In this episode, we recap the latest news of Star Atlas from the past week.
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We are launching a Star Atlas merch store. Please check it out at Intergalactic Gear.
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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 90. Any articles or videos mentioned can be found on my website at intergalacticherald. com. Please look for news recap number 139. So just a quick recap of things we’ll be talking about today.
[00:00:18] One some interesting, well, I shouldn’t say interesting, but better in depth analysis and mentioning about, uh, different things coming out in Star Atlas from the AFIA newsletter. And then also this past week, the Star Atlas brew took on a different style, I guess. They’re calling it a brew shop, where they were talking about the Star Path, the referral program.
[00:00:38] So I’ll talk about those two things, and then I’ll do my kind of thoughts on the state of Star Atlas and my journey playing Star Atlas. But before I get to that, just a couple Projects I’m working on within Star Atlas. One is my merch store, which is at intergalactic gear. That’s intergalactic gear.
[00:00:52] com is open for business. Just selling mugs at the current time, but we’ll be trying to bring out other products. But if you do go there, I do have a merch survey. I’d love to fill that out and provide any feedback on things you may. be interested in purchasing rated Star Atlas. And then also I have my I guess we’ll just call it a community of gamers that are not associated with guild.
[00:01:13] So kind of call it a non guild guild, but fits in with the Star Atlas deck concept, but anyways, it’s called Intergalactic Coalition. It’s a place for gamers of Star Atlas want to hang out that aren’t going to join guilds or don’t find necessarily the Star Atlas discord, the best place to kind of chat about Star Atlas.
[00:01:28] Partly because again, it’s. a chat as opposed to just having discussions. So the community will be more along the lines of threads and you can get email alerts when things occur occur. So you can kind of check at your own pace instead of having to go in when and just watch all things go.
[00:01:44] So anyways, that’s called Intergalactic Coalition. Again, you can find that at intergalacticcoalition. com. Do have an interest survey there. So if you’re interested in that kind of gaming community please go check it out and fill out my interest survey. So as I mentioned, there’s two kind of mean Topics of this past week one the AFIA newsletter, which Funcracker writes was really great.
[00:02:03] He did go a little more in depth with some of the things that are coming out partly this was related to the, so, two weeks ago economic forum that the Star Atlas team does. As I mentioned on my last podcast, I Didn’t really pay much attention to it because I was multitasking. I actually did go back and we’ll re listen to it again.
[00:02:22] And yeah, I was just distracted so things weren’t there. But there was a lot of great information there. But the AFIAN newsletter, which again, you can find a link to that in my my website for in News Recap number 139. Flynn Cracker did a great thing kind of going through that and listing it out.
[00:02:36] And maybe I’m just kind of the person to that. better to comprehend something when I’m reading it as opposed to listening. Yes, it could have something to do with listening to it 2x, but again, just whatever. Anyways so a couple of things that came out of that related to some of the upcoming things.
[00:02:50] One but again, most of this, I think again, all relates back to the economic form. One was the local markets, which I’ve been kind of saying I’m kind of very interested in. One was in Indication that they will be accessible on chain. So I think what that means is not that you can pull Something out of the local market directly in your wallet But I think more that you can do buy and sell orders because it’s on the blockchain.
[00:03:15] So This could could I guess on one side provide more botting, but it also maybe allows people more Accessibility so you don’t actually have to be in the game sage to look at something, but it’ll be on the chain So, I think overall this is a positive, but again, I guess we’ll have to wait and see when everything’s kind of said and done.
[00:03:34] The other interesting point that was brought up again from the economic forum was that the OTC, over the counter trading volume, at least Chris, the head of economics, thought that will go down because there’s less incentive, or excuse me, the cost to move things out, because ultimately still to do a Person to person trade you still have to get him into your wallets where now there’s just so many more places you can trade within the sage game So he predicted said that he thinks it’ll go down.
[00:04:05] So again, I’m Not really into the training as much, no pros or cons, but again I guess one downside of the over the counter trading OTC trading is the fees within the game aren’t tracked, which of course some people like that, because again, anything you can do to lower fees is good, but again, it doesn’t kind of go back into supporting and helping to pay for the game.
