we don’t even know what these other crafted Things have in long term play.
[00:14:13] I mean, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got now some resources, we’ve got some other resources, but it sure feels like the new thing is going to be these SDUs, which is again about scanning, and then how do you get the golden tickets so you can go into the raffles, so. But again I think the idea of thinking of roles or careers, it was kind of cool and made me think so.
[00:14:34] Moving on, next topic SageLab Delays. So I want to thank Efia, I think again, Funcracker for his weekly newsletter he put out, he puts out. I think this was it was a newsletter, 96. So It kind of pulled together, I thought, some interesting things on why there was a delay, but, again, I know I’m harping on the team, this was one team member, Xcode posting in one of the Star Atlas discords, giving reasons, again, if I missed that chat, Funcracker didn’t put this together for me, again, why Just a simple post in the announcements.
[00:15:08] Here’s why things are delayed. Well, anyways, just in case you haven’t heard, I’ll just go through a couple of the bullet points that Funcracker put there was. Apparently Solana was updating its version. I didn’t even know a blockchain had a version. So again, you got to go with the newest version of the blockchain.
[00:15:23] I get it. No problem. Some of their quote, some of their, quoting Funcracker, who may be quoting the Discord, they found some of their tooling broke down with that upgrade. Yeah, no problem. Software changes, software built upon it has a problem. Apparently there was some bug and hello moon. I don’t know what hello moon is that occurs on Solana mainnet, but not on their own test net called Atlas net.
[00:15:48] Okay, cool bugs. Got it. Data, but software bugs. Technology bugs, no problem. And also that apparently the Atlas fee payer, which now apparently is called Prime implementation was longer than expected. Anyways. So, ha, thank you for putting those together. I didn’t catch all that. Again, I don’t stay in the Atlas, or sorry, the Star Atlas Discord that much.
[00:16:13] Just check once a day is my routine and don’t… I can’t read every message, but anyways, totally makes sense. Again, just constructive criticism. Please post this in the announcement channel. I have no problems with delays for these perfectly valid reasons that are outside the, the team’s control.
[00:16:35] Oh, one other cool thing that fun cracker put in his Newsletter was an updated roadmap by roadmap. This was the EFI’s roadmap of all the different information that they have gleaned and where things are. So I have that unfortunately wish I could see it better. Cause it’s on a graphic in the webpage.
[00:16:57] Unfortunately, I thought I could just zoom in and look at it, but I can’t do that either. So. I’ll just reference you, if you want to see what they have kind of put together and kept updated over the years. Double check, there’s no link. Nope, sorry. So again, where things are coming down the road, but I, I can’t see it.
[00:17:16] So I’m, I guess I can’t talk about it. So, sorry about that. You know, but again, where the updated graphic novels coming Star Path. Actually, I guess the DAC platform showroom 2. 2 yeah, sorry, but again, as we know, it’s just guesses and things that people or the team has said before, and again still, we don’t have anything to play as of this date.
[00:17:43] Moving on Oh, I might have alluded to this earlier, but I guess I jumped around on my checklist. So again, there has been an open call for more SageLab testers. The deadline was September 15th. Yeah, I already talked about that. So Atlas brew came out again. These are become the. The best knowledge that comes out of the team actually to give credit where credit is due, they’re consistent.
[00:18:06] They’re always at the same time. They have tons of new information about what’s going on that the team’s working on. So again, great session. And I do appreciate the different people that are recording that for you putting on YouTube for playback. ’cause that’s the only way I can listen to ’em since I work during the day.
[00:18:23] So listened to that this morning when I was out doing personal chores and it was basically going through some of the initial parts of Sage Lab I think right after you have already logged in and created your character. Then, how do you add your resource, or sorry, add your ships, then form a fleet, put resources in them undock transport, so I think it was warp or subwarp, go someplace, start mining they did it, kind of just show everything, so they left mining early, and instead of going back, they actually did the self destruct, just so you could see it, so I think that was a great presentation also shows that, you know, It’s playable.
[00:19:06] It’s getting closer. So again, kudos to the community team for making that the Atlas brew for, of the past week. Oh, and one small tidbit and I’m really kind of curious, but this is actually really starting to make this feel real. They mentioned when they put the fleet together, they were going to give it a fleet name.
[00:19:25] But the small in passing, because they said, Oh, and that fleet name will be on the blockchain forever. And I was like, Oh yeah, I mean, not just movements, not just assets that are tied to a public key, part of your crypto wallet. Part of that will also be your name of your fleet. So the. fleet name will be on the blockchain.
