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 the Intergalactic Herald. Welcome to my Star Atlas Week in Review podcast. This is podcast number 66. Any articles or videos mentioned here can be found on my website at intergalacticherald. com. Look for news recap 1 1 5, 115. So just a quick summary. Not much happening from Star Atlas team.
[00:00:19] So I’ll kind of do more of some my general thoughts state of Star Atlas and some of my journeys actually with Starbase. And the Sly Assistant. But before I get to that just a couple things about projects I’m working on. One my merch store, Intergalactic Gear, that’s at intergalacticgear.
[00:00:36] com, is open for business. However, I’m only selling one mug. I got all the technical things created, but which was a major milestone. But creating additional products is what we’re doing. It’s a different phase of the project, but I am, if you go to the website, intergalacticgear. com, I do have a merch survey, so that will help guide some of the products I’ll be putting up next as I you know, prioritize that.
[00:00:58] So again, please go to intergalacticgear. com. If you’re looking to buy a Star Ops mug, you can get one. Otherwise, please fill out the merch survey. And then also I am On the back burner, at least still interested in starting a paid Star Atlas community for gamers particularly people who don’t want to join a guild, so kind of think of this as a non guild guild if you want to, but it’s really a place for Star Atlas gamers to hang out and chat if they don’t want to stay in the main state Star Atlas discord.
[00:01:24] So I do have an interest survey up there to see if people are interested in this. Please go to intergalactic coalition. com and fill out that. So go ahead and get into the content again. As I mentioned, there wasn’t really anything major from the starless team this past week, and the star Atlas brew that occurred was more about community updates.
[00:01:41] So if you’re interested in hearing some other things other community members please do check that out. Again, you can go to my website, intergalacticherald. com. Look for news recap number 115 for that. So so anyways so just a couple of my Ramblings on kind of call this segment the state of star Atlas So I was doing some thinking about different things that came up and was a came up with this concept of kind of what are?
[00:02:07] the incentives to engage In Star Atlas. So again, as long time listeners know and anybody following Star Atlas, there’s a couple different things. There’s the marketplace, if you just want to buy and sell things, trying to get an arbitrage advantage there. Which again, I guess that’s a game, so if that’s your interest, go for it.
[00:02:29] But then there’s the UE5 version, the showroom. In fact I actually kind of Lost track of it or I haven’t lost track of it. It just hasn’t been much after the surge play In fact beyond horizon just did a video where he was Going through the small and extra small ships in the racing module and I kind of had it Oh, yeah, I’m supposed to be racing So again, one of the things on my long term list is to just check it out But again other things have come up and even game things.
[00:02:53] So but anyways there is the Browser based game, the Sage star based. And so I, over time mentioned that I do enjoy or have enjoyed real time strategy games. And so I was kind of thinking of the difference between star based and a real time strategy, because it has been mentioned, well, you know, this is our real time strategy version, but I’m like, it doesn’t really feel like the classic case of it.
[00:03:16] And, and the reason I ring that up, or the way I think about that is when you’re in an RTS, you’re really investing your time to play. So the resources. Are already in game. So you buy the game and that can gives you access to play it. So in the game, there are resources and I’ll just pick on Age of Empires as a classic RTS that maybe people have heard of.
[00:03:38] And so there’s things like food wood. And rock and gold, I think. Yeah. Stone. Yeah. And you go and harvest, those are your villagers do, and they bring them back to the town square. And then as you accumulate more of those, you can either train more villagers or you can trade those off and build things.
[00:03:56] Oh, and then from those things, say, for example, you build a barracks and you can train different soldiers or you build a stable and you can train Knights or something like that. So, but all of the resources are in game. You don’t need. To pay for anything other than just the game itself. Now star Atlas course is different in that where you have to buy something.
[00:04:16] Again, you could say this is the free to play, but again, you still need something. So you have to buy a ship and in that ship, you can go out and mine and maybe get some resource that’s in your craft, or you could go ahead and buy us claim stakes, and then you get the four main resources, the fuel, food, toolkits, and ammo.
[00:04:33] So, but again, and, and I guess you could say, well. They’re not apples and oranges comparison. Yeah, of course they’re not. But again, I’m just comparing it to a real time strategy. So the key, I think that’s the difference is the amount of assets has a direct relationship to the amount of resources you can obtain.
[00:04:52] And by this, I mean in Star Atlas. So if you have a small ship, you want to be able to gain small resources. If you have a bigger ship, you can gain more quantity of those resources. But in a real time strategy game. You are just investing your time. If you set up your villagers to go out, and you’re patient enough, and you defend your village, you can mine until those exhausts, until those resources exhausted.
[00:05:15] But and that’s more in the single player. I guess if you’re in the multiplayer one, I’m not really sure. I guess at some point you exhaust all resources, but you can always kind of expand the map and things like that. So, I guess we’re, this little thought was, so you do need to buy more resources to be able to, excuse me, you need to buy more assets, i.
