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.
If you would like to support our efforts, donations can be sent to intergalacticherald.sol
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Podcast Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi, this is Matt with Intergalactic Herald. Welcome to my Star Atlas Week in Review podcast. This is podcast number 64. You can find links to all the videos and articles mentioned in this podcast on intergalacticherald. com. Look for news recap 113. 113. So just a quick summary of things to go over from the past week.
[00:00:22] One was the crossroad presentation. where there were some announcements specifically about crew packs. There’s also some changes to the star based game. There was some Well, it was actually, well, it was announced at the crossword presentation, but I didn’t really make the significance until somebody mentioned later on about some some of the changes to what was I guess called Sage 3d a couple of things on the Atlas brew.
[00:00:47] And then finally, just. Kind of, I guess two weeks in a row now, kind of just some of my thoughts on the state of Star Atlas in general. So before we get started, just want to mention two of the Star Atlas projects I’m working on. One is my merch store at intergalacticgear. com. I had a really hard week of work, business, and my business, and actually, Project having two more weeks.
[00:01:08] So haven’t been doing a lot, but it is actually a soft launched. I do have one product for sale. I did a test with someone and everything seemed to go good with purchasing and shipping and just got to test out some payment options. So anyway, so but. It’s just a mug. It’s very limited selection, but Hey, that wasn’t my goal.
[00:01:26] My goal was to actually get it created, which I have and adding more products is actually a much more straightforward process. So anyway, so that’s it. So again, please go to intergalacticgear. com. If you want to buy a mug with star Atlas on it, please do. Otherwise do still have my merch survey and I’d love to get more feedback as I start going back through some of the past survey results and looking to specific merchandise so I can start creating for the store.
[00:01:48] The other one is my I guess I keep calling it Non Guild Guild. It’s one of the Star Atlas DACs, so Distributed Autonomous Corporations, but really it’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a community for Star Atlas gamers. And again, I’ll get into a little bit of just kind of things in the Discord later, but really looking at a place for solo Star Atlas gamers who don’t want to join G Guilds, hence the Non Guild Guild.
[00:02:10] Also looking for a place for beginners to hang out. Again, that aren’t looking to join a guild because you want to join a guild, you should go join a guild. But again, if you don’t think that’s going to be your gameplay style please go to intergalacticcoalition. com. And I’m in the process of got an interest survey for things and I’m actually doing some debates on maybe where to prioritize this in the future of my my efforts.
[00:02:31] So anyways enough about me and my Star Wars projects. I’ll get into the content section. So again people have listened to this before know that I recorded this on the weekend, but it’s the. past week of things, usually not the previous Friday. So because of that last Friday, so two Fridays ago, I think early in the morning, I can’t remember, but anyways, it was in the past.
[00:02:53] Michael Wagner, who was kind of been on a travel around the world, or I’m not sure he went around the world, but he went to a lot of other countries. There was actually a Solana conference called Crossroads. I believe it was in Istanbul. So Turkey, I’m pretty sure, but. Can’t remember my world geography, but I think, think those are correct.
[00:03:09] But anyways. Istanbul, I know that one for sure. Anyway, so he gave a presentation. I do have that linked into my weekly newsletter. It’s coming out. It’s they just had to kind of basically in an hour or eight plus nine hours of content. So I timestamped where to start that one up. So he went over a few different things.
[00:03:27] The biggest one to me anyways, was talking about the crew packs. And so I think he talked about crew packs, a couple other videos. Anyways. Best thing to do is just watch it because a lot of it was videos that you can look at. And again, there’s been different places and different things in my newsletter of other people that comment on that.
[00:03:44] So I’m not going too much into it, but I did want to talk about specifically crew packs because that seemed at least to me, the most interesting new thing. And we’ve been told about crew packs for quite a while now. So, so what was announced there, and then I think followed up by a medium article, pretty sure those relate.
[00:04:02] I don’t remember. It’s a week ago. I can’t remember anything. Anyways, this is what I’m supposed to talk about. Cause I wrote it down anyway. So crew pack. So the first thing is there will be different levels of packs. Forget there’s some colors. Golds. No. Ah, I don’t remember. Sorry. It’s a week ago. But anyways, those are the different levels.
