Star Atlas Event Recap 36: Atlas Brew 174-Holosim

In this episode, hear an AI summary of the latest Star Atlas community event.  Full video recordings can be found on the YouTube channel of Star Atlas TV at https://www.youtube.com/@staratlastv.

---

---

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify

---

---

---

Star Atlas Event Summary

Hi, this isn’t Matt with the Intergalactic Herald. I am an AI. Welcome to a Star Atlas Recap of the latest Atlas Brew from the Star Atlas Community Team. The following summary of the Atlas Brew was AI generated so no guarantee it is 100% accurate because I am an AI after all. If you want to listen to the entire recording, please check out the YouTube channel of Star Atlas TV. Enjoy the summary. Alright, Star Atlas adventurers, gather ’round! If you were tuned into the latest Atlas Room, number 174, you know we kicked things off with some serious death metal vibes – apparently, that’s the new meta for getting pumped for a community update! But once the headbanging subsided, it was all business as Santi, Jose, and Holosim’s main project manager, John (also known as Xcode), took us on a deep dive into the wild ride that was Holosim Chapter 1 and what’s blazing on the horizon for Chapter 2. The main event? An honest, no-holds-barred look at Holosim, especially with the Chapter 1 leaderboard officially closing out tonight! The team admitted that this season was “full of activity, spiciness, and chaos,” and while the infrastructure certainly had its moments (let’s be real, a lot of moments), they learned a ton. John confessed they seriously underestimated just how many of you would jump in, saying, “we thought that we would have those performance issues under control and… we didn’t.” The player base grew so rapidly, you guys kept “breaking” their fixes almost as fast as they implemented them! But despite the struggles, it was a massive success in terms of player engagement, new player acquisition, and impressive battle pass conversion rates. We saw epic faction battles, like Ani and Mud duking it out, and the starbase combat played out just as they’d hoped. Now, for the big news – what’s coming next for Holosim, especially with Chapter 2 on the horizon. The absolute, undeniable, top-priority focus is fixing the infrastructure. John detailed their efforts to migrate to RPC, optimize data calls to stop your CPUs from burning, and intelligently display only relevant ships on the map. They also addressed the route manager – it does work, especially with less load, and while integrating third-party tools like Sly or Atom is currently too much overhead for their rapid pace, they’re committed to optimizing their existing manager and adding features like warp and crafting. But perhaps the most impactful changes are coming to the game design itself, particularly concerning leaderboards and the hot topic of multi-accounting. They’re moving away from a pure “grind-to-win” model, where the most dedicated farmers topped the charts. Instead, Chapter 2’s leaderboard will be achievement-based. Imagine hundreds, even thousands, of achievements – some visible, many hidden – that reward strategic thinking and engaging with all facets of the game, not just mindlessly repeating tasks. Grind will still exist, but it’ll be for “meaningful accomplishment,” with diminishing returns for repetitive actions. Speaking of multi-accounting, they’re taking a firm stance for Chapter 2. While they want to encourage cooperative play, they’re exploring measures like freezing accounts that try to bypass in-game systems by pulling resources to wallets and sending them to other accounts. The goal is to funnel all resource movement through legitimate in-game markets. And, in a move that addresses immediate community feedback, as of today, you can voluntarily mark your alt accounts in the game settings. These “alt” accounts will be excluded from leaderboard prizes, moving other players up, but will still appear on the leaderboard with an “alt” tag. You’ll have about a week for this voluntary registration, and the team will be analyzing the data to make further policy decisions for Chapter 2. On the gameplay front, starbases are getting a glow-up. Chapter 1’s easy-flipping mechanics were for data collection, but in Chapter 2, starbases will have “much bigger teeth” and be significantly simpler to upgrade, requiring fewer and more common contracts. The territory control will also be bolstered by a new PvE element: faction-aligned NPCs! The more you mine in medium-risk zones, the more enemy NPCs you’ll aggro, requiring you to use your safe-zone built fleets to protect your operations. They’re even revisiting crew and permits, considering mechanics like crew wages to discourage multi-accounting for crew, and exploring the idea of permadeath for fleets. Quests, too, will be re-tuned to focus on teaching new players and lore, rather than being grind-heavy. Beyond Holosim, there was a quick update on a recent Sage patch, which saw crafting fees reduced from 7% to 5% and the return of Mambai crafting, albeit with more expensive resources. There were also LP adjustments to various components. The team acknowledged mixed community feelings but assured everyone they’re in constant talks with the econ team, balancing player experience with ongoing C4 development. So, what’s next? The Chapter 1 leaderboard snapshot happens tonight at midnight UTC. While it will shift as players mark their alts, the team will announce the final standings and distribute prizes in about a week. And get this: everyone who linked their mainnet wallet will receive at least one cool, lighthearted cosmetic reward, with Ani getting a special faction award for reaching 10 million points first. As for Chapter 2, there’s no set start date yet, and that’s intentional – they won’t rush it and will only launch when the infrastructure is running smoothly. The current season will continue for a few more weeks, and you might even see some new mechanics tested in real-time. Finally, a special shout-out and Happy Birthday to Jose (aka Tuesday), who spent his special day with us sharing all these exciting updates! It’s clear that the team is listening, learning, and working tirelessly to evolve Star Atlas. So, keep an eye out for upcoming builder hours, language-specific brews, and our classic Galia game night. And remember, the future of Holosim is looking incredibly strategic and engaging! We’ll definitely need a part two brew as we get closer to Chapter 2, but for now, that’s a wrap!

---

Star Atlas Event Transcript

I only listen. >> What? What you listen to?

>> This is the only one that we listen to. >> Can’t we have some Brazilian funk to get things started? >> Nah, bro.

This is start at Lardis, bro. Come on. >> Okay, bro.

