Star Atlas: SCORE — The Complete Guide
On December 16th, 2021 the Star Atlas team released the very first module for their mini-game, titled SCORE — Tier 0. This module enables you -for the first time ever!- to earn money with your spaceships!
It’s important to note right off the bat that this is not yet a Play-2-Earn game, as there is not really that much playing involved. It does however allow you to start earning ATLAS (one of the game’s cryptocurrencies) without requiring you to put in too much effort.
In order to partake in the action, you need to own ships — at least one. Given that you can buy one for as little as $20 (or really 20 USDC) this should be within reach for most of you.
This guide will give you the full overview of everything you need to know to understand what SCORE is, and how to participate!
SCORE — Tier 0
Originally referred to as Ship Missions (the team’s roadmap still does), at some point the team decided they needed a catchier name for their releases. And so SCORE, or Ship Commissions on Remote Expeditions, was born. Do not be fooled however, it is literally a different name for their Ship Missions module.
Like several of Star Atlas NFT’s, their (future) modules also come with a Tier X designation appended to their name. For SCORE, the suffix Tier 0 indicates two things:
- It is the very first iteration of this module
- It is very basic and not yet what the team envisions for a proper “Version 1” (or in this case: Tier 1).
Lore
Despite the peace treaty that was signed between the factions nearly 100 years ago, conflict between the three factions has started to escalate again. To better protect their borders and to try to get an edge in this conflict, each faction is feverishly trying to bolster its forces. To that end, they are asking their people, meaning you, to enlist as many ships as they can spare. To incentivize people to join their cause, they offer them a rich reward (read: ATLAS) in return.
All ships are needed
It’s important to note that it does not matter what roles your ships can (normally) fulfill, nor whether they are attuned to combat. As with most conflicts, besides combat-heavy ships, there is a need for support vessels as well.
Bottom line: All ships can all be used in SCORE.
Rich Reward
How do the factions, or rather the devs, determine the amount of your ATLAS reward? They simply look at the MSRP, or more specifically, at the VWAP value of each ship. Every ship has such a value assigned to it, and the reward is directly proportional to it. It’s also important to note the ratio between VWAP and reward is near-constant for each and every ship model.
VWAP
VWAP, or Volume Weighted Average Price, is derived from the initial average sales price of the ships by the team.
The VWAP of a specific ship can be calculated by dividing the total amount the developers would earn if they sold all their stock (in USDC), by the total size of that stock.
Most ships were sold in several batches (1-3). If you take the batches of a single ship, multiply the price of each batch by its total size, then add these numbers up and divide them by the total size of the batches combined, you will end up with its respective VWAP.
For an overview of the VWAP’s of each ship (and some handy extra information concerning ship pricing), please check out Aephia’s Ship Pricing page.
Reward in ATLAS
Though the VWAP value is expressed in USDC, the reward will be denoted in Star Atlas’ in-game currency: ATLAS. The team has stated that they will occasionally re-balance the amounts rewarded so that the amount of ATLAS you earn will roughly convert into the same amount of USDC throughout SCORE’s lifecycle.
Operating Expenses
You are not just handing over your ships to your faction, you are also required to keep them supplied. As it turns out, in order to stay fully functional, each ship relies on 4 different resources:
Fuel
Basic hydrogen fuel cell replenishment. Low energy density, can be improved with further refinement.
Ammunition
The most basic form of space-grade ballistic ammunition. Compatible with kinetic type slotted weaponry. Weak against energy shielding, effective against hull plating.
Toolkit
A rudimentary multi-function toolkit, effective at hull mending. Compatible with repair drones and crewed EVA tasking.
Food
The latest in molecular gastronomic science. Who knew corn could taste this good? Effective in addressing minor homeostatic crew deficiencies.
It’s your task to keep your ships supplied, while their stock of these resources slowly dwindles. This means you will have to buy additional stock on the Star Atlas Marketplace in order to make sure your fleet remains ready for action.
