Last week I went over a version of how much money you could expect to earn from playing Aurory. While neither this article nor the Aurory article be a definitive expectation of earnings, these are definitely structured for you to be able to edit the numbers to match what they currently are and get a more accurate prediction. We know that crypto is volatile.
Recently, Star Atlas has been updated to have a couple new things to do. One of them is another playable tech demo of the game. It is called Escape Velocity and is played in your web browser. In it, you spawn in one of your ships and fly around to find and collect loot. Some of the prizes you can find are expensive ships, which you could then either enlist in Faction Fleets to earn ATLAS (the game’s native currency) or sell on the marketplace. Because the rewards are not dependable, I will not be including the prizes as part of income calculation in this article.
The other addition that I will mention is their new event called Never Alone. While I have only just begun the event, it appears that, at least initially, it is just a promotional event in which the developers want you to follow all their social media and join their Discord server. There are 6 tiers of events however and I’m still in the “Intro” section, so their claims of being rewarded for my efforts are likely true somehow. Because I have not gone through to find out what the rewards are and because this is a one-time event, I will exclude it from income expectations.
As of right now, the only way of reliably earning ATLAS is through Faction Fleets. As I had explained in my previous article, you buy ships and supplies in the marketplace, enlist those ships with your faction, and supply those ships in order to earn daily ATLAS. What kind of a return can you expect? Let’s dive in.
A couple weeks ago, I bought two of the cheapest “ships” you can buy: a Fimbul Airbike and a Pearce X4. I paid, at the time, 892 and 1,534 ATLAS respectively. For reference, I do not remember what the price of ATLAS was at the time I bought them. At the time of writing this, however, it is going for $0.00219. This means if I paid those amounts today that I would have spent about $1.95 and about $3.36. As eager as I was to enlist both ships, I had to get supplies.
Before I could have my ships earn for me, I needed to supply each of them with ammunition, food, fuel, and toolkits. The good news is that they’re always super cheap. Looking at ammunition at the time of writing this, each unit of ammo costs 0.00215039 ATLAS (seeded by the developer). This means each unit of ammo costs fractions of a penny, $0.0000047093541 to be exact. This means a million units of ammo would cost you about $4.71. My bikes don’t need anything near that, only needing a combined 210 units each day between them. The other resources are a similar story, so I won’t go over those in detail. I bought 10k of each resource.
With my ships and supplies, I could finally enlist them and start earning rewards. After doing so, the fleet management page states that the Fimbul Airbike would earn me 0.735 ATLAS a day while the Pearce X4 would earn me 0.966 ATLAS daily. The catch to this is that each ship needs to be resupplied by the end of their maximum “flight time.” For the Airbike, it’s 21 hours while the Pearce can go for 27 hours.
Let’s assume that I’ll always have them supplied to keep them going with no downtime. This means that, at the current ATLAS rate, I would earn a combined $0.003725! Yeah, it’s not fantastic, and that doesn’t include the cost of buying more supplies when I eventually run out (though it’s super cheap as I have discussed). One thing to keep in mind is the time it would take to finally get a return on this investment. With their earnings, the Fimbul Airbike will pay itself off in approximately 3.32 years and the Pearce X4 in approximately 4.35 years. This means that with their earnings together, it would take about 3.91 years to get back all the ATLAS I’ve spent so far. Now of course this doesn’t take into account my return on USD I’ve spent. This ignores the rate of ATLAS at the time of the initial investment vs. the rate of ATLAS at the time of the return on it. Sadly, I was not keen enough to put the original rate it was at when I made this small investment.
It should be noted that the time for investment return seems to increase as the price for more expensive ships increases. A website that has helped me estimate this can be found here: https://explorer.staratlas.club/ships/staking. It provides a reasonably updated list of the market price of every ship as well as how much each ship will earn. It also takes into account resupply fees, which is nice. Crunch those numbers and you’ll see that buying a bigger ship will earn you bigger daily rewards, but will take so much longer to earn that initial investment back.
Another factor you should know is that seemingly every transaction requires a small amount of SOL. The amount is small, but it’s not just for market transactions and fleet earnings. It’s also to do things like edit information on your player profile. This means that even if you just want to change your display country for where you’re from that you’ll pay 0.000005 SOL in gas fees. Same thing for resupplying your fleets and market transactions. This isn’t anything to panic over though. At Solana’s current rate ($20.85), that’s only $0.00010425 a pop. Sure, it does add up over time… roughly $0.08 a year to resupply my two ships for the whole year. Of course that will change as the price of SOL fluctuates.
Overall: This “game” currently requires you to invest a lot of money, buying many ships in order to earn a decent income. As it currently stands it is nothing more than a promising development of a game. The developers are aiming to have production and other game mechanics in place one day to increase the earning (and spending) potential, but this is just another item on their roadmap. This is not a real, playable game at the moment. They do have playable portions of what is essentially their big picture, but a project of this scale will take time. If you’re looking to earn from your game time, look somewhere else for now.
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