Let’s listen to the soul, bro.

Okay. Bro, >> bro, if you saw in the chat, said that didn’t realize needed an death metal band until now. 19.

>> This is everything. >> This is the new meta.

Yeah, metal. >> That’s what we need. >> The the playlist link in case anyone wants to go support.

think uh it mostly with AI, but even even it’s actually quite epic. >> It’s fire.

It’s fire. >> It’s fire.

Yeah.

It’s it’s great pre gym workout. Bro, can pump 2,000 kilos with that, bro. >> For sure.

>> Right.

Right. >> So, GM everyone. GM everyone.

We have number 174. >> Uh, think we’re doing cameras on right. >> Absolutely.

Uh, >> let me turn it on. It will take 10 seconds. Santi, bro, do you see my new mic?

>> Oh, we are all white today.

Nice. >> We’re wearing white. I’m wearing Super Phoenix uh t-shirt today.

>> Epic t-shirt. Anomaly. >> Anomaly t-shirt.

Uh yeah, XCO, we didn’t tell you we were doing cameras on actually. I’m sorry. >> We got you.

Uh >> but feel free to not turn it on whenever you come on stage.

It’s all right.

But yeah, we have the Atlas room number 174 and we’re talking Holim today. Uh which by the way, Holim is ending today technically the leaderboard.

So, uh, perfect timing to talk little bit about the holim and the key learnings, updates that are coming, what went well, what went wrong, and just deep dive into this whole sim season, which was full of activity, full of spiciness, let’s say, and >> chaos. >> Yes.

Yeah. And chaos. lot of chaos.

lot of random things happening here and there and everything we’re lucky everything was running super smoothly on the infra side as well. >> Super >> awesome experience. >> But yeah, >> got got lot of XP points this chapter personally.

Personal XP points. >> Yeah. >> Achievements that I’ve never gotten in my career.

think you raised like 10 levels on Discord, John, just by engaging with community during this season. >> Yeah, think so. >> Mhm.

>> Yeah. >> Yeah. Let’s uh let’s give Xcode proper welcome.

Um if you’ve been playing Hall of Same, you probably encounter Xcode either in the chat, either tagging him for complaint or even in game. Uh but Xcode is our main project manager and product lead for Holosim and he he agreed to join us here without hesitation to talk about this whole season what happened and just do deep dive together with us.

So Xcode man pleasure to have you. >> Thank you.

Thanks for the invitation and am really happy to be here. Uh want to want to get everything out and give you guys an idea of what’s going to happen in chapter 2.

So, >> yes, we’ll we’ll dive into that. We’ll dive into that. Uh, but yeah, Mandalorian is asking holy men today.

Yeah, the deleted board. Uh, but then the story line remains open for people that want to get the completionist award.

So, >> yes. Um but as always before that we should do our classic um >> waiting for the note. >> Mhm.

Yes. >> Uh bunch of things noteworthy happened uh actually one happened yesterday uh that people probably want to talk about.

But before we talk about that one uh little bit about the events.

So tomorrow we have the builder hour.

So if you’re building something using the Stratus IP or programs, uh you can join us at the builder hour. Uh we usually get engineers there as well.

So make sure to join if you’re building something or starting your own product uh using the Stratus um IP.

So definitely want to have you there. Then we also have two different brews in different languages to on actually tomorrow as well.

We have the Cafe Atlas in Portuguese and the Spanish brew in Spanish. >> Yes, >> in Portuguese. Uh, so you guys, if you speak Portuguese or Spanish, uh, you can mark us interested there in the in the chat.

And then on Friday, our classic Galia game night to get some ink, some XP, try to kill me and Dom. Uh we usually play >> you want to manage but you can have fun. >> That’s why you only try.

>> Only try. >> So yeah. Black goo valu never dies.

>> Yeah. >> Yes. >> This is weird.

Why are some people not hearing us? Like have seen couple people.

This is Discord so weird. >> cannot even trust it anymore. should say, but two people don’t think Enigma 42 will troll us.

>> Yeah.

No, Enigma wouldn’t have troll us. >> Enigma would never do that to us. >> Yeah.

>> Um but yeah, it’s it’s not on our side. Discord messing up.

Yeah, Discord have been it has been weird sometimes. It is completely unreliable, but we keep going. um give it refresh or actually let me find the link for Star Atlas TV because they stream it on YouTube.

So if you can’t hear it from here uh on YouTube see it’s working well.

So well they’re not going to be able to hear me but >> I’m saying the chat. >> Yeah.

Yeah. Bob, my mind clicked after that. Uh yeah, how would tell them to listen somewhere else if they can listen here?

Uh but just edit it in the chat.

So uh that’s good.

That’s good. Uh but yeah, then also another noteworthy new beside the events is the Sage patch that came in with some spiciness out there. Oh man.

>> Spiciness. >> Oh man. >> Spiciness in the new patch.

Yes.

Yes. Uh so basically the the deon team changed some of the variables for sage. Um we also reduced crafting fees from 7% to 5%.

Um so little relief there. Uh bringing back the feimal man by as well. You guys will be able to craft the Mambai again.

It’s little bit more expensive when it comes to resources, but we’re bringing that uh back.

and then some LP adjustments as well. Uh ink remains the same but then there are up upgrades to frameworks, SDUs, accel particle accelerators, radiation absorbers, electronics, electromagnets, field stabilizer and power source. Um, so you guys can find the full announcement uh here.

And know that some people didn’t like it, some people did like it, but mixed feelings out there. Just think mixed feelings and the spiciness going through the hoof. What we are doing is we are collecting everyone’s feedback.

We are in constant talks with the econ team. As you guys knows, we are trying to reach an a hard balance here between spending more resources on sage while we are still developing the last stage of C4.

