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 the Intergalactic Herald. Welcome to my startless week in review podcasts. This is podcast number 68. All articles or videos mentioned can be found on my website, intergalacticherald. com. Look for news recap, 117, 117. So before I get started, just a quick summary of different things I’ll be talking about today.
[00:00:20] A couple of comments on some content creators that produce some things from Made me think about Star Atlas, so something from the Metaverse Nomad, something from Beyond the Horizon. Quickly talk about the past week’s Atlas Brew. Team talked a little bit about crew. And then I’ll continue with maybe a permanent segment now.
[00:00:40] Kind of my thoughts on the state of Star Atlas. And some of my journey playing Star Atlas. So. Before I get into that, just a couple of Stardust projects of mine that I want to make you aware of. One is my merch store, Intergalactic Gear, intergalacticgear. com. It’s finally open for business. I now have three products they’re still all one mug, but three sizes of the mug.
[00:01:01] So, slowly again building out the different products in there and learning the system. Now that I’ve got the e commerce set up, the taxes, shipping manufacturing, all that. Now I can actually start adding products. So I’m doing a little more of the kind of graphic design learning about some of the Star Atlas images we can use and figuring out how to put them on products.
[00:01:20] So anyways, please check that out at intergalacticgear. com. Again, if you’re not really interested in a mug yet, you can still go to that website, sign up for the newsletter there, and you’ll get direct announcements and promos and whatever comes out there. So intergalacticgear. com. My second project, excuse me, is my what I guess I’ll keep calling my non guild guild, which is more of just a place for kind of solo Star Atlas gamers who don’t want to join a guild, but yet still want to hang out with people and prefer not to be in the Star Atlas discord and looking for more of a community that’s much more fits perhaps your Lifestyle of getting email alerts when people post things subscribing to different threaded discussions that you’re interested in and kind of being able to keep up, but on your time.
[00:02:03] So please go to intergalacticcoalition. com and fill out the interest survey there. And once we get enough people I’ll start working on that community. So let’s get into the main content section. A few content creators pretty much the. Consistent ones, obviously. They keep promoting posting or doing some, some content creation each week.
[00:02:21] First one is Metaverse Nomads. If you haven’t checked them out, again, almost always have a link for them because they do a regular scheduled Sunday, well, I guess it’s Sunday my time, but Sunday kind of start out lists live stream on their YouTube channel that they do occasionally talk about other crypto games and do talk about the crypto space in general.
[00:02:38] They had an interesting discussion and it’s been a topic that I’ve been thinking about a lot over time is again this idea of a small player and again the real key is what is it? I mean, obviously being interested in the kind of solo gamers and things like that. I kind of think of us as small players in the fact that we’re not part of guilds, but there’s another way to look at it.
[00:02:58] And it’s definitely a monetary investment. And so what was interesting is the Metaverse Nomads went over some Athea dashboards that were actually produced, which are really great. Great analysis, but it was specifically about a small player. So the person that created the, if your dashboards actually went through the different game pay play options.
[00:03:16] So from scanning to mining, to crafting and the different chips and how they may have different return on investment, but I thought was really interesting was that person decided. And I never a hundred percent sure since it’s the guild’s dashboard that the starting point was 200. And I mean, you got to start somewhere, obviously, but that wasn’t really the number in my mind I had.
[00:03:41] And I think I’ve kind of posted maybe on some comments on YouTube that to me you know a video game gamer. You’ve got to look at things that have occurred in the past, and so whether you’re a PC gamer or a console gamer, the idea of kind of 60 bucks, at least on initial release, has been sort of an industry standard for many years.
[00:03:59] So I kind of think of, again, that’s the starting point of 60. Now again, not criticizing that they didn’t pick that number, that’s just the number I am thinking of. FYI, again, this is my, my chance to chat about what I think about Star Atlas. But what was very fascinating about the dashboards and the Metaverse Nomads brought this up too, was that most things are not profitable, especially due to the Solana fees.
[00:04:24] And this has become a reoccurring topic that people are mentioning more and more that because the fees to do the transaction, and again, almost everything within Star Atlas, so he’s sage. star based are transaction based, you know, move, dock, undock. Those fees are pretty much a fixed cost. And again, fix isn’t the right term because as we’ve been learning more and more about priority fees and the congestion, you might have to pay more just to make sure your transaction goes through.
