Star Atlas 101 — How Much Can I Earn?
For those newer to Star Atlas, the variety of engagement loops currently available are quite varied, which means there is something for everyone. This is also true when it comes to generating a return from Star Atlas assets, with a few different choices available today, all with different rates of return.
Please keep in mind that your specific return can vary wildly based on many factors. The examples in this article are purely for illustrative purposes.
In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the most common types of assets widely available today, and the return that they generate. We’ll walk through:
- Ship Staking in Faction Fleet (Low Return)
- Claim Stake Staking in Faction Claims (Medium Return)
- Armstrong Imp Ships in Faction Fleet & Faction Claims (Low to High Return)
- Mining, Manufacturing and Scanning in SAGE (Medium to High Return)
If you are new, we would also recommend that you take a look at a couple of other articles outlining some of the basics and terminology that we’ll use here. If you prefer to focus more on gameplay and less on a financial return, you can absolutely do so in the Star Atlas game on the Epic Store!
Article: Current Gameplay Options in Star Atlas
Article: I have $20, what can I do in Star Atlas?
This article is for educational purposes only, and does not constitute financial advice. Keep in mind that any example return shown here may vary based on your specific scenario and Marketplace price fluctuations. Please do your own research before making any financial decisions. While financial return can be an important consideration, Galia Crafters also advocates that every participant finds the game loop(s) that are simply the most fun for them.
Ship Staking in Faction Fleet
Current Relative Rate of Return: Low
Faction Fleet has been around for a while now, and ship staking is relatively straightforward. Keep in mind however that this is not the long-term path, as Faction Fleet rewards are being reduced to transition players into SAGE.
Faction Fleet allows the staking of any Star Atlas ship, and each ship uses up R4 to produce ATLAS. Each ship consumes a different amount of R4, and each ship produces a different amount of ATLAS.
To calculate the ROI for Faction Fleet, these are the three numbers we want to look at:
Purchase Price: The price at which you purchased the ship.
R4 Consumption: How much R4 the ship consumes in Faction Fleet.
ATLAS Reward: How much ATLAS the ship generates when it has resources to consume.
Let’s take a look at an example ship, the Rainbow Om. In the first screenshot, we can see that it generates 74.802 ATLAS per day:
In the next screenshot, we can see the R4 consumption:
ROI Calculation: For the Rainbow Om, let’s first convert the R4 consumption into daily values, so that it’s easy to compare it against the ATLAS reward.
Fuel: 1.39 Fuel per minute = 2001.6 Fuel per day consumed
Food: 2.44 Food per minute = 3513.6 Food per day consumed
Ammo: 2.21 Ammo per minute = 3182.4 Ammo per day consumed
Toolkits: 2.67 Toolkits per minute = 3844.8 Toolkits per day consumed
We would then want to convert these numbers into the cost of ATLAS, assuming that we are buying the R4 needed. At the time of writing, the daily R4 consumed by the Om comes out to 29.16 ATLAS worth of R4.
If we take the daily reward of 78.802 ATLAS and subtract the 29.16 ATLAS cost, we arrive at a net return of 49.642 ATLAS per day, per Om.
If we extrapolate this to an annual number, that is 18,119.33 ATLAS per year. Converted into USDC, that is $92.65. If our purchase price for the Om was $850, that gives us a 10.9% annualized return.
Please keep in mind that the rate of return can change based on many factors, and Faction Fleet will not be around in the long term.
To make life easier, various members in the community have created tools to help see the rate of return. One tool we’ve found to generally be accurate is RedSpatula. You can see an example for the Om below, which is close to our manual calculation above:
You can access the RedSpatula site here.
Galia Crafters is not affiliated with RedSpatula, and refer to it simply as an example site.
Claim Stake Staking in Faction Claims
Current Relative Rate of Return: Medium
Claim Stakes are another type of asset in Star Atlas. In future iterations, they will be deployable by players to help with the extraction of resources. Today, Claim Stakes can be staked in the Faction Claims area to produce R4.
For Claim Stakes, there are only two numbers we need to think about:
Purchase Price: The price at which you purchased the Claim Stake.
Emissions: The rate at which R4 is produced by the Claim Stake.
There are 5 tiers of Claim Stakes, Tier 1 through Tier 5. Each tier produces different amounts of R4, and so have different costs. Tier 1 Claim Stakes are the lowest cost; at the time of writing, they are ~$45 USDC on the market. Tier 5 Claim Stakes, by comparison, are much fewer, with the only listing on the Marketplace going for ~$7000 USDC.
Let’s look at an example of a Tier 2 Claim Stake:
Here, we can see the emissions rate for each of the R4 resources. On a daily basis, this comes out to:
Food: 11,923.2 Food per day
Fuel: 11,001.6 Fuel per day
Ammo: 12,384 Ammo per day
Tools: 12,844.8 Toolkits per day
Since Claim Stakes produce R4, part of your calculation will depend on what you plan on doing with the R4; are you keeping it, crafting with it, using it for your ships, or selling it?
