On September 12th, the Star Atlas community can look forward to seeing Crew Cards utility go live in browser-based strategy game, SAGE Labs.
What Are Crew Cards?
Crew Cards will now represent individual units that are no longer tied directly to any ship, but will now be their own NFTs that you choose to assign to the ships of your choice. Each of these Cards belongs to one of 7 different species, and as such come with different background stories: Sogmians, Mierese, Punaabs, Usturs, Manus Ultima Divina (MUD), Photoli or Tufa. They’re split into rarity tiers but also categorized into 7 different crew aptitudes, which determines their main role through randomly-generated abilities and talents, meaning that crew members can belong to one of the following aptitudes: Command, Flight, Engineering, Medical, Scientist, Operator and Hospitality.
If you want your crew to operate at their optimal level, you’ll want its members to be assigned to their natural roles. By adding a Crew Card with a Medical aptitude to the Medical role, the crew’s experience in that role will grow faster.
Initial Crew Card Utility in SAGE Labs
Back in July when we discussed the utility of these assets when the Star Atlas airdrop and Crew Pack sale were about to take place in August, it was revealed that increasing crafting efficiency would be one of the first utilities to come to SAGE, with more to be added over time as the web3 game continues to be expanded upon with new features. So, for now, the more crew members you have, the higher your crafting efficiency. Eventually though, these cards should end up increasing production levels while also improving aptitude efficiency, as mentioned earlier.
If you haven’t already done it yourself, then on Thursday, September 12th, when utility for these assets get enabled, the game will destroy all fleets and send them back to the Central Space Station for you to setup the fleets again properly. You can already import and withdraw Crew Cards to and from SAGE, with a recent Discord announcement revealing that doing this process will be made easier once the team adds some enhancements during this week. One of those improvements seems to be the launch of a script linked in their Discord server, which makes it easier for players 1000+ crew move plenty of crew members from Ledger to the game, while adding the ability to transfer SAGE profile authority to another wallet.
Outside of SAGE, Crew Cards are set to act as in-game avatars for the Unreal Engine 5 R2.2 release so you can set up your own trainable crew on your spaceship as you enjoy RPG-like gameplay on the mobile app.
Last month, a snapshot took place to not only reward ship holders with Crew Packs, but eventually with Component Bundles too. More info on the latter was revealed in August, so let’s have a look at what that is all about.
What Are Component Bundles?
Component Bundles consist of a group of higher-tier ship parts and weapons that would previously be considered part of the ship itself, but just like crew members, that is no longer the case. While Crew Packs have already been airdropped, the free bonus of Component Bundles will be given to eligible holders at a later date, likely closer to when a new feature releases to give them a use case. That being said, those who get the bundle airdrop will be able to convert it into individual components once the complete Ship Configuration Protocol goes live. Holders will still get to choose whether they want to do that or trade the bundles at the galactic marketplace instead.
Components come in different tiers, and the below table shows various different bundles and the tiers of their ship parts:
This means that, since the snapshot date has already taken place, anyone looking to buy a Star Atlas ship from the marketplace will only be getting the standard asset: Ship Hull, which consists of Tier 0 components, utility rigs, and interior elements. Tier 0 parts are not tradable but simply replaced when you equip a higher-tier asset, and they include the power core, shield generators, hull reinforcement, warp drive, sub-engine, main thrusters, heat sinks, scanner array, and tractor beams. You don’t get weapons, modules, or crew included in your purchase, so you’ll have to buy additional parts separately to further tailor your vessel to your liking.
All ships are semi-fungible tokens for now as they have the same in-game stats, but in the future, once the Ship Configuration Protocol launches, they will become NFTs as you will have the option to adjust parts and upgrade them to suit your playstyle. The 6 parts in the table below are crucial to how your ship works:
Overall, the Ship Configuration Protocol will open the way to numerous strategies for building ships while enabling a new economy by letting Star Atlas players use in-game crafting features to create core components, weapons, and modules that can be traded on the marketplace.
Full details on the near future of Star Atlas ships can be found in this Medium post.