[00:04:50] But I say in fixed cost is regardless of what you’re doing. So again, if you’re docking one ship or you’re docking a hundred ships, same fee, because you’re doing one command, i. e. dock. So if you’re a larger player, or I guess maybe start using the small, larger, if you have many ships that you’re doing a command for, the fee is a much, much smaller percentage than if you’re doing one ship, because the fee again is fixed.
[00:05:16] So you know, I think that’s a very good point to raise that. Yeah. A lot of this is fees. And again, we’ve, or I’ve had discussions or mentioned things about, well, why is everything on the blockchain? Regardless of how you feel about it, the team has definitely been about, and again, kind of reinforcing things I’ve mentioned the past of this compostability.
[00:05:37] Meaning since the entire game logic is on the blockchain, anybody can write something that takes advantage of it. And again, the perfect example in the short term is the Sly assistant, which again, there’s a phenomenal tool lots of kudos to the Sly Gill and specifically Groove who’s been making it, or he’s posting about making changes.
[00:05:57] Not sure if it’s again, one person or a whole bunch of people. So don’t exclude people. But Groove is the person that comes up when posting things like that. I mean, it’s a great tool. It’s awesome. It’s totally, it’s totally possible because the game logic is on the blockchain. So it seems like, again, this is the strategy and the goal of the development team, but we’re all.
[00:06:21] everything we do costs fees. So again, that is kind of the one of the things. Another point that was really, I think, insightful that was brought up, and I apologize, I again, never write down who says it, I just write down what was said on the Metaverse Nomad Show was a comment that had came up about, well, you know, and I think it was from the last Atlas Brew, which the economic team that just like any real economy, there’s going to be the haves and the have not, people have a lot of money and not.
[00:06:42] But I thought it was really mentioned that, This is a game. This is not the real world. I guess we kind of well, whether you agree or agree, disagree with econ, econ, no, economic inequalities in the real world. I mean, it exists. You don’t have to agree with it, but it does exist. A game is not the real world.
[00:07:03] It is a fictional or real world. creation that has been made. So why are there the have and have nots? And I thought actually that’s a really good point. And the outcome again was it that if sauna fees are going to be kind of a factor that there needs to be a way to balance this out for small players.
[00:07:18] And again, there are thoughts and ideas. But again, nothing we can do yet. But again, I thought those were really great comments. And again, if you haven’t, don’t listen to the Metaverse Nomads show. I do have a link to theirs, but you can subscribe to their YouTube channel. And if you’re in the right time zone for when they’re doing their live things they have a pretty good chat that goes on during the thing.
[00:07:37] So it’s a great, uh, thing that another community member puts out. So, Speaking of community members, I wanted to highlight Beyond the Horizon. He has started a star based video series, which is great. He did a one on Sage too. And as he starts the first videos, he mentioned some of the reasons why he’s waited a while, but really great that he’s starting that.
[00:07:57] He too, as he was going through different things about Starbase, saying it really isn’t For the small player. So again, common theme here, but one of the things he didn’t mention was some of the other gameplay modes that he’s discovered way to star based. And again there are ones that I too have not always thought about.
[00:08:13] So in addition to, you know, it can be in the game and do mining and do scanning. There are a lot of ways to use the marketplace with star base. And the one that he brought out that I hadn’t really thought of either was that you can actually go on the marketplace, buy something. Bring it into Starbase, just craft it.
[00:08:30] So again, I guess you could take a raw material and make it the, the, I don’t have all my terms right, but the material above. So perfect example, I guess you could buy hydrogen, move it into Starbase and craft it into fuel, and then go back to the marketplace and sale it there. So so, Hey, cool. Hadn’t thought about that.
[00:08:50] That so again, there’s lots of different ways you can engage, but he did bring up some of the Components that are higher up in the crafting tree. There’s not a lot of marketplace Liquidity which again, I’m not really a financial person definitely not a crypto financial person But I think what’s that’s being referred to is there needs to be in a market situation enough buyers and sellers that there’s You You put something there, somebody wants it.
[00:09:19] And again, if nobody wants it, it doesn’t matter if you want to sell it, nobody’s buying it. So there’s not liquidity. Again, not sure I got that financial terms all right. But anyways, there it is. So anyways, it was kind of interesting to hear that. And I think he’s on episode two of that. So again, if you go to YouTube search for Beyond the Horizon.