[00:04:25] So I kind of get that too. So the was mentioned was that the, Chris did say that LP does have some downsides. And again, I, Getting the impression more and more that the reality is finally kind of being spoken that maybe the LP system just wasn’t a good but what Chris mentioned was And again, I want to give credit to Ify and Funcracker for writing all this down, because it can make, for me at least, it was way easier.
[00:04:51] Anyways, the downside of LP was that if you add more players, i. e. people playing and engaging, say, to earn LP, you actually decrease the earnings. So, there is sort of a counter. method that more players is actually than bad. So, but what, again, it goes back to, I think, the bigger picture, which is there’s a lot more opportunities and things to engage in that have economic impact.
[00:05:14] So whether that’s local markets still LP, the new RFRs, which I actually learned what those were. And I request for Something, ah, I should have wrote it down. Anyways, doesn’t matter. We just call them RFRs. Anyway, so that’s that was nice to hear kind of the realization, or finally spoken that, hey, this thing didn’t go as we wanted and we’re going to change, which again is perfectly fine.
[00:05:35] They’re developing the game in public. Makes total sense. And then speaking specifically about RFRs, it was noted again there’s a clear, there’s a clear relationship to reward. So again, you just craft one of them, and again you get Atlas. So it’s, it’s a one to one ratio. No kind of dynamic nature to it.
[00:05:51] So again, I think that was interesting. The other thing that I didn’t pick up, even on my second listening that Funcracker did, was that the RFR crafting will be at some bases, but the selling of those RFRs will be at other star bases. So in reality you have to move the RFRs around Within your faction.
[00:06:11] So again, that’s a very interesting gameplay that, you know, craft here. Do you want to spend the time? Do you want to just sell them on that local market and somebody else? Wait, sorry, misspoke. You craft it, but you can’t sell it there. So you have to move it someplace else. So, huh, I hadn’t thought about that.
[00:06:30] So if you’re crafting, you can’t sell it for someone else to move it. So you have to move it yourself. So crafting and movement. are tied together. Okay. I’m not a hundred percent sure I’m getting all this, but again, just lots of more nuances, which again, I think is great for developing further the different parts of the economy in SAGE.
[00:06:48] So anyway, so those were just some things, but again, if you want to read it all in depth, definitely check out my newsletter. On my website, IntergalacticHerald, news recap number 139, and there’ll be a link to the AFIA newsletter, so you can read that for yourself. So the other event that occurred this past week was the Atlas Brute, but it was changed in the style.
[00:07:05] They still did kind of, you know what do they call it? Noteworthy news, I think, I think that’s what they call it. Anyways, at the beginning don’t remember any of it, but then they immediately went into kind of more of an open, I guess I’m going to call it an open forum discussion to talk about a system or process within Starless to get community feedback.
[00:07:21] So first, regardless of the topic, Definitely kudos to the team, or the community team, for bringing that up, because I think it does go a long way to the promise that Stardust says, Hey, we want to get input and stuff. And this is in a public way, so that’s cool. Anybody can show up. Admittedly, not everybody’s available at that time, but hey, still it is.
[00:07:42] You know, as a quick aside I just realized they created after the last couple of brews, a what was it? A Sage channel in Discord and a the other thing? Can’t remember, UE5, what did they call it? I can’t remember. Anyways, another channel related definitely to the UE5 one. Don’t know if it’s called showroom.
[00:07:59] But anyways, if these brew shops are to become more frequent, it might be not a bad idea to create a Discord channel so that people who can’t listen live and contribute live either through the chat or verbally could still have a place to weigh in. In fact, that might be a great way to keep the discussion going.
[00:08:15] So anyways, Not that anybody’s listening to this, but they are. Hey, that might not be a bad idea to create a specific brew shop. I’m pretty sure it was called brew shop in the Discord. But anyways, so they started with a little history lesson of the two versions of StarPath. And again, StarPath is the Star Atlas referral system.