[00:04:20] And then within those packs, I’m pretty sure it was five crew per pack. When you open it, so I guess we’re using the kind of baseball card, Pokemon, Magic Gathering, you know, Physical card games. When you open it, you get to find out what’s in it. And then it seems like it is a randomized set in addition to actual crew, but the level of the cruise.
[00:04:43] So there’ll be multiple levels of crew that kind of align with the levels of the ships. So a lot more detail. It’s cool. Again, we know obviously collecting cards, whether physical or now virtual, is definitely something people like to do. I admit, I used to collect baseball cards way, way ago. I guess I recently, no, more recently collected comic books.
[00:05:06] Still get one comic book series. But anyways I digress, comic, because I had said before I didn’t really get into the whole core and collecting those covers. But anyways, the other really cool thing was the price points of what each pack level Is going to cost. And I believe, oh man, I should’ve left the link.
[00:05:27] I forgot what they were, but it seemed very reasonable. I want to say that the platinum, which was the highest, cause they did offer a pre released limited availability, not there’ll never be any more, but just for some reason, they just released 5, 000 of those. And the Platinums were 10 a crew.
[00:05:45] I can’t remember where the other two were now. Anyways, so that was the peak. And again, the rarity is there. But now we know price points. We still don’t have a date when they’ll be open for general release. The pre release 5000 limited, not limited edition, but just limited number sold out in less than 24 hours.
[00:06:02] So definitely interest from the community for that. Unfortunately, it’s just something in your inventory doesn’t do anything yet. So but again we’re moving forward. And again, this is kind of out of sequence. The Atlas brew did go over the article and talk more. So again, if you want to learn more about the crew packs, read the medium article, listen to the Atlas brew.
[00:06:22] Both of those are linked on my website for news recap number 113. So everything occurred in the community. I don’t, man, I should. I don’t know. Sorry. It was a long week. A lot of, a lot of business a lot of major work. So some of this stuff sorry, I just wrote it down last week and last weekend and just don’t remember.
[00:06:43] Anyways, there has been some star base changes. The ones that were particular interesting for me were the ones that seem to be related more to the small fleets. I think The Beyond the Horizon did a video and kind of called these things out. So I’ll reference that one again, if you could check my news recap.
[00:06:57] So there’s changes to the SDU scanning. Now you can get more. So again, for smaller fleets that’s maybe one of the more likely things you’ll be doing. They also, and again, since I haven’t played Starbase yet, I’m not a hundred percent sure I understand, but I think I get the logic. So if there wasn’t enough food in the Starbase you couldn’t craft.
[00:07:17] If there’s not enough toolkits, you can’t upgrade the Starbase. So they decided on food, which is related to crafting, that if there’s no food, like people aren’t supplying the food, the crafting will still continue, but it’ll just be at a slower rate. So and I think the benefit there is again, if food’s not always there and somebody’s trying to craft something who’s a small player and then there’s no food, their crafting stops, which maybe was more You know, able to keep doing whatever goal they were trying to accomplish.
[00:07:43] So so that’s seems reasonable. And then there was talk of this upcoming change. Oh, I guess there were some changes that occurred immediately and some will occur in a couple of weeks. Was there’ll be an export tax. So if you want to take your items out of star based. And put them back into your wallet.
[00:08:01] Hence, maybe to go to the marketplace there’ll be an export tax. So this was a mechanism to kind of hopefully disincentivize people from moving it between the different factions. And again, that’s a whole. another can of worms on why that’s pros or cons, but definitely didn’t seem to be something that will greatly impact small gamers because you just probably aren’t exporting a lot.
[00:08:21] So the tax proportionally be less. So kind of the stat, what is it? Progressive tax? I don’t remember. I don’t know. Real world taxes, you know, bull stuff. If you got a lot of money, you’re supposed to pay more tax type of thing. But there was also talk that there might be eventually local markets that will stay within Starbase.
[00:08:37] So there’d be even less incentive to take your resources either that you mined or your craft outside of your Starbases. So again it does seem like the team is trying to respond to some of the different things that have been discussed and things like that. But those seem to be the ones that popped out to me again, related to the concept of small gamers or, you know, gamers with small fleets.