So, we are trying to, you know, keep things moving without hurting too much the developments of C4.

But rest assure that we are uh we are talking with the EON team.

We are collecting you guys feedback.

We are in talks with them and this is an evolving situation, developing situation. We’ll keep you guys posted on everything that’s going on on that front. And as always, we are always trying to work together with you guys to improve the Statistics experience.

That’s why we have Bruce about feedback.

That’s why we have Bruce about hollow scene feedback.

Yeah that’s >> that’s where we what we always do here in Star Atlas. >> Yeah.

Some some extra comments there that that I’ve seen also that want to address is even if we hear the feedback like we relay all the feedback that we get from the Bruce uh to the team um directly but that doesn’t mean that things are going to absolutely change based on what you guys said or something like that. uh the team has to make the judgment and make the right call for the long term.

So don’t expect uh if even if we raise the feedback, don’t expect changes to happen the next day.

That’s just unrealistic.

So >> unrealistic. >> Um as you know, our team really listens to the community. They pay attention.

So if they think that something is actually not working properly or needs changes, they are going to make the adjustments like they have always done throughout the history of our Atlas.

So wanted wanted to be clear with that. With that said, think we can hop on our bit our big topic for today on main topic which is hollow sim. And know many of you have been playing it um and we made you guys rank the holosim experience uh last week but think we should start with it again like let’s exclude the infra issues let’s assume that the infrastructure was working properly how would you rank holosim on scale from 1 to 10 in the chat assume that everything was working No infra issues.

The holosim game design and experience. Did you enjoy it? Would you play more if it was working?

Yes. And yes, Bob says eight out of 10, seven out of 10, 10 out of 10, six.

Some people say that they cannot even make that imagination call about the issues.

But >> don’t say it like that, guys. Come on. >> 10 out of 10.

with no bugs.

Nice. >> see lots of comments on on outs.

Yeah, we’ll have we’ll talk about that today. We we have lot we have lot to share today. Don’t worry.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, it’s overall very positive feedback uh for the for the game itself. It was just uh some the information issues really affected the experience.

But uh John, think this is great topic to get started with you.

But for like an overall takeaway from you from managing this uh this product um with all the with all the good and bad things that happened uh what’s your key takeaway from from this season in in nutshell? Uh key takeaway is that we had underestimated how many people would play or that our infrastructure could handle the growth that we were going to see. We thought that we would have those performance issues under control and um and we didn’t.

So lot lot of the reason that we saw increased demand was better performing systems, higher player numbers, more consistent engagement and in the open beta we had spikes of that high engagement and we did see that it it struggled. Uh but having this sustained record-breaking player numbers through the entire season meant that as we improved things um you guys kept breaking them. Like we would we would you know make an optimization and it would fix the game for day and then the player base would grow by another 100 daily active users.

All these new fleets would continue to come online and uh we’d be back up against those performance bottlenecks again. Um all all in all the season was big success from the perspective of uh player numbers and we saw lot of new player acquisition. We saw really great battle pass conversion rates.

Uh we saw huge battles between Anie and Mud and Mud and we saw Mud get wiped off the map million times, right? We saw all kinds of really interesting scenarios playing out. The the Starbase combat was um was exactly what we had hoped it would be.

There was lots of engagement with Starbase combat uh the infrastructure contracts and um and like the not infrastructure contracts but like >> the territory control mechanic overall. >> The territory control mechanic was really uh played out really well. Um, yeah, and the interface to show uh the faction warfare like by redeeming contracts, that interface is now fleshed out, and we’re going to work toward hooking that up to um, you know, achievements for holding star bases and things like that.

It won’t be this uh, redeeming of contracts all the time.

So >> yeah, not to get too far ahead of ourselves. Uh we’re going to cover uh what will be coming next, but um think we can start. don’t know, Jose, maybe you want to add something in general lines and then we get on the key learnings topic.

>> Yeah, there are many subtopics to hollow scene. Overall, we learned lot in this season. Like this was uh and I’m not here talking about the metrics.

They are important as well, but we learned like the limits of our current infrastructure, but especially we learned lot about player behavior and game design. This for me, like see lots of people talking in the chat about uh multi accounting. This was one of the hot topics of this season and the way that this played out um has teached us lot has teached us lot.

John and have been talking about this those last three four days we have basically been deep diving on those problems those the data that we got from this from this season. And what can what would like to say is that uh we have solutions like today we are going to share with you guys some of the solutions that we have designed. Uh of course they need testing they need uh they need improvement.

We are still building them but we are very happy with the progress that we have made with the lessons we have learned in terms of deploying new mechanics to hollow scene about our ability to deploy them in timeable fashion about the infrastructure situation and today think today’s about showing showing you guys the future of holosene how cool it’s going to be and even though this season had some difficulties to say the least It has teached us lot like feel it’s stepping stone. It we had moments of frustration.

We have cool moments but it was very very important for the long run of Star Atlas and Hollow scene and you guys will see this today as we go through all the lessons that we learned through during this season. think that’s the main message here. >> Yeah, agree with that.

Uh, one of the key takeaways for me from the community side is that we have so many people ready to start engaging with the products and more specifically with holosim.

So many people enjoyed it, right? even even if the if the infra issues were there. Um think the proof of fun is there once we can fix those things and get things moving and also make changes to the game design.

We have an amazing product, amazing product, very good proof of concept.

So with that said, think we can get little bit on specific learnings. Uh John um and maybe we can get topic by topic on the on the different things and mechanics that we had for holism. Uh we can start with starbased combat and territory control.

>> Mhm. >> And what we have learned from from those things. >> Okay.

So, uh, really quick to to the reason territory control and star base combat was set and calibrated the way it was was to encourage people to go and take star bases. We needed to see how it affected starbase upgrades and we’ve identified some bugs there. We needed to see how uh players coordinated attacks on star bases.