Let’s assume that you are selling it on the Marketplace immediately, filling buy orders (this is the least profitable but most immediate path). If we look at the ATLAS equivalent of these resources, each Tier 2 Claim Stake produces 109.75 ATLAS’ worth of R4.
On an annualized basis and converted to USDC, each Tier 2 Claim Stake produces $201.97 USDC worth of R4.
If our purchase price of a Tier 2 Claim Stake was $240, this gives the Tier 2 Claim Stake an annualized return of 84.15%.
The above calculation does not include Marketplace taxes, which will vary based on if/how much ATLAS you have staked. Full Marketplace tax is 6%.
Armstrong Imp Ships in Faction Fleet & Faction Claims
Current Relative Rate of Return: Low (Faction Fleet) to High (Faction Claims)
Currently, the Armstrong mining ships are unique in that they either be staked in Faction Fleet like a Star Atlas ship, or in Faction Claims like a Claim Stake. In Faction Fleet, they consume R4 and generate ATLAS. In Faction Claims, they generate R4.
There are three Armstrong Imp ships; the Imp Tip (Small), Imp Tap (Medium), and the Imp (Capital).
Here’s an example comparison using the Imp Tip.
Purchase Price: $295
Faction Fleet: On a daily basis, an Imp Tip generates net 21.3 ATLAS, after taking into consideration the R4 consumption. Annualized and converted into USDC, this is ~$39 of ATLAS rewards, giving us an annualized return of 13.2%.
Faction Claims: On a daily basis, an Imp Tip generates 200.63 ATLAS worth of R4. Annualized and converted to USDC, this is ~$368 of R4 generated per year, giving us an annualized return of 124.7%.
For the Armstrong Imp ships, it is clearly more advantageous right now to put them into Faction Claims, if passive staking is your focus.
Armstrong Imp ships can also be used in SAGE, and carry the unique aspect that they do not consume Ammunition when mining. If you are interested in Armstrong Imp ships for mining, it’s recommended you look at your fleet and determine if it’s better to have them mining, or staked in Faction Claims; you may find in certain cases that their output in Faction Claims is higher than any savings or efficiency in SAGE mining.
The above calculations do not include Marketplace taxes, which will vary based on if/how much ATLAS you have staked. Full Marketplace tax is 6%.
Mining, Manufacturing and Scanning in SAGE
Current Relative Rate of Return: Medium (Mining, Manufacturing and Scanning Independently) to High (Mining + Manufacturing)
Both Faction Fleet and Faction Claims mentioned earlier are more passive game loops. SAGE, on the other hand, is an active game loop; your return will depend heavily on the assets you place into SAGE and the attention you give it. For this reason, every single participant will have a different rate of return, even if they are using the same ships.
If you haven’t already, we would suggest you read our articles covering the basics of Mining and Manufacturing in SAGE. This will help you get a sense of the mechanics available. Scanning is another mechanic available in SAGE.
On the topic of calculating a return, one of the first decisions you make is if your ships will be mining, manufacturing, scanning, or a combination. When you transfer your ships to SAGE, both your ships and the accompanying crew will be available. If you send your ships to mine or scan, their crews will be unavailable for manufacturing. If you set your crews to manufacture, the corresponding ships won’t be available for mining or scanning.
Depending on the size of your fleet, you can of course do a combination. For example, part of your fleet can mine while the other part does manufacturing, or you could send all of your fleet to mine and then start a manufacturing cycle overnight. You can have entirely separate fleets focused on scanning. The flexibility is yours, and depends heavily on your fleet and preferences.
Mining returns primarily come from selling any materials your fleet has mined. This can be somewhat of a simpler game loop, as all you need to do is mine the resource, bring it back to a CSS, and sell it. However, it also can be less profitable to sell the raw materials since that is the bottom of the production chain.
Let’s use the same numbers and example from our prior Mining article:
Let’s focus on the Iron Ore line. This gives us a net profit per trip of 365 ATLAS. This particular fleet can mine this amount in 162 minutes, and in a working day can do at least 4 trips. On an annualized basis and converted to USDC, this is about $2600, which increases with more trips per day that you can squeeze in. The ships in this fleet were purchased for roughly $7300, which gives us a conservative annualized return of 35.6%, for mining this particular resource at these particular market prices. Because this fleet’s crew does crafting overnight, this annualized return is only part of the overall return for the fleet. Additionally, higher returns are possible by using different ships in the fleet, and/or mining different resources.
Manufacturing returns primarily come from the profit margin of crafting components and items. As noted in our manufacturing article, there are many production chains available today based on the various recipes available.
