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
Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Listen on Google Podcasts
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 65. All articles or videos mentioned can be found on my website at intergalacticherald. com. Please look for News Recap 114. So it was another waiting week, I guess I’ll start cleaning it from Star Atlas.
[00:00:20] So not much to report, but I’ll go over a few things that AFIA put in their newsletter. Talk ever so briefly about the latest Atlas Peru, and then talk about my journeys playing Starbase last weekend. But before I get into that, just have a couple things about some of the Star Atlas projects I’m working on.
[00:00:35] The first is my merch store, Intergalactic Gear, intergalacticgear. com. I am now Claiming it’s officially open for business basically because I was able to finally have someone in this case beyond the rise and actually do a full test of ordering a product and having it shipped and even did a refund.
[00:00:53] So that wasn’t just me doing it on my computer. So anyway, so if you’re interested in a star Alice mug, which is my intergalactic. com. But if you’re not interested, I am interested in, if you would be willing to fill out a merch survey definitely now going to go back through the ones that have come in the past and I’ll feature ones looking for different merch to look to put on the store.
[00:01:14] So, and then the second thing is my what I’m calling a non guild guild, but basically it’s just a starless gamer community called intergalactic coalition. That’s at intergalactic coalition. com. This is a place where Gamers, Star Atlas gamers who are not interested in joining guilds, but yet still want to hang out with people and maybe not interested so much in the Star Atlas Discord.
[00:01:34] They want to keep up with conversations. I’m going to try to create a community for that. It’ll be based on a different platform, the Discord, so it’ll have things like threaded discussions. You can sign up for email alerts when people post on topics you’re interested in, things like that. So if you’re interested in that, it will be a paid community, partly to offset the cost of the software, but also to pay for some of the things I’m working on for it, please go to intergalacticcoalition.
[00:02:01] com. So let’s go ahead and get into the content, which again, like I said, kind of wasn’t much this past week. Not too sure if it’s Well, I’m not sure it wasn’t there. It just wasn’t much from the team. If you fun cracker does a great weekly newsletter. So definitely recommend signing, signing up for that.
[00:02:17] If you haven’t already, you can go to my website, find the link for the last one. So he also recaps kind of the week in review. I think it’s usually comes out at least my time around sometime on Monday. So he did Published some information that came out of the foundation room, which again, we’re not supposed to talk about unless the team allows us to.
[00:02:34] And so fun cracker, I think does a great service reaching out and asking for permission to do that. So a couple of things that he was able to share was one that on the crew cards, it was announced earlier that most of them would be the mud characters. So the human characters, but after a lot of the community wanted the other two, the oysters and the only, so the.
[00:02:55] Robots and the aliens that they’re going to make sure to, I think, give you a choice when you want to open it so you can pick which of the three factions. However for the non mud crew cards, there will just be placeholder art because again, to do one is hard enough to do three is three times as much.
[00:03:14] So at some point those will be updated with actual Official art, whatever that means. I guess the image of the, the crew he also mentioned that this is going to be the same for the ship components. So again, everything’s getting quote unquote placeholder art, which is again, fine, I mean, you’re still owning the object.
[00:03:29] It just, you know, again, it takes a lot of time for the different graphic designers and artists ship designers, all that stuff to get all that things ready. So so that’s fine. But just as an aside, I was kind of thinking, well, we’re going to What’s the rush? I mean, are we going to be able to exchange components in the marketplace?
[00:03:46] You know, are we going to be able to increase our components on our ships through crafting? Yeah. So, again, maybe this is all coming in part of a larger plan, but I’m like, okay, so I got a component to my ship now. I’m not sure what that really does because it doesn’t seem to have any impact yet in the things we can do.
[00:04:03] But again, maybe this is all building up for the release of the new version of the showroom that will be the public release, or maybe there’s this future Sage star based functionality. So anyways, we’ll see, excuse me. And then the other thing that was interesting is fun cracker got permission to publish another community members question in the foundation room, and this was Witticus, who’s one of the, uh, metaverse nomads.
[00:04:28] So we know from past metaverse nomad shows, there’s been a lot of things about what’s the intent of gameplay, which is, I think, pretty interesting. Kind of the title of that post. And so if you want to read it again, funcracker has in his email, it’s a question from him to Michael Wagner, the CEO. And Mike Wagner did respond back relating to some of the issues.
[00:04:48] Now just going to give a couple of thoughts on Wagner’s response, not the larger issue, but just sort of what he is because as through us in his podcast for a while, you know, I’m kind of much more of the quote unquote gamer, maybe small gamer or small fleet, definitely not. focused on guild issues and politics and things like that.
[00:05:06] So one thing that Wagner did say is that the team is aware of issues related to the small asset holders. And I did find it interesting that he called them asset holders and not gamers. I’ve always thought of us as small gamers, but again, it is got, Star Wars does have economic criteria, or you know, aspects, so that’s fine.