And um if we had tuned the star bases too effective, like too too powerful at the beginning, it would have been um would have been case where people weren’t turning them over.

So in that respect, we got lot of data. We saw how people can and do take over huge areas of territory. that really helped us understand like fleet fuel burn uh time commitment for for you know operations and things like that.

Um you’ve seen now at the end of the chapter we’ve upped the star base uh return fire and so now you’re feeling what an upgraded star base would feel like. Going into chapter 2 we are going to make star bases much simpler to upgrade. they won’t require four or five comp compound materials.

Uh they’ll actually require maybe one or two of the contracts.

So maybe water and food contracts are required to upgrade base to level two.

And then you add the metals contracts for tier three and you add the aerogel contracts for tier four and so on. And um we’re going to make the quantities low enough that an individual can go and upgrade base on their own if they want to. Um, and we’ll work on um we’ll work on the mechanics of starbased destruction.

So, star bases will be they’ll have much bigger teeth. They’ll be able to be upgraded much quicker and um we’ll we’ll take some of the emphasis off of redeeming those contracts as uh source of income and we’ll put that onto starbased upgrades, make that lot more approachable.

So, yep. Perfect. >> Yeah.

>> Um, you had to say you had something to add there. >> Yeah.

Yes. Uh, it’s precisely what John said like star bases, but the way that we set star bases during this season made it really easy to flip them around. And we needed to test them.

We needed to see like the players behavior in terms of holding star bases, etc. And we felt that we learned that the experience in this season was that the flipping was going too crazy.

People were not uh focused enough on defending their territory, their star bases. They saw this more as gaming farming mechanic than actual territory control, which was the objective. like the grand vision for this is to have your faction won the territory your faction desire to keep the territory in their control and etc.

And this was an interesting learning for us. Uh we have uh John will talk about this later but we have we have new design in place to change the way that you guys are thinking about uh the leaderboards and etc. and star base holding will also be important component on this new mechanic.

So it was really interesting.

We are glad that the technology the infrastructure worked it.

So now we can get more creative on how star bases will perform, how useful they will be for gameplay loops. >> Mhm.

Yeah. And also think uh we’re thinking of the win condition system and the and the contract race uh making some some modifications on that based on on what was learned. >> Mhm.

Yeah.

So the >> the win condition this time around was redeem contracts make bar go to the right. First person that gets the bar all the way to the right wins. We wanted to test that user interface.

Uh, chapter 2, we’re going to hook that into player and faction achievements. And so, for example, uh, say your faction holds star base for an epoch, specific star base.

Great. That faction, you’ll get that you’ll get that achievement, and that achievement will be on that board instead of points for um for for redeeming contracts. Um, if you lose that base and you retake it, uh, you’ll get that achievement and there’ll be points associated with that.

If you lose the base again and you take it back, you’ve already got the achievement.

So, there’s no point in wash fighting bases, right?

So, um, that’s that’s just one example of how uh that system will improve. Um, yeah, won’t go into too much detail there cuz we can piggy back on other stuff later.

But >> yeah, not sure if you want to think this is think this is one of the most important changes that we are going to make, John.

So maybe we can expand just little bit more here. >> Sure. One thing that we saw during this season is that the current scenario, the current build for Holene, it incentivized too much the grind and not the strategical gameplay loops associated with like game that wants to players to make strategic choices.

The players that grinded the most, the guys who played for the most, the guy the guys who created the most accounts and grinded and did combat like 247, they came out on top during this season. And not everyone has the time to do this, nor is the optimal game design having game that only hewards uh grind. We want to shift this little bit.

We want there to be grind.

Yes.

But grind towards meaning meaningful accomplishment.

So this is the idea behind uh the new game design that we are creating for this new chapter on holy. What we are proposing now is you guys won’t compete in the leaderboard for by XP. Uh we are going to remove all the caps.

We are going to allow you guys to go crazy in farming XP if you want, but the thing that will distinguish you from other players is not completing all the quests is not grinding the max cap of the daily XP threshold. What’s going to move you forward in the leaderboard is acquiring achievements for you and for your faction.

So, for example, uh as John was saying, let’s imagine an individual player here. You get an achievement for your first combat. You get an achievement for 10 combats.

You get an achievement when you kill your first enemy fleet. You get an achievement when you destroy 100 fleets.

But if you pay attention, there are diminishing returns for this grind. If you want to get more achievements and collect more points, you need to discover or engage with the different activities in game in strategic mindset.

So mindlessly farming, mindlessly killing players will grant you few achievements on this area of expertise, but it won’t get you to the tops of the leaderboards.

No, we are designing like hundreds if not thousands of achievements for this next chapter of Holene. And the interesting thing is that we are just going to reveal to you guys portion of what those achievements are. see people already asking this question, so I’m anticipating it.

You know, like 100 base achievements, but we are going to hide and create many cool achievements that you only be able to play to acquire if you try Holene. If you play all the gameplay loops, if you do different actions, if you conquer uh certain certain objectives related to the expansion of your faction and collective gameplay efforts, feel like this will make the game more interesting. This will allow you guys to explore different possibilities.

This will allow you guys to share the achievements that you learn through your gameplay loops with your friends. And this will be part of the gameplay experience. You will discover the written rules of those achievements of that game.

And you will compete together with your faction to come out on top on this let’s say conquest race for being the most uh like the the top faction in Gal expense.

This is this is the idea.

Now the rules and the achievements that you need to take, they are not given to you easily. Like it’s not just about the grind anymore. In fact, if you just grind, you’re going to get behind in the leaderboard.

We want to reward active game play. We want to reward strategic thinking. We want to reward players to be more mindful of their actions and resources in the game.