[00:08:35] I might also call it an affiliate system, but they call it referral. And version one was Kind of released many, many years ago and not many people engage with it. I think I did sign up at the time, but it had a point system. I don’t, it doesn’t matter because it was years ago, but the current one that you can sign up for allows you to basically sign up.
[00:08:55] Buddy link, I think is the service they’re using, if I remember correctly, and it allows you to get a link and then you could share that link with people. And then if somebody uses a link to buy, I think it’s certain ships or certain types of ships. Cause I know not everything. So like it only works on the primary ones that are sold by the team, not the secondary sales.
[00:09:14] Both the person purchasing the ship gets a discount, but the person’s link gets a discount. So what they mentioned though, was the unintended consequence. At least that’s what I’m calling it of the self referral. And I’d heard about this before, but I wasn’t really realizing the impact because Guess what it means is you can stack those two discounts together.
[00:09:35] So you’re buying it yourself from yourself But again, you have two wallets and a separate code. So
[00:09:44] Anyways, so that’s sort of what it is So what they didn’t shape then they move forward the boot shop is Asking if anybody liked anything about the current one and it wasn’t spoken But I think obviously everybody liked the discounts that wasn’t really the intended purpose. Somebody did mention that again all the transactions on chain.
[00:10:03] So you could figure out whose code did what and things like that. So again, that’s cool. But one thing that was mentioned that in addition to the self referral, that wasn’t a good thing about it, there really wasn’t any onboarding process. And I, I still think there’s this one issue that we, we use terms like referral program and we all can imply our own definitions to it.
[00:10:24] So onboarding. I’m like, you mean onboarding to the referral program or onboarding to the game? And, and, so, I’m not 100 percent sure. I’m going to go out on a limb and say it was onboarding to the game. But again, I don’t know if that’s really a problem with the referral program. That’s a problem with the current state of the development.
[00:10:45] But anyways the point of the whole was to talk about the next version. So we’ll just call it version three for lack of a thing. So they opened it up to anyone to comment. And again, they gave some ideas they were thinking about. So a couple of ideas. And again, if you want all the details check out my News recap, number 139, integralacademicherald.
[00:11:03] com, and thanks to Stardust TV for recording that. So, some of the things that came up about maybe the potential was one maybe you could apply, actually get a code, so it’d be a little more exclusive. Though people then talked about, well, what’s the discount? Could there be something different if you’re a content creator?
[00:11:19] I think sounds like some of the original intent was this could reward content creators who in fact, one of the terms that was used was the goal of the referral program was a way to, I wish I wrote that down. Oh, I did write it down. Ha! A recruiting mechanism by people with influence and people with influence, I would say is another way of saying content creator.
[00:11:40] But. It doesn’t have to be a country and it just has influence. Again, it could be a person who knows a lot of people who wants to, quote unquote, invest in Star Atlas. And so they say, hey, I use my code and you get a deal and I get a deal and everybody’s happy. So but I think there’s some really important parts of that goal that was stated was, again, recruiting, you know, it’s a recruiting mechanism.
[00:12:00] So we’re trying to bring more people into the game and it’s for people with, quote unquote, influence or influencers. But again, the guilds could easily fall into that one. So and then the other thing that kind of moved into sort of back and forth discussion was like who could qualify if it’s an exclusive code and things like that.
[00:12:16] So again, it was only, you Well, it’s less than an hour chat, but you know, at some point they, they wrapped it up. So there wasn’t necessarily a consensus reached on what to do next. But again, that wasn’t the point of the brew shop was to just get back some feedback. So again, if you’re interested in hearing the conversation and some thoughts that might be going around do check out again, the Atlas brew slash brew shop that was recorded this last week.
[00:12:39] So those are, again, were the two main topics that came up this last week. So I’m going to move forward into kind of my thoughts on the state of star Atlas. So again, I’m still very excited about the welcome market concepts, especially as I you know, hearing or finally seeing more of the details about it.
[00:12:54] So again, I think the biggest thing is the option that you don’t have to do everything back to the CSS. As I was doing my stockpile kind of thing before, I mean, again, you had to bring everything back and I don’t know. I mean, again, I might just leave something somewhere for the future. I, I don’t know.