[00:09:35] Or you can find the links to the first two videos in my News Recap at Intergalactic Herald. Look for News Recap 117. You can find links to those. So as is tradition, the Atlas Brew occurred on the Wednesday of the past week. This one, the the team there went over basically how the crew, which is upcoming, will have RG, sorry, RPG
[00:10:00] aspects. So how in a lot of RPGs, RPG games, you basically level up your characters. And so you can specialize in different and again, the term they use was aptitudes and they had a bunch of them listed there. So, and they basically were going through what the skill tree is for all of those. So if you’re interested in that, check out the Atlas Peru, a few other people have posted the document.
[00:10:23] I don’t think the team actually posted it outside of the breweries. I haven’t seen like a medium article or anything, so I don’t have a link to share there, but You should be able to find it. Now, as anyone who’s listened to me for a while knows, kind of, I’m excited, but, again, I feel like we’re in a waiting period, and that the team has a Past habit of hey, we got this thing and then nothing and I hate to say it But that’s what this is to me that this is already cool.
[00:10:50] It’s very interesting. I mean like I mean, I’ve never played in our RPG before so Can’t say I have a lot of background at it. As I mentioned, I’m more of a RTS type of person a little shooter Well, I liked them much more when I was younger and could do better at them, but RTS is definitely what I am now.
[00:11:10] So the idea of the crew though is cool because again, it relates to the ship. And what was great, both Metaverse Explorer and Beyond the Horizon did their thoughts on it. And what I didn’t catch in the brew was that the crew’s aptitudes will impact the ships that they’re in. Which is again, cool.
[00:11:28] That’s, that even has more things, and now I can kind of see where, how these have real life. ramifications within the game. Again, as I’ve mentioned before, I was always thinking of Star Atlas as a game specific, excuse me, a ship specific game, but it was mentioned a few months back that that might have been just because those are available, but that Star Atlas might be much more of a crew focused thing, where you have your crew who represent you, and you level that up, and that’s your, A custom profile picture, and then you get into a ship or something.
[00:11:57] So again, we’ll see how this all plays out. But, you know, the fact that the crew impact what the ship can do, i. e. if you’re a minor crew, your ship gets maybe mining improvements. Cool. So all this sounds interesting, but back to the negative part. Is, okay, cool, but when are we going to get engaged with this?
[00:12:17] You know, in the short term. There was even mentioned in it that there’s some aspects. It’ll be for the UE 5 game and then we sum for the Sage game, which now I’m still confused, isn’t Sage moving to DUE 5? So, again, it doesn’t really matter. We’ll see what happens. But again, it doesn’t feel like there’s anything going to come of this aptitudes anytime soon.
[00:12:37] And we also know historically things always seem to change. So, kind of interesting, but after I kind of, you know, five minutes, 10 minutes of hearing about it. And then they continue to go through all the aptitudes for the next, say, 45 minutes is kind of like, yeah, I’ll listen to the end just to make sure I hear it all, but whatever.
[00:12:56] So again, sorry to put a little negative spin on it, but again, nothing’s happening anytime soon. So. Anyway, so moving into the kind of final two things sort of my Star Atlas or state of Star Atlas. So one thing as I mentioned in the last couple ones, I have been getting into Starbase now because the Sly Assistant tool really makes it something I can do.
[00:13:17] So it was cool learning the tool. It’s a great tool. Enjoying it because in fact, I’m recording this and my laptop next to me that I’m using for this is mining hydrogen or yeah, mining. So, and it’s been working for like, I don’t know. Day and a half or something. They hit my goal. Well, I’ll get to that in a second.
[00:13:33] But anyway, so it’s, that’s cool and still have to figure out how it works and the sly assistant anyway. So anyway, so that’s really great. But one thing I realized as I went through my first goal of mining iron ore, that It actually takes three resources to get one resource. So to break this down, and this is where I’m trying to learn the terms a little better, at least how they’re listed in the marketplace.
[00:13:55] So we started out with the first four resources, which were food, fuel, ammo, and toolkits. And they’re called consumables in the marketplace. Okay. So I, Well, in my marketing and different things in information management, things like that, terms are important. So, I’m hoping somebody picked a term and thought about it than just whatever came to their mind.