Airdropped resources
Those of you who owned any ships prior to December 16th will have received a stack of three of the aforementioned resources. This enables you to start SCORE without requiring you to invest additional funds in order to participate in SCORE.
Note that Toolkits were not airdropped, as they are only required to repair your ships. As your ships start out at full health, these are not needed to start SCORE.
The number of resources airdropped should fill all of your ships to their maximum capacity, ensuring you will earn ATLAS before needing to resupply them. This means you will be able to purchase any future resources with the ATLAS you will earn from SCORE. There is no need to purchase additional ATLAS.
Claiming your airdrop
Contrary to most airdrops, the resources do not end up in your wallet automatically. Like with the ships you bought, they need to be claimed on the Inventory page of the Star Atlas website.
Buying more
Airdrop or not, from now on everyone will have to buy additional resources regularly. Due to the ships being actively used by your faction, each resource is depleting over time. Small ships have less space to stockpile these resources compared to bigger ones, so they need to be resupplied more often as well.
You will notice a new tab Resources has been added to the Star Atlas Marketplace. It’s here that you can find and buy all of these.
Running out
If one of your resources (including health) runs out, your ships will stop earning ATLAS. It basically means that your fleet is unable to participate in your faction’s military operations.
You will not lose your ships when your health runs out. Your ships will incur no negative effects at all when you run out of one, or multiple, resources. The only thing you will notice is that ATLAS stops coming in.
Solana fees
The Solana chain works in a way that for each new token you acquire, a new market (sub-)account has to be created on your Solana account (your wallet). By design, there is a fee attached to this process that you will have to pay when you acquire tokens (e.g. fuel, food) for the first time. This fee is roughly 0.023 SOL per market account, which amounts to a little over $4 at the moment of writing. This is charged in addition to the standard SOL gas fee.
Suffice to say that acquiring the four resources required to keep your fleet earning ATLAS, can be an expensive endeavor for those with limited financial means. As this is the way Solana functions, there is unfortunately nothing the Star Atlas developers can do about this. Even though one has to pay these costs only once, if you barely managed to buy a single Pearce X4 or Opal Jet, this can indeed be a significant hurdle!
Reclaiming the fee
It is important to know that this one-time fee can actually be reclaimed when you are no longer interested in holding/trading this token. This is why it is actually called rent. That information may be of limited use at this moment, but at least it means you have the option to one day get this money back. There are a few different spots where you can do this, among which:
WARNING: Do not claim back accounts that are still in use! In case of doubt, do not use this feature! If you do, your assets might end up getting stuck in contracts. Use this only when you know what you are doing!
Buying additional resources
Buying more resources after this initial purchase will cost a much smaller network fee of 0.000005 SOL per transaction. This amounts to roughly $0.0009 which should cause less of a headache.
Enlisting your Fleet
To enlist your ships, go to the Star Atlas game’s website and click the new option that appeared at the bottom of the menu Faction Fleet. This will bring you to a new page where you can optionally choose to read the mission brief. Here you will have to connect your wallet (if you haven’t done so already), after which you should click the Ship Enlistment button.
On the next page, you will see a grid of cards. There should be one card per ship model you own and have not yet enlisted. Note that if you own several ships of the same make and model, these will have been grouped into a single card.
Ship Model Card
This card shows a number of interesting tidbits. At the very top, it shows you artwork and some of the ship’s specs that you can also find on its respective Marketplace page. New information, and more relevant to SCORE is the Resource Efficiency overview that is right beneath.
The efficiency basically tells you the relative speed with which this ship burns through its resources of the specific type, compared to other ships. Note that this does not mean you will need to resupply these more often than the other supplies for this specific ship, as that also depends on its total capacity. It does tell you however that you will spend relatively more money on these compared to other ships.
Beneath this overview is a short flavor text, followed by the button with which you can enlist these ships properly.
Enlistment
When you click the Enlist <X> Ships button, you will get a new overview. Here you can see:
- The number of ships you wish to enlist — by default this will show the total number of ships (of that model) you have available, but you can select a different number if you so choose. Note that there is no maximum to the ships you can enlist.