[00:08:58] So the other thing that fun cracker in his AFA newsletter expanded upon, but I believe it was briefly mentioned at the crossroads event by the CEO was a retirement of Sage 3d. In the sense that that idea is not gonna be moved into u the, the UE five version of the game. Now, I’m still not sure I understand all of this, and part of it’s like we used the word sage to mean something, but up till recently there were that three, three versions of sage.
[00:09:30] There was Sage Labs version one, slay Jobs version two, and Sage three DI guess, which never really worked for me. So. I’m not sure if Sage is the product or Sage 3D versus Sage 2D is thing. And then, yeah, so again, it wasn’t very clear, but given kind of everything about product announcements and changes and everything, I’m not really putting too much stock into what that means, but it was kind of like, well, now we’re going to be able to be in your Unreal Engine and zoom in and zoom out.
[00:10:04] And I’m like, okay, well, How’s that relate to Sage? Are you talking about the economic? Again, I’m not sure. I guess I could have checked the roadmap to see if it was there, but given the fact it was announcement, feels like it wasn’t on the roadmap or there was that secret thing on the roadmap. I’m not sure.
[00:10:20] Anyways, we’ll see as things go down. But in the end of the day, this is just, doesn’t change anything. Nothing changes tomorrow. It’s just more of which way they’re going to focus their development. But it did get me, make me think that. Again, as I’ve mentioned before I had to buy a video card to get the showroom to work on my computer.
[00:10:40] I mean, I’ve played RTS games where you can zoom out and zoom in, so like, okay, that’s normal. I mean, I guess maybe zoom all the way down in your ship and turn into a crew member. Okay, that’s kind of unique and different, but again, that assumes everything is in UE5. Now, As a product development strategy, sure, it makes sense to have less products, but seems like a browser based game would make a lot of sense to expand the potential gaming audience.
[00:11:08] Because again, browsers can work on mobile devices, they can work on tablets, they can work on lap or computers. UE5, unless there’s more to it, is basically a Windows computer. So, you There’s nothing wrong, there’s tons of Windows PC games out there, but yeah. So I’m not really sure, but again, it was so brief, I wasn’t sure.
[00:11:31] Funcracker put out more stuff in his newsletter and I’m like, okay, sure. But again, it’s like, well, bluntly every other announcement of something. Okay, cool. Well, let’s wait and see. Anyway, so that’s just something, you know, that was announced the Atlas Brew did occur. And again, it was predominantly focused on the Crew packs.
[00:11:52] So again, if you want more information there. One interesting slight change, and it doesn’t really change anything, but they didn’t mention that no longer we’re gonna do the ship conversions where we’re gonna send our ships somewhere and then out would come the shell, the components, and the crew. And now they say we’ll just be an airdrop of crew.
[00:12:09] But I don’t recall if they said what’s gonna happen to your ship. So again, Maybe this is easier, different. I don’t know, but again, just a different way that things will be occurring. So anyway, so that was interesting and that it’s kind of it for the stuff that was announced from, from the team. So again, the crossroads events occurred crew packs released and some slight changes to star base.
[00:12:30] So to kind of wrap up this podcast later in the week, I don’t know if it was brought on by anything particular, or this is just a continuation of kind of last week, but. I guess I’m seeing patterns. And again, if anything, I guess I’ll go back all the way until the end of the last year where things were kind of put out that we’ve got a lot of announcements and that’s great and stuff happens and that’s cool.
[00:12:51] And I do not fault the team for racing crew packs the way they did. And they were able to, I think somebody estimated half a million dollars in a sale of that. So that’s, that’s great. I mean, we’ll get something for that someday. But. That’s it. It’s a week later and we actually, there was talk of the Atlas brew and the, the, the people on that, it was great to learn and get some subtle nuances to a few things, but again, what is it?
[00:13:19] I think they said end of second quarter. So if you call that the end of June and now they’re changing how they’re distributing the crew and okay, great. And at this point. Oh, we’re sure, or not even sure, but I guess we’ve been told it for sure. You can use Crew 4s and Starbase, which again, doesn’t do anything.