[00:19:49] And so one I think they’re joked at how that, that could live on forever because again, the blockchain it’s in the past. So one small question I had is, can you rename it? Cause it seems like it should be able to, it’s just a, it’s just an attribute of something on the blockchain. It’s not the block, but I realized again You know, it’s not just something you see on your screen, you know, anybody can find it.
[00:20:10] So they can look at these fleets. Now, again, is this fleet going to go through the whole system? Who knows? But again You know, I guess maybe just that whole thing about an anonymity on the blockchain, but you’re naming it. So you gotta be careful if your name. Basically what’s it called, doxing yourself.
[00:20:29] You know, and I’m like, well, wait, should I use my name? Should I use my business? I guess I’m already out there. You guys could, you know, you’re listening to this podcast. You go to a website, have an about page. It’s not that hard to put two and two together. In other places, I’ve… But anyways, it was just more of two fold.
[00:20:46] One, cool. I mean, you literally can go on and find your name. I mean… I don’t know, it’s just, I guess when you create something and the world can see it, it’s kind of cool. It’s not just on your computer or on a server, I mean, there. But on the other hand, I guess we all have to kind of think about privacy and, and how we want to be out there.
[00:21:07] So, anyways, but it’s still fun, it’s good. And then the last thing that came up I think, I’m not sure when it was… Officially announced, but it was announced officially in the announcement channel. So I’ll, I’ll, I’ll give kudos again where things are. But Sage Labs finally has an announced date, a launch date, which is September 21st.
[00:21:22] So again this is a Saturday. I’m sitting here recording 21st is next Thursday, Thursday. Interesting. I would have launched on Monday, Monday, but that’s just me. I don’t like to work on the weekends. I want to do hobbies on the week. Anyways. Sorry, that’s irrelevant. The key is we got a launch date. I really, really, really, really hope that they don’t come up with the last bit bug.
[00:21:48] They, they, this, this would really ruin all credibility. So I’m going on the assumption that they have fully tested this. Here’s the last couple of bugs. All the pieces are there, of course, in the That was brew, they showed something that was playable and it shows up. Now again, they have launched other things on time when they’ve put out announcements.
[00:22:08] They’ve had events on time so again. Giving them 99.99% that this is gonna happen ’cause they just can’t not have it happen. So hopefully by the time you go to the next podcast, something’s out there. I’ll definitely assume all the content creators will be all over it on Thursday and maybe on the weekend I’ll think about carbon, little time to play.
[00:22:31] Or maybe I’ll just give it another week. But anyways, we got on a launch date. And I think that’s a great place to end this podcast. So thank you again for listening to all my ramblings about Star Atlas. Hope you’re enjoying this. I guess I’m supposed to tell you to leave comments or like me on your favorite podcast platform, though I’ve been noticing a lot of people are listening to it directly on a website.
[00:22:50] So. Cool. There’s contact form there. You’re welcome to submit something there. So just to wrap up again, if you want to be a podcast guest, definitely always looking to have other people come on and ramble with me. Or again love to chat about you. If you’re a content creator or a Star Atlas builder please do sign up for my weekly news recap on intergalacticherald.
[00:23:10] com. That’s my main second, I guess I should say it’s my main, it’s my other content source. So trying to put together all the different. resources I find, so you can just have them come to your mailbox once a week. Yeah, week. And then this podcast is sort of my stream of consciousness about what I’ve seen.
[00:23:28] So hopefully you’re enjoying this. Again, and just to promote my own two Star Atlas, two other Star Atlas projects. Again intergalacticgear. com is my merch store. our merch store being developed because you can’t buy anything yet. So love if you would go there and fill out the merch survey, just give me some feedback on that.
[00:23:45] Get on my mailing list there. And then Intergalactic Coalition is my idea for a non guild guild for solo starless gamers people that are only able to. put a little bit of time in per week but yet still want to hang out with other Stardust gamers and learn techniques, chat, things like that. So I’m working to develop a community around that.
[00:24:05] It will be a paid community. I’m going to be very upfront about that. Software costs money to get these features. I’m going to put effort into it to, you know, put some… content there too. Also just to hang out with you. So, you know, there’s always somebody to chat with. So my time’s worth money and I’m asking you to donate a little to help offset that.
[00:24:25] Anyways, yeah, not, not apologetic. It’s paid. So anyways, but thanks for listening. Again hope you enjoyed this. Otherwise I’m Matt with the Intergalactic Herald and talk to you again next week.