[00:05:35] e. ships or claim stakes, to get more, enough resources to be able to engage those production cycles. So, you can get more resources in a real time strategy game by having more villagers, but the villagers come from the thing, so you can build up to it. So far at least. doesn’t seem like there’s a way to scale based upon growth.
[00:05:55] Now, again, that’s not saying you can’t do it, but in order to get another ship, you have to have Atlas or USDC. Well, if you’re paying more than that’s out of the game, if you’re trying to get Atlas, well, now you have to go through. And the present play game style is that you get Atlas from, Loyalty points and loyalty points come from only certain things.
[00:06:16] So again, it’s actually restricted the thing. And I know there’s lots of discussions within the Stardust community about our small players hindered by the current gameplay. Well, again, whether they are or not, it does feel like there will be you know, again, this is all we have. So, but I kind of was also thinking about all of this, comparing it to a real life economy, because we have been.
[00:06:39] told that Star Allies is trying to develop a virtual economy, not a game, but all, well, I guess a game, but also that there’s a virtual economy and that we can exchange what we find there for real money. So again, this is where the whole gaming metaphor definitely breaks down because this just hasn’t happened before.
[00:06:57] But In a real life economy, we are basically exchanging our time for money. We go to a job. And again, I would just stay in the employer, not if you’re starting your own business or, or, or something, but you know, whether you’re an employee or in the gig economy, say driving for Uber, you’re definitely exchanging your time for money.
[00:07:13] And that money that we get in return for that allows us to do the things we want to do or our needs. But at the end of the day, it’s all self serving. And the reason I bring this up is kind of the theme that’s been going on is like, are people currently playing the game in a quote, self serving manner?
[00:07:29] And as I mentioned last week, Michael Wegner kind of came out saying, well, yeah, duh. People are always going to be kind of self serving. And so, but I was kind of thinking about, again, in the real world, you know, there are definitely some community aspects. And again, I’m talking real world, not the game, real world.
[00:07:47] But. We all go to work as a single, yeah, maybe you have a family and so you’re, you’re partnering yourself or doing it for your family. But again, that’s still. close. I mean, I don’t know. Some people support their brothers and sisters or something like that, but you’re not necessarily going to work to then have money to give to your next door neighbor or something.
[00:08:10] And again, I’m, I’m being really simplified here because obviously there’s charity and not everybody has the opportunity to work. And, you know, but again, So, but basically this is where the government comes in to pay at different levels, local, state national, and our mechanism for that is that we pay taxes.
[00:08:30] So in that sense, we do have a role in the community aspects. Staying out of the politics. I mean, we all want firefighters, a dedicated team that if a house is on fire, they come. And. We don’t pay per fire. We pay into a collective pool that pays for it. Again, I’m not getting into, you know, our, our government’s funding public services, again, it’s complicated, but I’m just going with the idea again, paying taxes and, but taxes again, simplifying again, are sort of related to factors like income, so if you have more money or income, you pay more taxes and the smaller player.
[00:09:09] Or in this case, smaller person pays less. Again, I’m simplifying taxes. There’s much more con complicating all this, but what I realized, and again, I’m not saying that it’ll never happen because I think there’s been talk about this, but that’s. Not the type of system that’s in Star Atlas currently.
[00:09:25] So, you know, the large players are able to earn more, which again, large corporations earn more in real life. Small players earn, but there’s no kind of common thing we’re putting into, or in this case, that a larger player gets quote unquote taxed more than a smaller player. And there’s been some discussions about how that the one Common thing are Solana fees.
[00:09:48] And I’m still trying to figure out exactly how much those are occurring. Cause I’m still not a hundred percent sure. Cause some people say, well, if you do this, you’ll get your money back and things like that. Again, I’ve just not played Starbase enough to know all the ins and outs of this, so I just don’t have any practice or my own experience to do that.
[00:10:06] But we do know on the blockchain that a transaction, regardless of the amount inside of it is cost the same. So that is not a quote unquote scalable. To what you’re doing now, again, that’s not necessarily something Solana can do because again, they’re treating every transaction equally, but in Star Atlas, the game, those transactions, whether it be moving, warping, crafting, or whatever are treated the same.
[00:10:32] So again, these are just, you know, comparing this to the thing. So the next thought in this kind of, you know, kind of state of Star Atlas segment is in Starbase. So. Why do you even play it? And again, I’m slowly, or after I wrote all this, I actually did start playing, but what’s different about Starbase than Labs, the predecessor, was this concept of upgrading, upkeeping the Starbases.
