What is Star Atlas?
Star Atlas is a multiplayer gaming metaverse with a space theme, based on the Solana blockchain. It was developed by Automata and allows players to "join forces, organize, and venture into uncharted territories," according to the business paper.
Star Atlas, whose first token generation event launches in August 2021, features in-game assets that embed the concept of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), allowing players to own full ownership of their unique assets and generate income with them. More specifically, every item in Star Atlas is an NFT recorded on the blockchain.
This post is part of CoinDesk's Metaverse week
Star Atlas has two tokens that govern all game operations, POLIS and ATLAS.
POLIS is the governance token with a market cap of $14 million and ATLAS is the payment token with a market cap of $18 million, according to data from CoinGecko.
Players purchase ships, NFT-based spacecraft used to explore space, from the in-house marketplace to start the game. These spaceships, with varying details, crews and components, are crucial to a player's ability to battle rival factions and discover assets scattered across the Star Atlas metaverse.
Star Atlas GameplayAccording to
thegame's
lore
, theyear is 2620 and there are three unique factions: MUD, Ustur and ONI.
The MUD territory, ruled by humans, is known for its firepower; the Ustur sector, controlled by sentient androids, is known for its hull strength; and the ONI region, an amalgamation of alien races, is known for its diplomacy.
The player chooses one of the three factions, an irreversible choice for their respective wallets, and participates in the constant battle for space exploration, territory conquest and political domination that takes place in Star Atlas.
The Star Atlas team releases their gameplay in modules, and the only available module to play is their mini-game titled "SCORE - Tier 0".
In SCORE, players can use their assets and earn ATLAS by recruiting their starships to support their faction's side in the conflict.
Once recruited, players must supply their starships with enough fuel, ammunition, tools and food to keep their fleets fully operational.
Players can buy and sell game goods such as ships and resources in the Star Atlas marketplace. USDC can be used as payment to exchange goods in the game, but ATLAS is the predominant currency in the NFT marketplace.
The most annoying feature?
In my experience, the most annoying feature of Star Atlas is the need for active management when resupplying ships.
While there were a few times when I was able to resupply my starships without a problem, it happened more often than I would have liked that I tried to resupply my ship and the transaction failed, so I had to try again.
Sometimes I had to try several times over long periods of time to successfully resupply my one ship.
For players who only have one ship, the process of resupplying can be bearable, but for others who have multiple ships in their fleet, resupplying can be extremely tedious and cumbersome because players do not have the ability to resupply their entire fleet at once.
I went to the Star Atlas Discord channel to discuss my dilemma: The problem was frequently discussed there by players.
Several times a week, players in the Star Atlas Discord would bring up the problem of resupplying their ships.
There is a community tool that allows one-click resupply, but the official Star Atlas team has not developed it and only offers players the option to resupply one ship at a time.
Moreover, the problem of resupplying one's ships gets worse when Solana faces overload issues, and worse, players can't resupply or participate in the Star Atlas world when there is a Solana blockchain outage, which has happened several times.
Also, it was annoying to load my Solana Phantom wallet with enough money to participate. Without SOL in my phantom wallet, I was unable to choose a faction as a player because this first action step requires a small SOL fee.
When I attempted to send SOL from Coinbase to my Phantom wallet, Coinbase reported, "Due to intermittent degraded performance of the external SOL network, sending/receiving may fail at elevated rates." Just as with my ship's supply, I was only able to deposit SOL into my phantom wallet after several attempts.
Biggest surprise?
What surprised me the most was that the gameplay of Star Atlas SCORE is just players buying ships, adding them to their faction's fleet, earning ATLAS, and resupplying ships with in-game resources, because I don't normally associate the use of money with the game.
The Star Atlas guild and the majority shareholder of the creator of Star Atlas, Aephia Industries, made similar comments in their SCORE guide: "Star Atlas is not yet a Play-2-Earn game because it doesn't really have much to do with gaming."
Moreover, I initially thought the game would be more than what it currently is based on three metrics: a combined market cap of POLIS and ATLAS of about $32 million, a player base of more than 95,000 users, and a cumulative total value of more than $105 million USDC for the three factions.
With millions of dollars and nearly 100,000 players, I had expected a more extensive game offering and was surprised to learn that the current game offering is limited to a mini-game.
While the POLIS and ATLAS market cap data comes from CoinGecko, the other statistics are proprietary data taken directly from the Star Atlas faction page. In addition, the metric for Star Atlas' sizable player base does not indicate whether the number of players is for a specific day, week, month, or all of time.
The Future of the Star Atlas MetaverseTo
address
thelack of
extensive gameplay, the Star Atlas team announced on May 13 its next major browser gameplay module, SCREAM, an acronym
that standsfor "Ship Configuration, Resource Acquisition and Missions
."SCREAM "will be the first time players can use their ships to fight for their faction's future, with fun, active, repeatable, on-chain gameplay with earning opportunities," Star Atlas said in its latest release. "Our features are executed and resolved on the blockchain, from attacking starbases to harvesting resources and even the location of your fleets," the team added.
While players in SCORE will be rewarded for adding their ships to their faction's fleet, players in SCREAM will be rewarded in proportion to the value they have generated for their faction through their actions in wars and battles.
When SCREAM launches in a few months, SCORE will be slowly phased out, according to Aephia Industries.
Best feature?
Star Atlas' best feature is its community.
The Star Atlas community on Discord has more than 172,000 members, where someone is available to chat at almost any time of day, while the Twitter account has more than 300,000 followers, where thousands of people regularly join their Twitter Spaces, such as the one on May 20.
Not only did I receive technical support every time I needed help navigating Star Atlas, but I also experienced an inclusive community where players found it easy to feel part of the overall Star Atlas community.
Every time someone answered my gameplay questions and eased my problems, I was grateful that someone cared enough to help me play the game properly.
It also helps that the official Star Atlas team posts updates on their Medium page to facilitate community engagement and support.
There's no official gameplay yet, but players are still getting involved, whether it's in-game, on Discord, or Twitter.
Community is the heart and soul of legitimate Web 3 organizations, and based on the demonstrated care that Star Atlas community members take, it's easy to see that they are Star Atlas' best feature.
All in all, Star Atlas wasn't my favorite game to play at the moment because of the limited gameplay and the problems I had keeping my ships stocked with supplies. Still, it was nice to be a part of the Star Atlas community, so I'm excited to see how Star Atlas develops in the near future.
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Rather than allowing players to port weapons or powers between games, non-fungible tokens will serve as building blocks for new games and virtual worlds
. The Metaverse Will Make Gamers of Us All Essentially,the "Metaverse" is a game - but one with real-world consequences and possibilities
. What can you do in the Metaverse in 2022?The future possibilities of the Metaverse are probably limitless, but is there anything you can do in the Metaverse right now?