[00:13:10] Again, just gives so many more options. I think that’s great. Definitely becoming more and more of a fan of the RFRs. Not that I even tried them before, but again, this mechanic to get specific rewards. And so I do kind of feel like it could be a substitute for the Faction Fleet, which again, I’m still in with my couple small and medium ship.
[00:13:29] I don’t think I have a large chip. I think I have a medium chip. Don’t even remember what they are. But anyways because it’s just so simple and I know I get some atlas out of it. So this one is a, you know, don’t know what the recipe for an RFR, and again it was talked that there may be different recipes, but again it gives some things that you can definitely directly determine.
[00:13:49] your, the goal, or sorry, I mean the result, and you can backtrack to figure out how to do it. So that compared to the LP system, again, seems much more interesting to me. Nothing inherently wrong with the LP system as another mechanic though. So overall, again, I’m thinking all these are great improvements to the economy and, and yeah, I think this is a great kind of steady motion forward.
[00:14:13] On the referral program
[00:14:14] I, I, I don’t know. I’m kind of not mixed, but I guess I never really saw a problem. And again, maybe it’s because I really didn’t realize the the self referral part of it. Because to me, a referral program is, again, to, well, again, as was stated, the goal recruiting mechanism. But I was actually thinking more about how I think of a referral program in general.
[00:14:36] And that’s why, again, I said at the beginning, kind of the idea of affiliate marketing, which is a, is a internet thing. practice related to kind of passive income and some side hustles and things like that where vendors you know, for me anyways, like a website hosting provider or even Amazon, you can sign up for their affiliate program.
[00:14:56] They give you codes that make it unique for you. And then you can based upon their rules, show those codes to people. And if somebody buys you get Some money back. So again, I was like, yeah, cool. Yeah, great. This is how you promote and But I think there is some subtle differences in quote the word promotion So in the case of let’s just stick with Amazon Associates because everybody kind of probably knows about buying from Amazon So again, if you use somebody’s link Amazon’s happy because you bought something now, would you bought anyways?
[00:15:26] Yeah Amazon. Maybe that’s not the best thing. But again, It works and everything’s fine, but there isn’t this concept of self referral because, You, it just doesn’t work that way. You know, if you’re buying an object, say it’s a book on Amazon, you get the book and you’re happy and the other person gets the cut and they just recommend it or just mentioned, Hey, you can use this thing.
[00:15:47] So I do now have a better understanding of this kind of self referral because again, if you basically get a discount for buying a ship that incentivize people to buy them. So, yeah, it kind of isn’t the original point. So, is the original point to make more sales? Well, that’s typically most of the referral ones.
[00:16:06] Again, people have audiences, so they’re sharing their product. Again, it’s a form of marketing, form of advertising. But in Star Atlas, of course, we want to recruit new people. So there, there is that aspect. But as was kind of mentioned when I was talking about onboarding, but again, there really isn’t anything for a new person to do.
[00:16:24] And we’ve been, The community has been talking a long time about, you know, that the Sage just doesn’t work for small gamers and who’s a small gamer And you know, they may be more interested in the racing But now the shooting and again don’t need anything to come in to play that At least in its current form, maybe again in the future.
[00:16:42] You got to buy a crew member or something So I don’t know. I mean part of me is like yeah referrals fine. Just have it What’s the big deal? The other point is, well, if the goal is recruiting people, well, it’s a fair point. I think somebody might have mentioned this in the, the brew shop that, well, there’s no game.
[00:16:59] So why don’t we just focus on the game and not worry about a referral program? And I’m like, okay, good point. But horse cart, chicken egg, I don’t know. So I don’t know. It was great that the team asked. It’s not, again, clear what, well, I think maybe, and again, it wasn’t the point of the brew shop was to say, here’s what we’re doing.
[00:17:19] It was more of, hey, we think the current thing isn’t working. What do you guys think would be better? And in that sense, great. It was a good conversation. But I guess where I’m, you know, feeling more and more is this is just part of marketing strategy. So are we marketing to bring people in the game?