[00:05:24] But I just found that interesting. I’m not sure if that was an intentional thing that he talked about, small asset holders. But he then mentioned later that, again, the gameplay today is economic centric. So, again, asset holders, economics, kind of all make sense. But I thought it was really insightful that he did mention, I think At least to me anyways, this sort of is a very definitive statement as far as people are saying, well, the game is, well, let me back up.
[00:05:50] I think most people would agree that cheating in games Yeah, not sure in life, but definitely in games, you know, if you’re cheating at checkers, you know, it takes away from it You know, there’s rules and you can still have fun playing within the rules and trying your best to win but what make michael wagner mentioned in his response was that some people will play in their own Best self interest and actually I read it a few times like yeah, duh I mean if i’m playing monopoly of my sister when I was a kid I mean, I wasn’t trying to make sure she had a good experience.
[00:06:21] I mean i’m trying to beat her now again as a father with a young child, that’s that’s a little different but two siblings. No, you’re definitely trying to beat your Beat your sibling. So so yeah, obviously there but I also was thinking in the broader scope of how I was thinking about my gameplay style and I guess at the end of the day, I wouldn’t have called it my own best self interest.
[00:06:43] But yeah, I guess I want to play a game. I want to develop some resources. I want to do what I want to do. And I want to go where I want to go. And I wasn’t like anti the rest of the game playing community, but it’s kind of like the same thing within real life. Sure. I guess I care about my neighborhood or I care about my city or I care about my state or country or something like that.
[00:07:02] But, and I want to be, you know, certain, you know. Not character, but I’m trying to think just who I am and what I stand for, I guess, to use the marketing term, what’s my brand look like? You know, I want to have some, some of that and, and people could have different ways of looking at it. But again, I’ve always said that.
[00:07:21] Star House to me is a game. Sure. It’s got some components of the real world, but I don’t want to deal with stress and working and feeling like a job and something like that. But again, wrapping this back to the point, I guess I am looking to play Star House in my best self interest. So I, I. I guess I really don’t fault anybody else, but I think the real biggest takeaway is that’s how the team sees it to that.
[00:07:42] There’s always going to be some people. And so again, there’s nothing wrong with altruism trying to do the best for everyone and all that. And that’s great. But on the other hand, this system isn’t being designed that that is the primary focus. Or even the minor focus. It’s just not what they’re designing for.
[00:07:57] They’re designing a game, an economy, it works, and, and things like that. So, Michael Wigner left with a kind of legal speak of, Nothing currently is in violation of the terms of service. Which, again, I know why he’s saying that, because that’s sort of the thing that everybody falls back on is, Well, is it in the terms of service?
[00:08:14] And we’ve talked before about this related to bots and automation when gameplay. And again, I think, The team, the community, the game itself is still working through these things. And that ends on the last thing that I think Mike Widener’s reply had was that everything just needs time. And I think, again, that goes back to, even though I’m saying, Hey, we’re still in a waiting period.
[00:08:34] The waiting period is because the team is building things and that’s the time they need to take to build things. So, you know, they’re not going to be addressing every little thing at every single time. They’re moving forward with their vision again, and we can look at the roadmap. It’s, it’s very well laid out again.
[00:08:51] And so I think, you know, all that, yeah, the team needs more time for things. So anyways, if you’re interested in Wagner’s response, again, check out, if he has a past newsletter, link to that is in my news recap, number 114, if you go to my website, intergalacticherald. com. So the last thing the Atlas Brew did occur.
[00:09:10] Again compliments to the community team for having that as a regular thing on Wednesday. Sort of becoming a nice, uh, tradition to listen to that on Friday night when I’m kind of putting together my list. So that’s great. They talked about different gameplay modes that could occur within Star Atlas.
[00:09:25] I’d say this was more of a, what do they call it, theory crafting, where they’re just kind of, you know, Hey, this could be cool or that could be cool and let the team or sorry, let the community throw out ideas. There was one member of, I think the game design team, but again, still always have a hard time keeping names straight within the team.
[00:09:42] But anyway, so I think it was a great thing, but yeah, nothing no announcements or anything like that. Just a way for the community to hang out and chat, which again was the original intent of the Atlas Brew. So, so that’s really much everything from the Star Atlas side. But last weekend I finally did.
[00:09:56] Get make some time to play star based. So what I decided to do on my own place playing was kind of first just treat it like labs just to figure out the new interface and after a bit, I guess it seemed familiar, but it was still hard to get used to everything. Cause you click here and then this comes up and how do you pick something?
[00:10:16] But again, that’s just user interface. It’s new. There was no tutorial, so you kind of just have to hunt around trying to figure it out. So oh, and definitely it works better on a bigger screen. It was started on my laptop and then moved to my big screen desktop. And yeah, definitely needs a bigger screen.