So this John, correct me if I’m wrong somewhere here, but think this is the general logic for the leaderboard in this upcoming chapter. >> Mhm. Yep.

This is how I’m looking at it as well. >> Nice.

So for the faction, it is it’s going to be holding key points in the map as an individual.

It’s more achievements based. >> Yeah. And also I made an earlier example um just to touch on how alt accounts work.

Uh and and like alt accounts is one one thing we can talk about. Sharing the gaming experience with your friends and your family looks lot like alt accounting when you go and you just do pure analytics on it. We don’t want to discourage gameplay like cooperative gameplay.

Uh but think about this in in this light for second. Um if were to create second account and wanted to do all my mining with that account. um that’s fine.

can do that because the mining achievements are restricted to that account and all the points associated with that effort, they live there.

There’s no way to mer to bridge those mining achievements to the to the main account and that’s where the the points for the leaderboard are going to come from.

So, uh if wanted to use second account and wanted to do all the mining, now all that mining experience lives on that one account. And even if were to send the materials, not not saying we are or aren’t blocking material sending, but if wanted to send the materials to my main and craft something with it, that main account would get the experience for crafting and he would get the rewards, sorry, the um he would get the achievements for crafting, but he wouldn’t get the achievements for the for the mining that took place. And so there’s there’s splitting now of of effort and reward and and all of that.

So, um, just just want to put that out there. In in lot of ways, this really encourages you to focus on achieving those things on your main. And if you’re if you’re the kind of person that wants to be at the top of the leaderboard, you’ll need to do everything with that account to make it to the top of the leaderboard.

>> Mhm. There are some questions out there. Uh, Beckerinho is asking, “But could create several accounts doing the first achievements to gather the biggest and easiest points for the faction?

” Let’s imagine the the point system. Like for example, the first and easiest achievements, they will award you one point, one achievement point. the deeper that you go into the gameplay loops, those points will get exponentially higher.

So this way, even if thousand players do this first achievement, the later achievements on the road, they will award much more points.

So it’s tradeoff here. like maybe this could influence little bit but in no way this is as strong or as meaningful as the achievements at the end of the road you know so this achievements it’s yeah think it’s waste of time actually if you try to do something like that >> sorry if read into his question little bit deeper the the things that you can do uh easy on an alt are not going to award any points to your faction.

So, by by design, >> um wanted to get into this later, but it’s it’s good good this is good place to touch on it. Um ju take step back and think about um game performance and UI optimization. Uh, some performance gains can be had by optimizing how many fleets player controls and how many fleets we put on the map.

And we’re going to make some game design changes to make it so that you can’t be blocked because territory control has taken over the base that you need. Uh, we’re going to make it so that you don’t need so many fleets to mine and harvest R4. And we’re going to make it so that you can re you can sell back small fleets to the NPC at bit of loss and upgrade to big fleets by creating many small ones.

And those three things combined, you end up with safe zone that has uh one star star base, one asteroid belt with all the R4 at it. And so all of your mining and transport efforts for R4 are cons condensed at one base. That reduces the overhead your UI is by by like it cuts it down to 25% of what it used to be.

You don’t have to mine in so many places. You don’t have to move resources from so many places.

There’s like huge net net positive there.

But you won’t get any faction specific achievements for doing anything in the safe zone.

You can have as many miners as you want going crazy.

you can put all the automation in the world on it. To get faction specific optimiz uh achievements, you’re going to have to go to the medium zone. You’re going to have to mine copper at medium base.

Okay? And when you mine copper at the medium base server side, it’s going to say, “Okay, that guy’s mined that copper there. He’s got his achievement there, and this is more dangerous and it’s more uh it’s more performant.

” Um, and then fur further to that, if I’m going to get bit ahead of myself here, but big component of chapter 2 is going to be PVE element, which is going to be factional aligned NPCs. And we’ve started experimenting with those. Um, the factional aligned NPCs will monitor the star bases mining, for example.

So, if you go and you click on star system now and you see that particular asteroid belt has 12 billion resources that have been mined this chapter, every 100,000 resources mined at particular asteroid belt will aggro an enemy to patrol the system that you’re actively moni that you’re actively mining in. And so, you’ll go and you’ll you can do whatever you want in the safe zone. Build up resources, build up ships.

You don’t get this. You don’t get points for that. you go into the medium risk zone, you say, “I now I’m going to go and try and make my achievement for the day or my I’m going to go try and like do the the copper mining achievement and I’m going to go mine copper here.

” But as you do that, you’re going to aggro enemy NPC fleets who will target you and patrol the area that you’re mining in. And you will need to use the resources that you’ve gathered in the ships that you’ve been building in the safe zone to protect that operation. And the more people that try and achieve those uh those things, the more aggro you will get from enemy NPCs.

Um so that that is the ter territory control this time around base flipping. That was the experimental feature. We’re going to implement this factional line NPC in the postseason and hopefully go into the uh chapter 2 with full-blown um NPC aggro that will like directly impact how you generate rewards for yourself, how you generate achievements.

Um so there’s bit of layered approach here.

Yeah, the leaderboard is achievement based, but uh no longer are you like just doing it freely. uh you’re you’re generating aggro from the NPCs. Um and you’re going to need to either like go ahead if you want to use Sly and you want to like hook the thing up and go to town, you have to have ships coming to protect those miners or they’re going to get blown up.

Uh that it’s just no way no way to to put it otherwise sort of thing.

So, um think individually some of our tactics may not look super strong, but when you tie them all together, it’s it’s very strong uh ecosystem that we’re aiming for in chapter 2. Uh and that all all that everything hinges on performant systems.

So, we recognize that and we are working toward making those systems performant first and then building the enemy NPC system on top of that. >> Yeah. And this is something really important here guys to share with you.