- A toggle to choose if you want to supply these ships. Choosing not to do this, means you can enlist them, but they will not earn you any ATLAS until you supply these resources at a later point
- An overview of the resources you have in total, the amount you will supply to this ship enlistment, and the amount of time it will take for these to deplete. This is important information! Please take note of the resource that runs out the quickest, you will need to resupply this fleet before that time runs out, or risk the participation of these ships in your faction’s fleet to be suspended.
- Finally, you will see what this fleet will earn you if you manage to keep their resources above 0. This is also where you can find the button to Enlist them properly
When you click the Enlist Fleet button, your wallet will ask you to approve a transaction that will remove the ships and the resources you committed from your wallet. Additionally, you will need to pay some gas (Solana) as this is a blockchain transaction.
Congratulations! Your ships are now earning you ATLAS!
Health
Note that besides the resources you see listed in the Fleet Enlistment overview, there is also the ships’ health to take into consideration. It will run out over time as well (which you will see after enlistment is complete). When your fleet hits 0%, it doesn’t mean that your ships have been destroyed. It however does mean they are damaged to an extent that they can play no part any more in your faction’s efforts, and their activity, therefore, has been suspended.
In order to get your ships back in action, or preferably make sure they never leave it, you will need to spend Toolkits in order to bring their health back up. Check the next section for more information about this!
Faction Fleet
After you enlist your fleet, you will see a card that is rehashing some of the info you encountered before. More importantly, you will see your Pending Rewards in ATLAS and a Claim Atlas button in order to claim these to your account.
Claiming them does not influence your rewards in SCORE at all, so feel free to use this option whenever you feel like it, or are in need of ATLAS. There is no need to claim your reward regularly, it will be here waiting for you forever. Future rebalancing of ATLAS rewards will not influence the amount already earned!
Note that on this overview you see the current state of your ships. If you need to resupply them, or if you want to end their enlistment, you will have to click the Manage Fleet button.
Managing your Fleet
Once you started enlisting ships, after clicking Faction Fleet in the menu, you will now enter an overview page of your enlisted fleets. You can still enlist more ships (different models!) by clicking the Ship Enlistment option at the top.
Each of your fleets shown in this Faction Fleet overview has a Manage Fleet button. Clicking this will open a new card, presenting you with information about this fleet and options to manipulate it.
Re-supply
On the view that opens first, you can see the fleet’s health and the stock levels of the three resources they are using. Here you can choose to repair the fleet and/or re-supply its food, fuel and ammunition.
Above each of the three resources, you will find buttons that take you to their respective Marketplace page so you can buy more. Clicking the Re-supply button beneath one of them will show you an input option where you can enter the amount of these resources you wish to send its way. Note that you can not input a number that would make its total stock exceed its capacity.
Once you are happy with the number, you can click the Apply button to start a blockchain transaction in order to funnel these resources from your wallet to your fleet. This will trigger your wallet’s confirmation dialog to pop up in order for you to approve this transaction.
To make the process of renewing your resources a little easier and save on gas, there is also an option to resupply more than one resource at the same time. To use it, click the Re-supply All button at the bottom right of the card.
Repair
Repairing is done by clicking the Repair Fleet button near the top. This will right away present you with an approval request to spend toolkits. It will try to request the number of toolkits required to fully heal your ships. If you don’t have own enough of these, then the max amount in your wallet will be taken instead.
Note: If you get an error message when you click the Repair Fleet button, make sure you own some Toolkits. Go buy some and make sure to claim them afterwards as well!
Adding ships to your Fleet
In your Fleet Management overview, you can click the Manage Ships in order to update or withdraw your ships. Here you have the possibility to add (new) ships to your fleet. Simply select the number you want to add and click the Update button.