[00:13:39] Our, you know, mobile app, I think they said end of the year, which seemed like why you need a crew to do that. So, again, there’s this pattern, and it, it It’s just a pattern of, you know, announcements and then nothing, and we move on. Now, I’ve heard some interesting things in the foundation room, but of course can’t talk about that.
[00:13:56] So, okay, so what can I talk about? Well, I was kind of thinking more and more kind of just again, I’m calling it the state of Star Atlas. And there’s definitely less content creators. I mean, I’m Really appreciate the ones that are doing things you know, call out the consistency of Beyond the Horizon and Metaverse Explorers and Metaverse Nomads.
[00:14:15] I mean, and Funcracker who’s producing the newsletter because pretty much where the bulk of the links come from, but that’s it. And in months and years past, there were other people now maybe life situations changed or whatever, but you know, other than Beyond the Horizon actually The other three have been there from the beginning.
[00:14:34] So we’ve only added one new person into that mix that produces content on a regular basis. And, and I guess I should, just as a quick aside mentioned, I, I’m aware that there are other language creators in the Star Atlas community, since it is a global community. I’m not discounting their work, but it’s just not accessible to me.
[00:14:55] And that’s again, just cause it’s a language issue. I just can’t, and I’m sure maybe potentially vice versa. So you know, again, not trying to dismiss other non or other language content creators. Just just again. I can’t read it, so I can’t listen to it. So but definitely I have felt too that the discord, sorry, I was discord anyways, feels less engaging.
[00:15:17] Now, again, there’s things in the foundation room I can’t get, get into and other things, but I, well. I guess as a measure of me I’m very thankful that I’m on one of the lists that if a new player comes in and somebody wants to look for a guide, my website comes up. I’m very thankful for whoever instituted that.
[00:15:35] That’s great. I really appreciate the, the promotion, but I also track my statistics on the website. And yeah, Not a lot of people go to my website. So that kind of makes me think not a lot of people are in the discord. So again, I don’t have the hard numbers for discord things, but you know, there the other thing was a community projects that have been out there and that does feel also gone a lot of quiet people that were doing the physical products some of them have disappeared.
[00:16:00] Some of the bigger projects are still doing some things, but you know, not hearing a lot about them. Or they, you know, come and go so You know again, it just feels like it’s a little but one thing that I didn’t want to bring up specifically was people are saying Well small gamers are leaving because the game’s not interesting and I’m like Okay, fair point but But is it the community or is it the gameplay?
[00:16:26] And I would say that I think, and again, I’ve been saying this for a long time. I want something to engage with. I want a game to play and I’m hoping finally cross my fingers tomorrow to actually get back into star base and just see if my And again, I don’t even know how to, I’m not a whale, but I had more than one ship.
[00:16:44] So, you know how that kind of fits in there. Cause I’m, I’m still intrigued by it. Oh, but I am also pragmatic that I think it’s all about automation, which I’m getting, I’m interested in also exploring, but if, if, if you take away star based, there’s nothing else. So what, what, what, what a small gamer do?
[00:17:03] Cool. Again, let’s just say that’s a few ships because that’s all there is. Again, can’t do anything with your crew. You can’t do anything with a lot of the things you can, I guess. And again year or months ago, Metaverse Explorer mentioned again, how there were like three components or three games.
[00:17:18] It was the browser game, the Unreal Engine game and the marketplace game. And sure. Obviously a small person can sell and trade in the marketplace. But again, if you’re not trading or selling a lot, your margins are probably pretty low, so may not be that engaging. And now the star based. I guess it’s still going to be around for a while, again, back to the Sage 3D thing, I’m not sure, and we know on Unreal Engine, the showroom, after they took away Surge, it’s pretty much the same as it’s always been.
[00:17:47] There’s some things in there, and you could, but, you know, I’m still waiting to try out my new video card, because there’s just, okay, I could go do this, but there’s, there’s no multiplayer, there’s no, yeah, again. If you podcast back, I mentioned that I thought search was great and very disappointed that it isn’t a thing anymore.
[00:18:06] So, but basically all this, I guess I want to wrap up in saying that I’m not sure this is negative cause I don’t feel negative, but I do feel kind of like all we’re doing is waiting and yeah, it again, and our society today with, with stimuli that exist you know, quick dopamine or whatever thing hits we get from social media you know, sporting events, you know, whatever, live events, whatever, politics, whatever you want to get.