[00:14:17] So, make an assumption. But, anyways, those are consumer. So, we consume them. Okay, cool. Consume fuel, consume food, consume ammo, consume toolkits. Awesome. But here’s where it gets kind of weird to me. But in the marketplace or something called raw materials, and these are things like the hydrogen I mentioned, like the biomass, but to get a raw material, so just to guess mine it.
[00:14:45] So let’s, let’s just pick on not hydrogen. Cause it was at the center of space. Let’s click on the iron ore. Cause I had to move one, one star base out. So to get to that, you actually have to spend three resources. IE consumables. So I had to get fuel to send my ship out to the other star base. And then I had to pay or use ammo and food to mine it.
[00:15:08] And then obviously fuel to come back. Now, technically I could have crafted it at that star base, but again, that’s not really the point because here’s my real point is so this was on our, actually, let’s go back to biomass. I think that’s not at the central space station. So biomass is one of the raw materials, but to mine biomass, you need food.
[00:15:29] Okay, cool. That’s how the game mechanic works, but biomass is crafted into food. So I got to use food to get not food, but to get biomass to make food. And then I guess I can reuse that food to get more biomass to make into food. That doesn’t make sense to me. And, and I guess the problem I have, I’m realizing is the raw materials make sense, but they should all be the same at the same level.
[00:16:01] Now I get the idea of a craft and train, you move up to things that are beyond, but the raw materials at the bottom, then the consumer boys are the next level up and then above that are components. And I think one other term I can’t remember, again, I’ve got to that. So I don’t know. Okay. Kind of logically to me seems out of, out of whack.
[00:16:20] And again maybe I’m going back to my ROTS where you had someone, and again I’ll keep picking on Age of Empires, you had a villager who goes out and farms and brings food back to the, to, Place where you store the food, and then from that food you could train soldiers, or horses, or whatever. Well, I guess stables require, or to build a building you needed wood, so then you send your villager out to get wood, and the wood be, can be used to build a stable, which then can be used to train a knight, which required food.
[00:16:53] And maybe someone there was metal, but whatever. But again, it’s kind of, you start at the bottom, you work your way up. Well, here, the bottom is below the thing we need. And so again, it seemed off now from a technical standpoint, I kind of like the idea that biomass becomes food and food becomes some other thing on the crafting tree.
[00:17:14] I mean, that, that all makes sense. But the fact that you have to get You have to consume to fly your ship. So, again, maybe part of this is I’m not a game designer, so I don’t really know, but the idea that you have to have food to mine biomass to then craft the food, I don’t know, just didn’t make sense to me.
[00:17:32] So, I’m sure I’m just not thinking about this enough, and maybe in the big picture it all makes sense, but I was like, basically what it came down to, to get one of the raw materials, I gotta spend three things, food, ammo, and fuel, and all I get out of it is biomass. So, that sounds Well, I’m putting a whole lot into the system to not get out the thing and then that thing is even equal level.
[00:17:56] So, I don’t know. That’s just what I thought about. I wrote it down. Now you got to listen to it. There you go. So, final section just kind of sort of where my journey. So yeah, I’m playing Starbase with a Sly assistant. I’ve been figuring out all the mining and scanning, transport, how to set up the configuration.
[00:18:14] Actually, I saw posted in the Sly discord that One of the programming logics that’s in there is that Assistant will never do anything unless you specifically tell it to do it, which makes a lot of sense. So figuring out exactly how much resources to put in to mine something, or really transports the heart problem.
[00:18:35] Mining and scanning, you just have to have enough resources in it It goes and does the mining, does the scanning. And then when it runs out of resources, it goes back to the star base, fills up again. So it’s really more of struggling with the supply chain issues of getting the transport working, which is moving those resources.
[00:18:51] So the food, fuel and ammo from the central space station to the star base, it has the resource I want to mine. And then my scanning for SDUs are kind of around it. And then taking back the mine resource back to the star base and kind of getting that supply chain of the transport going. So Partly I don’t think, well partly I was learning, but partly I wasn’t documenting what I was doing.
[00:19:11] So the next time I’m gonna do better. So going forward I’m gonna, what I decided to do is I was going to try to get a million of each of the raw materials. So I already did iron ore as my kind of first test. Then because hydrogen is at the central space station, you only have to do a mining loop. I’ve been running that for the last day and a half and already over that goal.