[00:10:58] But I like, well, why? I mean, what’s the benefit to me? And again, I’m not trying to say this is self serving, but again, going back to my case, Comment about the real world. I, if I’m going to do something, I want something back. And this is, I think the thing that’s missing is if I were to help with upkeep, I put some food in, maybe I get something, but it’s not equivalent to the time or the effort that I put into it.
[00:11:23] So so anyways, that’s on the upgrading. Now the upkeep is so we can crap. But again, just this last week, the team came out, well, we’re going to change that. So, you know, guess why matter? But On that same thing, I still go, why are we even crafting anything? What is the benefit of building up now? You could say, well, if you wanted to go get biomass and then craft at the food and food is what you use to find your ships.
[00:11:47] Okay. That makes perfect sense. But when we get into these more complicated things I don’t even know what they are cause I just have no reason to figure them out. They don’t go anywhere. Now, again, I know long term they might actually do something in this case. I believe necessary to help upgrade.
[00:12:02] The star bases, but again, why do I need to upgrade them when I have the central space station? So again, trying to wrap all this back up to my original comment, our original statement was, what’s the incentive to engage? And I’m just not seeing those incentives yet to play Star Atlas. So is it fun? I mean, that could still be an incentive.
[00:12:22] We’ll see. Gotta try it. And I could, I’ll talk about that shortly. Is it entertaining? I don’t know. I compared other forms of entertainment. I mean, scrolling through social media, you get something watching TV, you get something in a book, you get something clicking and moving things. Yeah, I’m not, I’m not calling that entertainment.
[00:12:40] And then the ultimate one that lots of people talk about is can you earn, earn income? Cause again, that’s sort of been the promise of the play to earn thing. And if the only thing that you can cash out for real income is Atlas, then You have to go through all these steps to get the LP, to then claim it, but you’re competing against the whales for it and all that.
[00:13:01] So, just to summarize. Yeah, I’m not really seeing a lot of the incentives to play. Now, you could say, but I still enjoy it. Well, that’s fine, and that’s to your benefit. But there is a lot, I think, of that incentives encouraged. And again, just to wrap this up, the incentive to go to work every day is not because you may enjoy the job, but you need the money because you need to pay your mortgage, or you need to pay your rent, or you need to buy food.
[00:13:26] So the incentive is, Basic needs, obviously a game doesn’t have those. So anyways, like I said, there wasn’t a lot of news from star house team. So I’m just a rambling. So moving on to the next section. So I actually did Finally get into some of the Starbase stuff. This time I actually was trying to figure out more about the upkeep.
[00:13:45] So I went ahead and transferred some food to the CSS and for that thousand food. I got a 3000 LP. So I’m like, oh, okay. So here’s where LP comes into play. So last time I was Time I figured out, you know, again moving a ship scanning for SDU’s, mining, crafting, those are all still the same mechanics that were in labs.
[00:14:05] The new one is this, you know, upkeep, which again is just food. So next I want to try to figure out upgrading, and I couldn’t figure it out, but then it realized that the central space station is already at the highest level, so there’s no reason to do that. So It obviously is upgrading the other starbases that exist within your sect, or in your faction, and that’s where the toolkits come in.
[00:14:25] But, as I just mentioned, I don’t know why I would upgrade another starbase If the central space station does everything I need. So again, the incentives to the faction, the incentives to rewards, entertainment, whatever, don’t understand why upgrading a star base makes any sense, except I would assume if I donated food and I get LP for upkeep of the star base, donate toolkits and upgrade to get more LP.
[00:14:56] Okay, cool. But the only purpose LP so far is to trade it into Atlas, which again, I guess, but goes back to the whole scale thing. Can, can a person with a small fleet or say the fleet I have actually you know, get something when the whales come in and do whatever they want to do. So again, just trying to figure things out, don’t have it all figured out, but I’m starting to understand a little more where this there’s some definitely community dissatisfaction with, with the gameplay now.
[00:15:25] Now that is cheating just the way it’s done. So anyways, I went ahead and tried to exchange that hundred, excuse me I just exchanged a thousand LP just to try. And I was projected to get 181 Atlas at the end of the epoch. And I have to guess I have to go back to claim that, but yeah, that, that’s nothing.
[00:15:47] So again, maybe it works when you scale up, but my, my little test was like, I don’t get it. So And then the last thing I did in to just figure out the game mechanics is I, I did the crafting. And so I just took some of the biomass that I had mine, just to prove I could, turned it into fuel.
[00:16:03] There was a fee it was 11 cents, USDC, I’m pretty sure. And I earned 1 XP for crafting, and I came out with, like, 46 food, so Yeah, I mean, 11, I mean, again, 11 cents is nothing, but considering that I didn’t do a lot. Yeah, I see where the scale has to be there to make this all kind of relate. So anyway, so just to summarize my thoughts on this one had to do still a bunch of the control F5 to refresh the screen to see the crafting activity starts.