Our number zero, one, two, and three priorities right now is to fix the infrastructure. John will talk little bit more on those technical details and how what happened during this season, the the fixes that we have in place, the things that we are doing to improve the experience.

But this is like something that you can assume that moving forward we’ll fix at at least the basic infrastructure of the game.

We are exploring different ways of doing this how we can do this on like way to do this. There is no clearly easy hang low hanging fruit but there is lot of things that we are doing lots of initiatives that are coming together. They are progress progressing well and before any other season starts this is something that internally we have discussed to exhaustion we need to fix infrastructure so this is not this goes without saying like we acknowledge the problems that we had during this season and they will be addressed you know that’s must >> yeah um think there was question out there if we can if we can cover it if there they were asking what are the steps that we’re taking into fixing infra?

Um don’t know if John maybe you can comment bit on that. >> Yeah, give me two seconds to actually pull up my my road map here and uh I’ll comment on it in minute. just got to go get the actual plan.

don’t want to wing this one. >> Okay, perfect. Perfect.

Um there’s some questions out there in the chat just think. >> Yeah.

Yeah, we have many questions. Hollowos in Brules are always like this.

People are super engaged and we love it. Rest assured guys that we are going to cover them. saw VB VB posted very good summary that tackles on most of the questions that the community have.

We’ll be answering that especially the how the rules for the next season going to play out. what we are going to do about multi-accounting uh infrastructure and automation as well.

So >> yeah, >> think while John pulls uh while John finds the the road map thing, >> uh we can talk bit about the rules and all that. Um we have definitely decided internally to go into the next season with clear written uh guidelines that that’s 100%. >> Yes.

Yes.

This is the must have. The first thing that you guys will see the next time you log into play in the in the next chapter will be these policy rules.

We are exploring uh many many many different rules paths especially to deal with multi accounting etc. One thing that we are discussing and internally John and are particularly thinking about this initiative is that you can’t take resources out of the game. If you do that, we are exploring freezing your account because we are assuming that you are doing that to pile up in your main account to give you unfair advantage of being simultaneously uh farming different accounts and pulling resources to one.

If you want to move resources, you move uh resources through the marketplace in the game. You use the local markets. You use the the the systems that are built in game to move resources around.

What you can do is get them to your wallet and then sending it to your other account bypassing the game rules.

Yes.

So, we are not allow going to allow this. There will be uh we are discussing not allowing this. feel this helps lot with the piling up of resources and etc.

Uh and other way any other scenarios that we see people pulling resources without using uh let’s say legitimate uh gameplay mechanics will be addressed as well. Uh we are still debating internally uh the different uh systems that were used it to do multi accounting and we are surely going to explore each one of them. And whenever we see situations like those we will create rules that will last for the season and if they are breached we’ll freeze the accounts that do this kind of thing.

Yeah, I’m I’m I’m good here. I’m ready. am going to just I’m going to jump into and just say um this will be these kinds of policies will be in lie of game features that don’t rely on that kind of policy.

So, for example, as the game becomes more of an MMO and because like players have better tools for interacting with each other in game, uh we’ll definitely and the game design is better and the reward systems are better and more dynamic. uh we’ll look at um we’ll look at rolling back some of these harsher measures because we don’t one thing we don’t want to do is prevent specific multiplayer game actions from happening. Um the the overarching point here though is that if there is policy in place um against particular thing, it will be written and it will be enforcable and it will be clear at the beginning of the of the chapter what it is.

And um we will do everything we can to make the game design better and to make this fun multiplayer game and also to address the issues that we saw this chapter kind of thing.

So just just a bit of clarifying thing there. Um okay, but just to circle back to performance really quickly. Uh there’s three main things that we’re working on for performance.

The first is um obviously the Starcom versus RPC. The reason we have data inconsistency right now is because we are still using Starcom in some areas and we’ve begun to migrate to RPC and sometimes we get the data from one, sometimes we get it from another and it’s it’s not super clean right now.

That’s one one thing. Um the second major optimization is the user interface. Uh, sorry.

And before move on, the migration to RPC has helped in many ways. Like our data is more reliable than it was last season in specific situations. The game is actually much faster than it was last season.

We just have way more players and way more fleets on the map. If you remember in the in the open beta, we had permanent destruction for the first like 6 weeks of play. >> There were way less fleets on the map.

We didn’t even get to the point where we have this 10,000 fleets that we have now until almost the very end of the chapter and that’s when things started to roll off the rails.

So from fleets on the map perspective, we grew very quickly this chapter, way quicker than we did in the open beta. We did we never saw anything close to this in the uh in the the sack server testing that we did.

So um RPC we need to optimize the data we get from RPC. We need to be very specific about what we get rather than getting big chunks of data and then iterating over it in the browser. Why your CPUs are burning right now.

We’re giving you tons of data and your computer has to sift through all that data to make decision and it has to do it often.

So we want to optimize RPC calls and we want to optimize what data we need to get from that RPC call that will reduce load on the uh on the main thread in the UI. Um, and then another big optimization we can make there is how we display ships on the map.

Right now, we’re showing two factions and your own faction whenever they move. Um, we want to get that to point where we’re only showing you what’s relevant. If we can take 80% of those ships off the map because they’re not relevant to you right now, that will improve your your your game uh speed significantly.

So, that is another optimization route we have. Uh once those things are in place, we want to do some specific things. We want to change the combat UI.

Uh even when the combat system is working flawlessly, you still have full screen that covers what’s happening around you.

We have completely different combat UI designed. And we want we need to bring in um um front-end guy to build it. And that’s on the road map.

uh we want to optimize the route manager and see comments and do want to address them. Why don’t we in include Sly? Why don’t we look at Adam?