[00:17:36] Are we marketing to sell more ships in the sense that Star Atlas needs to sell things in order to keep funding itself? So those of course have two different goals. And if the goal is to sell more ships and basically you’re offering a discount and somebody feels that’s worth it to buy the ship, well then you win.
[00:17:58] I mean that’s Who cares if it’s a self referral? It’s you still sold a ship. So it’s no different than having a sale But I guess then you should call that a sale Maybe it’s a promo code people expect promo codes To give them a discount So, you know, maybe don’t call it a referral program call it a promo code and give it to everyone who you know I don’t know.
[00:18:19] So I think that might be the Maybe stepping back, that might be the ultimate thing is. A referral program should have a purpose. And if the purpose truly is recruiting people, or sorry, yeah, recruiting mechanism, well then it’s about bringing people into the game. But again, there’s no game, so maybe this isn’t really important right now.
[00:18:39] If it’s to bring people in the game knowing that the game is only allows for certain things, you know. That’s fair, but again, we should be upfront about that. So again, I guess maybe to summarize, cause I’m just rambling. I think this is more nuanced than just simply what should we do better with our referral program?
[00:18:55] It almost feels like, again, the referral program or programs should have goals. Nothing wrong with providing community members a discount on ship purchases directly from the team. That’s great. Helps the team, people get ships, they save a little money. Win win, but that’s not a referral program. If you’re trying to bring people in, sure, you can do that, but you need to have, well, where are they coming?
[00:19:20] So again, I guess you do need to have an onboarding process to bring them in to accomplish something. And it could make a fair argument. There isn’t a lot to do for someone who doesn’t want to spend a lot of money to build up a fleet and things like that. But again, that could still be part of what’s there.
[00:19:36] So again, I think in. In the summary, it is a nuanced thing, and that’s probably what we do. But, great for the team to be asking apparently they want to make some changes from the current one, so even if the change just is to get away with or to remove the self referral and to bring up some other program that maybe starts more incrementally, hey, that’s fine too.
[00:19:55] But, again, I think it’s all possible. whatever in the end. So moving on to my last section. So again, kind of my journey. So if you’ve been following along again, I’ve been trying to craft a, or excuse me, redeem a Mamba X in Sage and I finished mining hydrogen finally. So that was cool. So I got my 25 million hydrogen in my wallet.
[00:20:15] So I went ahead and moved to the next resource, which is carbon. It turns out I calculated you need 35 million carbon and it’s not at the central space station. So now I had to set up the full supply chain. So I in case I already said this, I’ll say it again. Basically, I set up a mining fleet that will sit at the what is it, mud, Med 3?
[00:20:39] I don’t know. One of the other starbases. Mining hydrogen, then I set up a transport fleet that’ll move the car Sorry, carbon. Mining carbon. I’ll move the carbon back and then it’ll bring out ammo, food, and fuel. And then I kept a small mining fleet at the CSS to keep hydrogen because I had a feeling based on my previous experience doing my stockpiling that fuel would become a problem because my coin stakes Weren’t able to keep up with it.
[00:21:07] So I wanted to keep a small fleet mining hydrogen and then some crafters crafting Fuel from that. So anyways, I set all that up worked great or sorry It was working great And then I checked the next day and I realized wow the carbon number hasn’t moved much and there’s a whole bunch of food ammo and fuel at the other space station starbase and I don’t know, I have a feeling that the sole fees are greatly dropping compared to even the hydrogen mining.
[00:21:40] Now, I realize there’s two mining fleets, so I guess that’s double the transactions. And there’s a movement fleet that’s unloading, loading, warping. Unwarping things like that. And then there’s the crafters, which I, to be honest, don’t even know if they use soul. I thought they used Atlas, but I got it. I’m sure they use soul somewhere.
[00:21:58] So it just felt like it was burning too much soul, but then I refreshed my browser and I got soul back. So I don’t know. It could be this, the interface and so far, I don’t know. There was just too many moving parts. So this morning I decided, you know what, let’s reduce the moving parts because I don’t feel like I’m going to run out of the resources, the fuel.
