Star Atlas Roadmap Update — April 29, 2022

Today’s Star Atlas roadmap revealed the very first glimpses of gameplay for the upcoming SCREAM module set to be released this year. SCREAM is Star Atlas’ successor to SCORE and promises to bring players a more comprehensive gameplay structure and economic rewards.

Before we dive into the weekly roadmap update, we highly recommend you check out the introductory lore section in the roadmap. This week’s lore piece features an exciting engagement between Lt Wenn’s Busan Thrill of Life and a pair of Tufa Feist ambushers.

SCREAM Showcase

First things first, the biggest update from today was the show case of two very short developmental prototype clips of the base SCREAM module. If you haven’t seen them yet, head to this weeks roadmap to check them out. They’re in the Project SCREAM 1.0 section.

In the first clip, we get our first look at the prototype for what appears to be the initial SCREAM system and galaxy maps.

We casually see a ship flying towards the system’s warp gate. In the background, we see multiple planetary bodies orbiting a single star. Near the star, what appears to be a manufactured space station hangs in synchronous orbit.

For players of the grand strategy game Stellaris, the system map will feel pretty familiar. In Stellaris, fleets of ships are directed throughout the system in the same click and direct manner displayed in the teaser clip. As fleets move within a predetermined range of other fleets, stations, and planets, they are able to undertake a variety of actions. Ship size, speed, as well as system gravitational effects, all play a role in how effective a fleet is at moving across a star system.

As the clip progresses, we see the main ship take a warp gate out of the system. The camera zooms out to reveal the galaxy level map. This map, likely in a prototype stage, roughly resembles previously released map images of the faction safe zones, medium risk zones, and high risk zones.

The second clip shows a similar chain of events from a different perspective. We see a ship take a warp gate as the camera zooms to a bird’s eye view of the galaxy. While it is difficult to accurately determine based of the footage, it would appear that the ship was able to travel from Ono controlled space directly to the High Risk Zone. Perhaps there are shortcuts throughout the Star Atlas galaxy.

For a long time, SCREAM developers Chypto and Bunthius have said that parts of the module will be heavily influenced by the game Stellaris. We can see from the clips that the system and galaxy maps heavily resemble that model. Additionally, the movement mechanics of the ships also appear to mirror that of ships in Stellaris.

What we don’t know, however, is what actual mission gameplay will be in SCREAM. Mining isn’t exactly an activity in Stellaris and previous reports on SCREAM indicate that this may not be an available activity upon initial release. Combat in Stellaris is based upon a complex equation based on ship types, armor, shields, weapons, modules, and more. Here we surmise that based on Stellaris gameplay and previous comments made by the Star Atlas dev team, players will have to pay special attention to the equipment on board their ships prior to deploying them for a mission.

Hopefully it won’t be too long before additional details are released about SCREAM. Reading the room, players are looking to jump into the action.

Additional Updates

In addition to the massive SCREAM reveal, the roadmap had a few other updates to ongoing projects.

The usual System Polishing updated fixed a number of known bugs.

The DAO Project is completely in the building phase. This week a new term, GATE program, was included in the product updates.

Lastly, a new section on “Infrastructure” was added to the update section. In this case, infrastructure appears to refer to Star Atlas’ ability to manage large data flows and connectivity across its servers.