[00:10:31] So but that was fine. One thing that was a little annoying, but I kind of just forgot about him was the whole idea of cool down. So, you know, when you do Not really mining per se. I think that had a cool down, but definitely warping or sub warping has time. And I was kind of like, why? I mean, again, I was trying to get into something not, and I got to wait 60 seconds.
[00:10:52] And again, I was just testing out one little ship. So maybe a bigger fleet would have more or less cool down, who knows. And I was like, why is this here? Cause I was again, starting to think and I’ve been actually seriously thinking this is like, maybe I should just pick up another game. I think I mentioned last thing.
[00:11:08] One of my RTS is company of heroes version three had come out a year ago and it came on sale on steam. So I was like, Oh, maybe I should just buy that and play that. And I realized there’s absolutely no cool downs in a real time strategy game. But then it dawned on me yeah, of course we have to have cooldowns because if we didn’t and everything’s on the blockchain and the whole idea of the game is, what is that word?
[00:11:32] Compose ability that anybody could build their own interface on top. Yeah. If there wasn’t cooldowns, I mean, somebody could literally zoom around like really fast, so I get that. However, it kind of feels like the. You know, actually, I’m sorry, I just realized. Yes, the cooldowns are so people can’t manipulate the game, but I shouldn’t think of them as cool downs.
[00:11:56] I should think of them, well, it doesn’t, you can’t instantaneously move through space. I hadn’t thought about that until just now. So mining takes time, but you kind of intuitively figure that out because you have to transfer the resource to your cargo hold. I didn’t, yeah, I shouldn’t have thought of that.
[00:12:11] I kept thinking it was cooldown, but really it’s the travel distance, and distance takes time. I mean, if I want to drive to the store, it’s going to take time. If I bike to the store, it’s going to take more time, because I can travel at a different speed. Oh, yeah, I hadn’t thought about that. Well, anyways yeah, I guess then that does make sense.
[00:12:25] I don’t know, maybe it was just, again, it should have been time to warp, but anyway, it doesn’t matter. I just wrote it down, and now it totally makes sense, so. Anyway, so I did two gameplay actions. One was just back to SDU scanning because they said, Oh, it’s going to be better. Now, moving from one block at a time to one star base, I found no SDUs.
[00:12:46] Now again, I was scanning with one ship, so maybe not, but yeah, that wasn’t very enjoyable. Also, like, again, 60 seconds between each jump, but that’s fine. I did mine resources that went fine. Again, it was a small cargo hold, so I didn’t did do this, the warping, which of course is the quicker one. And then once I got to the one star base, do the mining, I sub work back.
[00:13:07] So, you know, figured out all that stuff. I did earn some XP, so that was cool. I mean, just for the sake of experience points, which is what XP is. I did not learn, earn any LP. So lawyerly points. And I wasn’t sure why, but then later on I realized, I think those only come when you update the starbases, either upgrading them or upkeeping them, so I gotta do a little more reading on that to remember how LP works, but nevertheless played it interface, you know, could get used to it over time, the mining and scanning Loops were pretty much the same so but I didn’t get into crafting and I didn’t get into the star bases So those are the next couple things.
[00:13:45] I am however toying more with looking next at the Sly Labs Automation because again how it’s semi official that we can do it and I assume that because it came in Sage Labs is more related to scanning and Mining not sure if it has anything to do with star basis. So I guess in one sense, I’m not really appealed to the star base component yet, but that’s only because it’s new, it’s been a whole bunch of thoughts that it’s not quote unquote fair or whatever, especially it doesn’t work for small players.
[00:14:16] So again, there’s less incentive to try it out, but again, kind of interesting the automation, especially if I could get it set up to just automatically run kind of like a little bit like faction fleet, also be really curious to find out if you can earn more. some things than you can in Faction Tweet. So anyways, we’ll see got a three day weekend.
[00:14:34] So hopefully do a little more this weekend. So anyways, that’s it. Thanks again for listening again, not a lot news type of thing. But again if you but in so just a couple of things to wrap up again, if you’re interested in being a podcast guest, love to have guests on here, whether that’s community members other content creators Star Atlas employees, I’d love to have you on.
[00:14:51] We can either do an interview style or we can just talk about the news of the past week. Again if you want to check out my merch store, please do intergalacticgear. com. If you’re interested in a Star Atlas mug, please buy it. And again, hopefully over the next Or phase two now is where I’ll start putting some other products in.
[00:15:07] So if you go there and fill out the merch survey that’ll help me understand more what people are interested in. Also if you’re interested in a startless gaming community where you can hang out with other gamers, particularly people not interested in joining the guild, please go to intergalacticcoalition.
[00:15:22] com and fill out the interest survey there. Once you get enough people to justify the initial Cost of the software per month. I’ll look to kind of start putting some effort into that. So anyway, so that’s it. Hope everybody had a great week and star Alice and hope you have a great week ahead.
[00:15:37] This is Matt with Intergalactic
[00:15:38] Herald.