Because manufacturing requires crew, those who want to specialize in manufacturing should generally lean towards assembling as many crew as possible. This can mean focusing on the Star Atlas ships that have the highest crew to cost ratio.
For example, currently, an Airbike with 1 crew member can be bought from the Marketplace for $9.60. A Pearce R8 with 15 crew is listed for $2950. These ships serve very different purposes in future gameplay and stats, but if we are looking purely at the cost of acquiring crew for crafting, then it’s clear that the XX-Small ships like the Airbike are the most cost-efficient at this time.
Once you have crew, you’ll want to decide what you want to produce. One community tool we would recommend is Eveeye, which has a handy calculator looking at current market rates.
Galia Crafters is not affiliated with Eveeye, and refer to it simply as an example site.
Let’s look at an example using Copper Wire:
What this image shows us are the going rates for 100k units of Copper Wire, along with the production costs.
Note that this assumes you are buying all of the materials through the Marketplace, and not producing your own through mining.
In this manufacturing chain, Copper Ore is crafted into Copper, which can then be crafted into Copper Wire. As a manufacturer, you can obtain the raw material (Copper Ore), or obtain Copper. Each stage of manufacturing provides a margin, so your decision will be how far up or down the production chain you want to start. Let’s break this down:
Starting from Copper Ore means that in order to craft 100k of Copper Wire, we need to buy 100k of Copper Ore, produce that into 100k of Copper, then into 100k of Copper Wire.
The Eveeye calculator includes a place to put in your crew numbers, which we have set to 10 for this example. Let’s look at the box showing Copper Ore:
This indicates that with 10 crew, it will take a total of 179 ATLAS to buy the Copper Ore, pay the crafting fee, and the job will be completed in 13 hours and 53 minutes. We can compare this with the market price of Copper Wire:
This shows us that we could sell 100k of Copper Wire immediately into a buy order for 201 ATLAS, or list it for sale at the lowest current price for 229 ATLAS.
Note that the Eveeye tool currently looks at the prices of the market buy/sell orders, not the quantity. It’s always a good idea to check yourself what quantities people are buying on the Marketplace to ensure your order size can be filled.
Let’s say we fill the buy order, and sell our 100k of Copper Wire for 201 ATLAS. This means that on this specific order only, our profit margin is 10.1%. If we annualize this number against the 10 ships we needed for the crew (assuming you are crafting round the clock and prices stayed the same), we get an annualized return of 71.9%.
Starting from Copper instead of Copper Ore means you get to skip a step, as you do not have to craft the Copper Ore into Copper first. Here, we can look at the box from Eveeye for Copper:
We see that in this case, it costs 190 ATLAS for the materials and the crafting fee, and takes 11 hours and 6 minutes. Using the same market prices for Copper Wire as above, this gets us a profit margin of 5.5% for this trade, or an annualized return of 45.7%. Generally speaking, crafting from the raw resource provides better margins than from a downstream component, even if it takes longer overall.
As you can see from this example with Copper Wire, you’ll want to consider both the price margin, but also the time element. Some components take a much longer time, relatively speaking, to craft. Thus, you’ll always want to make sure that it’s worth it to you. A crafting opportunity with a 20% profit margin that takes 24 hours to do may not be as great as a crafting opportunity with a 10% profit margin that only takes 6 hours to do. You’ll want to take a look at your specific fleet to decide the best options.
Mining + Manufacturing may be something to consider if you happen to be interested in both. This can help boost your margins as you are not buying materials from others on the Marketplace. Generally speaking, this is most optimal if you have maximized efficiency in your mining fleet and have the lowest cost of production. This can also help maximize your fleets such as if you mine during the day and craft through the night. The annualized return of Mining + Manufacturing is generally higher than just mining or just manufacturing.
Scanning is another game loop currently available in SAGE. There is a highly variable rate of return for scanning due to the chance-based nature of this activity. Additionally, certain ships specialized for scanning have a completely different rate of return. However, it’s worthy to note that scanning can be done with even a single XX-Small ship, which means it can produce returns for the smallest of fleets. We won’t cover scanning in-depth in this article due to the high variability of this activity. Generally speaking, we see those in the community getting medium rates of return when conduction scanning. If you have any specific questions on Scanning and its ROI, please ask in the Economics channel in the Star Atlas Discord!
The above calculations do not include Marketplace taxes, which will vary based on if/how much ATLAS you have staked. Full Marketplace tax is 6%.
We hope that this guide helps introduce some of the concepts of the current ROI by game loop within Star Atlas. At Galia Crafters, we believe that fun, engaging gameplay can go hand in hand with financial returns, which is why we are long-time participants in Star Atlas.
Whatever it is that you enjoy doing, explore, try things out, and have fun!
