Star Atlas hands its next C4 playtest an AI guide named SAGE

In Brief:

• Star Atlas (official site) said an AI assistant called SAGE will help players during an upcoming C4 playtest in Star Atlas: Golden Era.
• C4 has been on a public test realm since late May, running on the z.ink testnet, with Phase Two adding Combat V2, the Nemesis Engine and Cultivation Claims in July.
• ATMTA plans to announce a mainnet date once Phase 3 is ready, then run a 30 to 45 day campaign covering C4, the z.ink genesis event, token listings and DeFi integrations.

Star Atlas is putting an AI assistant in front of players for the next round of C4 testing.

“Let SAGE (AI) help you navigate the stars in our upcoming C4 playtest, in Star Atlas: Golden Era,” the studio posted on X, linking to sage.staratlas.com.

The acronym does double duty. SAGE is the game, Star Atlas: Golden Era, and SAGE is also the name of the assistant the studio wants players to lean on while testing it.

Where the assistant came from

The AI first showed up in Holosim, the free-to-play version of SAGE Labs, where it greets players at holosim.staratlas.com and walks them through character creation and faction selection. It’s pitched as a personal assistant trained on Star Atlas material, aimed mostly at new players. Route Manager automation tools and a tutorial system shipped alongside it.

ATMTA has been building toward AI companions since its partnership with the ASI Alliance and SingularityNET, founded by Dr. Ben Goertzel. That deal included “Virtual Companions,” described at the time as the foundation for AI assistants that support players.

What C4 already is

The C4 public test realm went live in late May during a town hall, following a closed beta, on the z.ink testnet that launched the week before. It’s the biggest SAGE update so far, the product of about a year and a half of work and the studio’s first major product update in two years.

C4 turns SAGE into a full 4X game. Exploration, expansion, exploitation and extermination, with PvE and PvP opponents and a diplomatic layer stacked on top of the simpler Starbased build.

Phase Two landed in July with six features. Combat V2 reworked fighting. The Nemesis Engine powers on-chain NPCs starting with Jorvik, creating a standing enemy presence and laying groundwork for piracy and resource transfers. Cultivation Claims generate unique resources that feed in-game stimulant production. Rounding out the package: a Democracy Module for localized governance, zXP support and a Goal system.

The first Jorvik pirate fleets reached the PTR recently. But the Democracy Module, which lets players set Starbase fees and collect revenue, hasn’t been exposed for testing yet. Michael, ATMTA’s chief executive, said it should arrive “pretty soon.”

Economy still being tuned

C4 currently carries more than 100 mineable resources and roughly 5,600 recipe combinations. Michael has said he’d prefer a much smaller resource set in the Safe Zone, closer to what Starbased offered, to push players into the Medium Risk Zone for the rest. That’s his design preference, not a settled decision.

He also cleared up the naming. The team now calls the perpetual browser game simply SAGE, dropping SAGE Labs and SAGE Starbased, since “SAGE C4” is only the project name.

Phase 3 and the road to mainnet

Phase 3 bridges cNFT crew to z.ink as Token-2022 NFTs for trainable missions. José, who handles lore and community, has demoed the back-end interface for building those missions, which can be added per region, system or planet, gated by local conditions or prior completions, with required payment assets and rewards paid in XP, ATLAS, resources and components.

Once Phase 3 is ready, ATMTA plans to set the mainnet date and start a 30 to 45 day launch campaign spanning C4, the z.ink genesis event, token listings and DeFi integrations. Michael estimated mainnet at two to three months out.

z.ink itself is an identity-linked SVM Layer 1 built by the Star Atlas team. The network, bridge and developer documentation are live in public testnet, and the team is looking for validator, RPC and hardware partners. Airdrop season is slated to start in September.

Jacob, the studio’s chief technology officer, said bridges are among the industry’s biggest security risks. The z.ink bridge is open for live testing but remains in a testnet phase rather than production-hardened. A bug bounty is under consideration; Jacob said the team isn’t positioned to fund an external audit.

The play portal, meanwhile, still reads: “PUBLIC TEST ACTIVE · C4 SYSTEMS LOADING.”