Why don’t we uh all of these things um are options. Sly works great. The we had we had an outage on the weekend for two for two days there and while our user interface was down all the ships that were using Sly were working just fine.

It was it was great. It was like very eye openener for me. It was like okay this is like clearly um an issue with our with our Starcom infrastructure and not with the RPC and not with the blockchain and all that.

We maintain 35TPS through broken block like broken front end uh through Starcom. um integrating Sly with our thing or integrating Atom like there’s lot of overhead with taking another team’s codebase and having them come on board with us and and work sidebyside with us. Hollow Sim is super small, super fast moving.

The route manager was never meant to be this big complex thing. And when it works, it works really really well. It it when it works, it works very well.

It keeps people keeps their ships mining. It keeps your uh keeps your transport routes working and um all through the open beta. Uh was able to keep in the top 50 uh just with the route manager.

never I didn’t don’t don’t think played too too degen in the open beta and was keeping in top 50 when it was working and when the the load was lower on the system sort of thing. had hard time keeping in the top 400 this time.

So totally get it. The overhead of integrating thirdparty system is too high for the speed that we’re moving right now.

It’s definitely on my radar. If we can get these optimizations in, the route manager will work again and we’ll put more time into optimizing it.

We will add things like warp.

We will add things like crafting and we will add things that are also identified as like really low effort, high high return sort of stuff.

So, um, and then two other pieces.

No, just one other piece. Uh, we’re going to do specific server side monitoring of certain quest progress. Um, and all that to say, like the quest system wasn’t tuned well this season, and uh, we know how to tune it better.

We’re we’re not going to tie quest progress to things that are flaky. We’re not going to tie them to things that are grindy. The quest system is there to teach new players how to play the game to learn the story of Hollow Sim and to partic to to enjoy the content that uh Jose’s created and and that Sage presents through her, you know, AIS, right?

So, um the there will be much lower barrier to entry to completing quests and moving people through ship progression and you’ll be able to uh buy and sell things in the marketplace sooner if you’re if you’re not the right level, that kind of stuff. Um, so a lot to there’s there’s there’s lot there in the optimization realm but we learned ton about uh about optimization this this chapter.

There’s no other way to put it that like hard knocks uh lots of really key learnings from from what makes this fun and what makes this grind. And we don’t want it to be grind. We want it to be fun.

>> Yep. >> Exactly. And man there’s so much to talk about here.

Another thing John not sure if we can share with them on the multi accounting side of things we are also working with the idea of uh the one of the biggest problems and things that moved people towards multi accounting was crew. Crow was something that we really needed to hear work for this upcoming chapter and we have been thinking about this. One of the mechanics that we are thinking about experimenting with is setting up wages for your crew members.

So this will make you have to work hard to keep those crew members working and this will make uh this will make the players who simply set out accounts to use crew members to be meaningless. And we also thinking about ways where if you have the value you can add crew to your to your fleets without having to resort to multi accounting. for example, having way to buy crew members or certain achievements that will be harder to get but reward crew members.

This is one of the mechanics that we really want to explore and moving forward. As Larino is saying, crew and permits are things that we are revisiting right now and we are also exploring the idea of introducing permade on fleets.

This is also something that we are working with right now. Uh we are going to make of some not some lot of game design changes on resources available in the safe zone and etc. And science think we need another brew honestly because there is we don’t think we covered even half of what we had to say right John >> we covered lot.

Oh yeah. Um yeah, >> have one more thing. One more thing to cover.

>> Uh just an update that we did today.

You can go in the interface uh you can go in the settings interface and you can mark an account voluntarily as an alt account and exclude that account from the leaderboard. that um think that meets the desire of those who have alts who didn’t wish to take away position on the leaderboard from someone else uh to achieve that goal. They can go in there and they can mark their own accounts as alts.

You can choose which account you want to be your main by not marking it an alt.

Okay, that also addresses concern that heard from some people that said, “Well, my alt actually turned into my main through the season. ” Right?

So that you get to choose what your main account was. You go ahead and mark all your other alt accounts. Uh they’ll be removed from the leaderboard rewards.

They’ll be left on the leaderboard so you can see what position they held. And there’ll be tag there that says alt beside that account name. Um and then we will run um campaign similar to the one we did last where we were collecting data with survey.

And you’ll have week to uh link wallet. you’ll have link to week week to mark your account as alt if you want to. And yes, if you unmark it before we take it down, it will like you can switch them around, whatever.

Um, we’ll have week where we have this postseason where people can mark their accounts and stuff. During that time, Chris and are going to go through and look at the data that we learned from accounts marked as alts.

We have some criteria that we’re going to look at and we’ll make further decisions as to whether or not we need to take any action um later, but currently this is voluntary thing. You sign up, you mark your account as an alt, and that is the that is how the leaderboard gets fleshed out. Uh, and then our commitment to you guys is to have better policies, written policies going into chapter 2 and having game systems that don’t encourage alt accounting and having leaderboard positioning systems that uh have diminishing returns for that type of gameplay.

And uh think we can build really strong chapter off of uh off of what we’ve learned here with with PvE engagements and with some real territory control objectives in place.

So >> yep. >> Yeah.

So AOA is asking is it voluntary registering of vaults the only thing that will happen to the leaderboard? Uh the other things can happen as you guys have uh seen. Um, I don’t have don’t have anything else to share at this point about it.

So, at the minimum, anyone who marks their account as as an alt uh will remove those from the leaderboard. They won’t get any that alt account won’t get any prizes on the board and uh other people who are below them will be moved up in in spot.

That’s the only thing can really commit to right now. Uh, need to need to spend more time with Chris and Michael going over the findings to say if there’ll be anything else. Uh, battle passes too.