[00:19:32] And then the next one I’ll go. I don’t know, pick whatever’s next on my list, but I made a list of all of them. So I got that. So, but what I’m going to do differently this time to try to bring back a little both internal statistics and I’m more than happy to share here if I make coherent sense of what I try to do is start out with a set amount of fuel, food, and ammo.
[00:19:53] I’m thinking that one’s going to be like 300, 000. Again, I’m just picking these numbers out of thin air for the test because I wasn’t paying attention on the last one. And also soul, so Solana. So I kept adding more each day partly because I was still wanting to be cautious because of the the freelancer.
[00:20:13] What’s it called? Yeah. Freelancer slash handler. Anyway. So within that, you can Delegate. I like delegate better. You can delegate your fleets, your ships, your assets. I guess only it’s the ships. So, so I assistant, you’re only delegating ships. You’re not delegating resources. Is that true? Yeah. You put the resources in the star base in star based in your wallet.
[00:20:38] And then the sly assistant just controls your fleets, which are composed of ships. Yeah. So I guess, I guess it doesn’t have access to anything beyond ship commands. And thought about that. So don’t quote me on any of that, but anyways so I’m gonna start out with a set amount and the soul. Well, anyways, you have to put soul in your.
[00:20:56] Freelancing wallet and I like that idea because then it obviously can only use as much as you put in. So I think I saw one person posting the slide discord a while back that they’d ate up a whole bunch of their soul and they don’t know why. And I was like, eh, you know, cause. That’s real money. Or it has monetary value and like the other ones, well, I guess they all have monetary values, but you know what I mean?
[00:21:18] So closer to actually getting money. So set out with a certain thing, three to 300, 000, maybe more. I was thinking of starting with 0. 05 soul just to see, cause it seemed like that’s how much I needed to get the other million. But anyways, the point being is having those fixed. at the beginning and not going to add anything.
[00:21:38] I can disrupt the sly assistant run. Hopefully without inputting more initial resources. Now, again, I may have the, the configuration off and it doesn’t work right or something like that, but that that’s okay. This hope to refine this for each raw material. And then when it’s runs out of one of those, then I stop and I’ll see how much I mind and how many S to use.
[00:21:58] I can have got. And then I can do a calculation about, well, how much did I invest and how much did I return? And then if I’m not at my goal of a million raw materials, I can add a little more to whatever is low. And that’ll help me understand for the future. But again, I thought it was really good. If you have a fixed, exact fixed amount at the beginning, you should be able to calculate based on.
[00:22:18] whichever one runs out first, how much you gained, and then you can calculate, oh, was it worth it? And again, that’s, I guess, in the back of my mind, I’m trying to figure out what is your investment in consumables and sole, so fees, to get back a raw material. So anyways, that’s my goal for the week ahead.
[00:22:39] We’ll see how it goes. And that wraps up everything I had to talk about. So just to finish again, if anybody’s interested in being a guest on this podcast, definitely open for any community members. Other content creators happy to do interviews. We could just talk about the week of news in the past.
[00:22:54] Any team members love to get that. If anybody in the economics team, I’d love to do a second part of like a beginning guide to economics and Star Atlas from a Star Atlas team member. So nothing, nothing about what’s going on. Nothing about problems. Just, just want to. You know, maybe even start with the white paper and just talk about the economic parts of the game from the beginner’s perspective, who’s just coming in.
[00:23:16] So anyways, open invitation to any team member. And then again, just my two Star Atlas projects. My first is my merch store. Again, if you’re looking for a Star Atlas mug, please go there. Otherwise I do still have my merch survey up. So that’ll help me figure out which other ones you might be interested in.
[00:23:31] That’s at intergalacticgear. com. And then if you’re interested in a community. of other Star Atlas gamers people who don’t want to join a guild, don’t have time to hang out in Discord every day, but yet still want to be in conversations and talk to other people. I am looking to create a paid community, and part of the reason for paid is because I need some funding for the software I want to run.
[00:23:51] It’s not free like Discord, it is a paid solution, threaded discussions. Email alerts anyways, things like that, please go to Intergalactic Coalition and sign up for that interest survey. Once I get enough people to kind of offset the initial cost of the software, definitely looking at building that.
[00:24:08] So anyways thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed my ramblings of this week. Again, this is Matt with the Intergalactic Herald. Have a great week ahead.