[00:22:18] Ammo and food at the other starbase because the miner shouldn’t do much. And keeping transport, well, I could just wait. There’s no requirement to immediate transport. So, I reconfigured the transport fleet to be a mining fleet and sent it back to that starbase. And now those two are just mining in carbon.
[00:22:39] I went ahead and kept the other fleet mining in hydrogen because, again, I still feel like long term. I’m going to need more fuel. So it’s still using transactions, but again, if I stockpile now, then I won’t have to use it later. At least that’s what I’m thinking. So anyways, so I went from kind of a full supply chain to basically dedicated mining with no transport and getting, got my little piece of paper calculating things.
[00:23:06] So we’ll see if, how the consumption rate of food, ammo, and fuel for those two mining fleets at the star base is. And, well, I guess the hydrogen will just keep mining without a problem. So, kind of thinking of running that. I am watching the soul a little closer. Again, I still need to, well, part of it is I don’t have the time, but the other part is I’m afraid to look, because if the soul is really being eaten, then this whole sage, I, well, I think sage becomes just done, because even though I don’t consider myself a small player, I’m not a large medium player.
[00:23:46] I don’t know. Got to come up with better terms. But anyways, I got more than one ship. So you would think that there would be economies of scale by the amount of cargo I’m using. But maybe again, it takes a lot of cargo to do that. So maybe if I totally give up on this, I should give up by putting some facts and figures behind it.
[00:24:07] But again, I, I really kind of want to do a mamba X and I don’t mind waste spending time, but I think realistically, if the cost to putting all these costs in here’s really what the key is. If you put all the cost in to get all the resources, move them around, craft them to then get a mamba X. If all that was more than the actual cost on the marketplace right now of mamba X, then it, that’s a ridiculous thing.
[00:24:35] Plus. You’re not calculating any time. So I could have a MomBax now, but Deep down I have a few instances. So what? I have another ship that still can’t do anything. So part of this is like I really don’t mind playing Sage, especially with automation from Sly Assistant, but I Guess I don’t want to Lose money, but I’m okay invest.
[00:24:57] Excuse me I’m okay putting money into the game as I mentioned on some of my other videos If you have to put 20 bucks in a month, so be it. So that part doesn’t bother me, but again, I guess I just kind of want to know. And maybe in the end it’s like, okay, there’s a threshold and we should just stop kidding ourselves that the threshold is quite high to make Sage at all.
[00:25:17] Makes sense. So anyways, again, part of this is maybe exploring I mean, I have a goal, but maybe part of it will be just learning more about the specifics economy. So anyways, that’s it. So thanks for listening again. Happy to have any podcast guests. So I’ve actually had a couple of people reach out, so I need to dedicate some time to thinking about how to actually do that.
[00:25:38] So thank you for those who have reached out. But anyways, if anybody is interested, I definitely do want to do it. Question of just making the time and, and yeah, spending the time to organize and get some stuff recorded, plus getting some questions written down. But I’m definitely open to any community members who just want to chat about Staros in general or want to do a week in review.
[00:25:58] That’d be great. Definitely open any content creators or other Staros builders who want to talk about their projects love to do that And again totally open any team members who might want to get on and just chat. Again Definitely interested in kind of more of a theme which would be you know beginners again whatever form that takes because I think those are useful videos.
[00:26:18] And of course, kind of the theme on my website. So helping people get into Star Atlas. And then lastly, again, if you’re interested in any Star Atlas merch, specifically Star Atlas mugs, I do have a few of those for available in my merch store at intergalacticgear. com. Please take a look. If you don’t, You can still go there and fill out my merch survey.
[00:26:34] Greatly appreciate any feedback you would be willing to give. And if you’re interested in getting together with some other Stardust gamers who aren’t a member of the guild, but never, but and don’t like kind of the chat platform love to talk with you and create a community for us to hang out and chat.
[00:26:48] You can go to intergalactic coalition. com and fill out the interest survey there. So hope you enjoyed this. Thanks for listening again. Have a great week ahead. This is Matt with Intergalactic Herald.