Well, sorry. What’s the question about battle passes too? Do you mean are there going to be new battle passes next time?

Because there will be new battle passes next chapter.

Yes.

Cool. >> What’s the question there, John? >> Uh, guess >> if we wipe battle passes, think that’s what they were saying.

>> Oh, if we wipe battle passes.

So, the battle pass is going to work.

It’s going to be in effect until the end of chapter 1. And when chapter 2 rolls out, it’ll either be new battle pass or it’ll be the zinc uh subscription service.

So, if the zinc subscription is ready, then it’ll be that and you won’t have to worry about hollow sim specific thing. It’ll be tied in with your zinc account and those earnings. >> Yep.

>> Yep. Yep. >> Will current battle passes roll into sync if it’s out in time?

Um, don’t think they are related for now. >> They’re completely different under the hood.

Yeah, they have nothing to do with each other. Um there’s there’s actually going to be um at least one cosmetic reward for everybody. Uh it’s going to be pretty lighthearted.

So if you do link mainet wallet, you’ll get everyone’s going to get award. Uh Anie is obviously going to get the the faction award for getting to 10 million first. And um but yeah, every everybody’s going to get something.

We have really really cool uh it’s cosmetic, but don’t don’t want to spoil it. can’t say anything. >> Yeah, can’t say anything else without spoiling it.

So, >> yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah.

>> Okay.

Okay. Um Jose, brother, anything else from your side before we we have to close this brew? think we covered lot honestly.

Um >> yeah. have lot to talk about still on hollow scene, but we can leave this to the next holene specific bro. >> Yep.

Yeah. >> think Lero has quick question request. Type fast, Laror.

Fast Lo. >> No, no, you can mark them by We’re going to give you week to mark your accounts. Fine.

She say, “Please don’t leave system that can alter leaderboard so bad. ” No, no, it it’s going to be it’s going to be achievement based, right?

So, you get badge for something, that badge is going to be equally weighted with other badges or or or maybe very little.

So, say you are the guy that has the most combat points and there’s badge for that. The guy who happened to mine his first asteroid that day. He’s he’s going to be have his badge that day and you’re going to have your badge that day.

And like if that’s all you did that day, those are the only points you get there. There won’t be there won’t be way for you to uh game the leaderboard. It will be achievement based and those achievements will all be um those achievements will all be uh attainable by anybody.

complete the first 10,00 players. >> How much time do people have to complete the completionist award? >> That like 6 to 8 weeks, but it there won’t be don’t think there will be 1,000 spots in 6 to 8 weeks.

Uh there’s lot of people on the leaderboard that are approaching completing. Um, yeah.

So, mean, if you think you can do it faster, like go ahead and invite your friends and your family and we’re going to keep we’re going to keep fixing the thing and the performance is going to get better.

So, >> Mhm. >> Um, those yeah, those prizes are up for grabs until they’re gone sort of thing. Uh but yeah, >> and for chapter 2 to start, we don’t really have date yet, right, John?

>> Yep. Correct.

Yeah.

No date. We want to We don’t want to rush things this time. >> Yeah.

>> Chapter one closure uh 6 to 8 weeks, right? >> mean, it it could it could be, but we’re not we’re not setting new season start date right now. Uh we we’re not going to set new season start date until the thing is running smooth.

>> Yeah. And the current season, think we are going to let it run for few weeks still right John? >> Yeah, exactly.

We’re going to let it run for as long as it takes to get it working properly >> to the next season.

Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah.

No plans to take it down. >> And and something that you guys might experience is that we are going to introduce new mechanics, test stuff, so sometimes you’ll be surprised by new stuff happening.

So it’s worth keeping an eye on. >> Yeah. And the the snapshot for the leaderboard will be at midnight UTC tonight, 8:00 p.

m. Eastern. Um, and what you see on that board will change as people register alt accounts and if we take action on any accounts, uh, the the leaderboard will change.

But we’re going to leave it there so you can see, uh, what it was at the time. We’ll we’ll we’ll come back in week and give you guys full rundown of what the leaderboard looks like and then distribute those prizes. How many hours is that time from now?

Uh for it looks like 5 hours. Five. If you look in game, there’s countdown and it should be relevant to your time zone.

It’s just situated at the very bottom center of your screen on the hollow sim page. Perfect. think uh we covered everything.

Um anything, John, from you before we close here? >> Nope. Just uh just really happy to go through all this with you guys.

I know that it was difficult season, but I’m really encouraged by uh your guys’ honest feedback and um just keep it coming and we’ll keep we’ll keep fixing it. >> You’ll keep it working, guys. >> Nice.

Yes. >> Okay.

Well, Doll is in the chat for Xcode and Jose, they’re working hard on Holim and we’re getting things fixed for the next season. Um, you can tell that these guys really listen to feedback and even make changes in real time.

So, thanks everyone for joining. Uh, John, as always, pleasure to have you. We’ll definitely need a part two as we get closer to the next chapter.

So, >> yes, looking forward to >> invited again. >> Thanks, Auntie. >> Awesome.

>> Thank you guys. Have nice week. >> See you guys tomorrow.

Before we go, everybody wish Tuesday happy birthday. Um, he’s spending his time. >> Thank you, bro.

>> With us uh here talking about Him at the Brew.

So, let’s all wish our our penguin here happy birthday. The legend. >> Thank you guys.

really appreciate it.

It’s pleasure and privilege to be here with you all. Another year growing old. At least I’m doing what love.

So >> yes sir, >> it is our pleasure just to to spend time with you, man. Happy birthday, brother. >> Thank you, bro.

Thank you, bro. >> Yeah. >> All right.

>> Thanks everyone. We’ll see you tomorrow at the builder hour and Friday at the game night. >> Bye guys.

See you tomorrow. Bye bye.