[00:18:34] They all are doing something. They’re, they’re, they’re capturing our attention. They’re engaging us. And again, if we just stay within gaming, you’ll play a game and you play as long as you want, depending on the style. I kind of do feel like our state right now is in the star Atlas is just, we’re waiting.
[00:18:49] And. There’s nothing wrong with that. And again, the team is definitely building things. We see them. Some great videos were shown at the Crossroads event. We’ve seen videos before. You know, I think they’re being very strategic about bringing new people on to help in, in specific things. But I think, and I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before, I mean, and That obviously the reduction in staff.
[00:19:13] Oh, that was, that was at staff. So at the Atlas brew they mentioned a very interesting small point was never alone campaign, which again was a great engaging thing. At first I thought, ah, this is just cheesy, but I have to admit I did it. And, and it was kind of fun scavenger hunt, do this thing, whatever.
[00:19:28] It was mentioned at the Atlas brew that originally the team, again, whatever they said was 17 people. Now. I’m not sure how to put that in context that it wasn’t mentioned titles, but it says, well, now we’re only four. And I think what they were referring to was what I guess I’ll just refer to as a community team, which is Sante Dom Jose, and I think Darwin.
[00:19:48] Now, again, it wasn’t stated. I’m just kind of putting pieces together. So they’re, they’re members that are in this DART Atlas gift score doing different things. Throwing up the Atlas brews, you know, public PR or outreach type of thing. 17 compared to four is a big difference. And so I think it kind of speaks to things I’ve been noticing when I do check the star house discord and you go to the never alone campaign, people are saying, well, what’s happening, what’s happening next, whatever.
[00:20:16] And it did sound like from least what they mentioned, the outlets, who they are going to wind down the, the Never alone campaign. They didn’t go into specifics, but that was spoken. Hey, we’re going to wind it down and but again, it got me again thinking, and this goes back to what I was just saying before I remember that was again about the reduced staffing.
[00:20:31] Well, that was just in we’ll call it. I don’t know. Communications marketing. I don’t know. I don’t know what department went from seven or what group or whatever team. But yeah, that’s a big drop. I mean, yeah. Can’t do my math off the top of my head, but you know, 75%, which actually now you think about it, they said they write off 75%.
[00:20:47] So maybe it was kind of across the board. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. That was in the past. But I do think it does show how the reduced staffing is definitely Factoring into the, what I’ll call this waiting state that again, it is, is taking so much longer to release. And then a standard project management is the longer something takes more likely there’ll be scope creep.
[00:21:06] There’ll be changes. We’re in technology, technology changes. It sounds like part of the reason the sage three D was, was the, um, retired was the technology. Something called play canvas is just either hard or they can’t find people where it’s much easier to get UE5 developers. So again, all makes perfect sense, but again, things might’ve been different if there were more team and move forward.
[00:21:29] So I think to wrap this up, that I’m still very interested in the division that has spoken about Star Atlas. I think it’s, it’s great. The past products that have been came out. I mean, even in the end score, faction fleet, that’s pretty good. It was fine. It worked. It did something. I mean, I’m still claiming resources and, and filling, refilling every day.
[00:21:54] It’s not a terrible, it’s not fun, but it’s not something I don’t, I mean, I’m still, I guess, slightly enjoying doing. It’s, it’s some way to engage with my ships, I guess, at the end of the day. So But regardless of vision or past products it doesn’t compare to any other games currently available. And I did catch myself going, well, you know, I have all these games in my backlog, I think also steam was running a sale and they said, Hey, this game you put on your wishlist is 50 percent off.
[00:22:19] And I was like, you know, I could just go buy that and play that. And anyways, I guess I’m trying to go back to, you know, why are quote small gamers leaving? I would just posit that. There’s other things to do with your time. Like go play a new video game, play an old video game. I mean, again, if you’re just a gamer, if you’re not a crypto person, you’re not into investing, whatever.
[00:22:39] If you’re a gamer, do you want to play games and there’s really no start all this game right now. I mean, bluntly there’s, there is really isn’t. So there are other cool things new game releases old games, old favorites, whatever, you know? So again, if we’re just talking about gamers So, I think, going forward, as we’re in this waiting period, until, you know, there can be some attention.