[00:16:35] So again, still seems like there’s Solonic issues. But most of my transaction went through. So that was it. A improvement most of the fees of moving around and things like that didn’t seem too bad, but the crafting seemed pretty pretty tough. And again, if crafting is the only way you can or one, one of the mechanisms you can use.
[00:16:55] XP. Yeah, it didn’t seem to go enough. Overall, again, just not enough Atlas earned, though I didn’t check to see how much the food was worth on the marketplace. I know people are just mining resources and selling in the marketplace, which is fine, I guess. But seems like you want to stay in the game, not move out.
[00:17:11] Anyway, I don’t know. There’s almost too many things and too many variables, and I’m not The quote unquote spreadsheet gamer. So, but I did think, again, why go through all this work just during LATLIS? Again, not incentivized, didn’t have much fun. Again, for other people, this may be it. But I’m definitely struggling to find out a reason why I want to go into Starbase to just help with upkeep and upgrading where the other mechanisms, sure, I guess if I wanted to build up a surplus of resources for future game things, I, I guess, but again.
[00:17:44] This is just rambling. This doesn’t have any plans or things. So verify last topic. I did decide to switch gears and learn more about the Sly Assistant. So, if you haven’t heard about it before, one of the guilds, Sly, one of the people in their guild, Groove actually created an assistant that works inside of both the old Sage labs and now moved it forward to the star base and basically allows for automation.
[00:18:07] And again, if you’ve listened to me before, there’s a unspoken thing about automation that if it’s available to everybody, the team doesn’t seem to be against it. But if it’s manipulative and closed for just single people, then I guess they don’t do it. But again, it’s, it’s very vague. But. Apparently the Sly Assistant, as it’s called, has garnered widespread usage, everybody talks about using it, so it felt like, okay, finally, maybe I should go ahead and take a look.
[00:18:39] So the first thing I did is on their site, you can oh, and you can get some of these links if you go to the guide on my website, though I need to update that to make sure as I’m finding more things. So just real briefly for how to get installed. They have a readme file that has some information.
[00:18:54] I did watch some YouTube videos that Beyond the Horizon put out a few months ago that had to deal with it. Joined their Sly Discord and I found another guide, which was very helpful. So basically you go through, you install this browser, browser plugin called TamperMonkey. Then you can load the Sly Assistant scripts.
[00:19:13] So they’re just JavaScript. So they’re just code. And that, that’s it. So then I tried to get started and it just didn’t seem to be working. And again, I’m not saying the documentation is terrible, but again, there are people building it, YouTube videos. I mean, there’s no like step one, step two, step three type of thing.
[00:19:35] But after, as I look through the slide discord, apparently that day, Solana had a lot of issues. So just bad timing. So I just, I had fortunately already stopped for the night. So the next day tried it again and it seemed to be working. Then I started pointing out some of the settings ran for a while just to see what would happen.
[00:19:52] And really needed to get into that new guide. So that’s sort of where I ended it at that point. Just, you know, trying to get into it. So I’m going to still play a little more with the Sly Assistant. I’m well, one, both intrigued because I have an IT background. So some of this stuff seems very straightforward, not the, what it’s doing, but the process.
[00:20:11] So I’m just kind of curious about that. So anyway, so that’s pretty much it. Again it was another waiting week from the team, not much there. That was prudent, how much we’ve been told, next week, there might be an economy Atlas brew discussion. So that’ll be interesting. And crew cards are always on the horizon.
[00:20:29] So anyways just wrap it up. Thanks for listening. Again, if you’d like to be on this podcast, I’d love to have some guests. We could talk about the news the past week or to start us in general. Also interested in interviewing any Star Atlas builders, content creators, or anybody on the team. Again, if you’re interested in.
[00:20:44] Buying some Star Atlas merch, please go to intergalacticgear. com. Again, just have a Star Atlas mug presently, but I’m working on we’ll be working on adding some more products there. And please do fill out my merch survey, so that’ll help me know which products people might be interested in purchasing.
[00:20:58] And if you’re interested in joining kind of a non guild guild community of Star Atlas gamers who don’t want to join guilds but nevertheless still want to kind of talk about Star Atlas but don’t want to hang out in the Star Atlas discord, please go to intergalacticcoalition. com and fill out my interest survey and if we get enough people that are interested it will be a paid community that’s Partly to offset the cost of the software.
[00:21:20] The software is different than Discord. It allows for threaded discussions primarily as the primary method, excuse me, and email notifications. So if you like to follow a certain conversation, you can just click follow, and then you get an email when somebody does it. So it works much more asynchronously than the Discord chat.
[00:21:36] And you can come and go. And not have to constantly check. So anyways, pre goes to intergalactic coalition, if you’re interested in that, and that wraps it up. So thanks very much for listening. Hope you have a great week ahead. This is Matt with the Intergalactic Herald.