When you add new ships to your fleet, the health of your fleet will increase (as an undamaged ship was added), while the other 3 resource bars will take a proportional hit downwards. Note that none of the resources you supplied actually disappeared. It simply means that the ammunition, food and fuel that was present within this fleet will now be used by more ships. In other words: The total capacity for each resource increased, while the supply stayed the same, leading to the bars (/percentages) for each of these having shrunk.
It’s important to note that newly bought ships can not be enlisted separately if ships of the same model are already enlisted. This means that these ships will not show up in the Enlist Ships overview. You have to go to the existing enlisted fleet and add new ships through the management view.
Withdrawing your Fleet
The Manage Ships view is also where you can withdraw your fleet from its enlistment. Clicking the Withdraw Entire Fleet button will reclaim your ships to your inventory (and wallet). Any remaining supply of resources will also be sent to your inventory, you do not lose these.
Note that you need toolkits in order to be able to withdraw! Upon withdrawing your fleet, you will have to approve a transaction that will consume some of your toolkits. Your ships need to be fully repaired before being able to withdraw them. This is because their damaged state is not saved with the ship but lives entirely in SCORE’s smart contract.
There is no option to withdraw only one (or a few) ships. If this is your desire you will have to withdraw them all and enlist them again, minus the number of ships you wish to keep.
Important: If you accidentally reclaimed the rent on token accounts related to the ship(s) you want to withdraw (see Solana Fees section above), you will run into an error when trying to do so and your ships will remain enlisted. Do not reclaim rent on accounts you still need!
Errors
If you try to withdraw, or re-supply your fleet, and are presented with an error dialog, this is almost always caused by a lack of resources. In case of withdrawing this would mean you do not own enough toolkits to fully heal the fleet. The SCORE program checks beforehand if you own enough resources to complete the chosen action. If this is not the case, instead of seeing your wallet pop up to request confirmation, you will see an error message appear.
In this happens, double-check which resource you are lacking, and acquire some more of these on the Marketplace. Don’t forget to claim them afterwards in your Inventory as well.
The Future
SCORE - Tier 0 is not meant to occupy you for more than half a year. Tier 1 is planned to arrive close to mid-2022 and it will introduce a lot more depth and a more clear mission structure to this game mode. You will have to visit mission-givers and compose the best possible fleets, comprised of various ships, in order to successfully complete them.
For now, however, this is a great first step into the beyond!
In Closing
With the launch of SCORE — Tier 0, your ships are finally able to earn you real money. Gameplay-wise it might be a tiny step, but this is a giant leap for Star Atlas’ economy. Over time this game mode will be refined and adjusted, but we’ll never get back to a point where you can’t earn money with your ships! From here it will only get bigger and better! Enjoy SCORE!
Courtesy of Aephia Industries
If you liked this guide and are looking for more Star Atlas-related news, guides and insights, please visit our website at https://aephia.com.
ABOUT AEPHIA INDUSTRIES
Aephia Industries is one of the corporations, or player organizations, within the Star Atlas metaverse. Inside the (extended) lore of Star Atlas, its primary goal is constructing, servicing, and selling spaceships. In the real world, Aephia’s focus is on helping its members reach their full potential in-game and maximize both profit and enjoyment. Aephia Industries fully embraces the Play & Earn ideal, instead of solely focussing on playing to earn.
Aephia Industries is dedicated to the empowerment of every sentient being — to making interstellar travel accessible to each and every individual so as to help us experience true personal freedom and gain control of our own destiny.
— Aephia Industries — Mission statement
To learn more, visit Aephia Industries’ Discord or check out their website.
ABOUT STAR ATLAS
Star Atlas is a next-gen gaming metaverse emerging from the confluence of state of the art blockchain, real-time graphics, multiplayer video game, and decentralized financial technologies.
Real-time graphics technology using Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite allows for cinematic quality video game visuals. Blockchain technology using the Solana protocol established a largely serverless and secured gameplay experience. Non-fungible tokens obtained and traded within Star Atlas creates an economy that replicates the tangibility of real world assets and ownership. To learn more, visit StarAtlas.com, join a faction at Play.StarAtlas.com and send your spaceships.