[00:23:01] eyeballs to use the marketing term can be sustained where people are like, Hey, there’s this, there’s that, there’s whatever star Alice is going to be in this awaiting period. Cause we need something to create that continual engagement. And again, not trying to fault that the gameplay style or the mechanics or the economy or whatever star base is wrong, but, and it could be a stepping stone for more and that’s fine.
[00:23:24] Nothing wrong with developing. Cause again, the team has been very open. This is previous, this is building in public, but I think. Again, putting all these things together. Yeah, it is kind of, well, there’s only so many, maybe we’ll call them diehards, I don’t know that are sticking around. So having said all that, I’m going to try to leave on a positive note, not that I think there’s anything wrong, but it does feel like the team is really focused on this public version of the showroom that they’ve been talking about.
[00:23:53] I forget which release number, but you know, it seems like it’s the racing one, it seems like it had the midday gravity support. You haven’t heard a lot about recently. But again, just cause why would they, if they don’t have something to announce yet but we have heard on different Atlas brews, you know, that they’re really focused or they will be focusing on marketing that they will have an onboarding experience.
[00:24:13] So again, all the things that sound like, oh yeah, duh. But I think again, the, the key is to realize that they know they’ve spoken. Those are the things they want to accomplish. Well, why aren’t they doing it now? Well, because they don’t want to accomplish that now. That’s not their goal. And. Yes, we’re not privy to everything definitely, you know, you get a lot if you’re in the foundation room, but even then, they’re not everything that’s been spoken, because why would it I don’t care if they are building public, they’re not going to share everything, so I think you know, that is the thing to start looking forward to more than, I think, anything else really, because if it’s focused on the public, then we can look to be done with this waiting period, because it, bluntly, if it’s That thing is no different than anything else they released.
[00:25:00] Then it will flash in the pan and people will leave. So I, I don’t believe that’s what they’re doing. I don’t know for sure, but again, they, everything I’ve ever read and heard, I mean, they do have a vision and it’s, it’s, it’s a very, well, look at the roadmap, there is no way you’re going to accomplish all of that if you don’t build and, and iterate on something that keeps growing your you know, player base, customer base, whatever you want to call it.
[00:25:25] So anyways, hopefully again, to me, the waiting period or the waiting time that we’re in is really just the, before we get something out there that really is focused on not the diehards, but things to bring people in. And then that should reunite the community ring night, obviously the interest in the game and cause that positive feedback loop.
[00:25:44] So I’m going to just wrap it up there because that was rambling, but you know, That’s all I thought about this week. So anyway, so to wrap this up, thanks again for listening. If you’d like to be a guest on this, definitely still looking to do that. So community members builders that are still left IP builders and obviously I’d love to talk to any of the team though.
[00:26:02] Again, I’ll be focused on beginner topics. I’m not into the cutting edge you know, newest thing or what’s the biggest debate, but you know, what Really can form content that would really be interesting to beginners because I really enjoyed that content when I was first introduced to it. And you know, be nice to refresh some of that.
[00:26:21] Have a list of what those cool things were, but again, some of them were not really focused on that. And then lastly, just total self promotion. Again, if you’re interested in Star Atlas merch, love you to go to my merch store at intergalacticgear. com. Please fill out the merch survey. If you really want a coffee mug, please go ahead and buy that.
[00:26:38] I guess it’s a U S only, but and then again, I am trying to get a group of people together who are Solo, startless gamers aren’t looking to join a guild, but still want to hang out with some people and create our own community, our own platform that’s more focused on that. We all live busy lives.
[00:26:55] And so you know, you might not be able to chat, but you want to contribute. So asynchronous communication, get email alerts for things you’re interested in. And, you know, within that community develop some different content and things like that. It will be paid. Just be upfront about that. That’s to offset the cost of the software and cost of me maintaining it and monitoring it.
[00:27:14] So anyway, so that’s it. Hope you enjoyed this. If you didn’t, that’s okay. Hope you want to try the next one. Anyways. So again, this is Matt with Intergalactic Carrot. Hope you have a great week ahead.