Star Atlas Opens SAGE Phase III: POLIS Governance Arrives and a Solo Campaign Begins

In Brief:

• Star Atlas (official site) has pushed the SAGE C4 public test realm into Phase III, which introduces the POLIS-powered Democracy module along with the prologue of a single-player campaign.
• All test accounts were reset and handed a leaner starter package as part of a rebalance that also slashes warp and subwarp speeds by 67% and limits mining to fleets built for the job.
• zXP accrual on z.ink stays switched on for a limited window, meaning z.ink profile progression is still earned through hours logged in a test build that stands between players and mainnet.

Phase III of the SAGE C4 public test realm is live, putting the POLIS Democracy module in players’ hands for the first time and delivering the first chapter of a single-player campaign.

It arrives after weeks of delay. ATMTA had penciled in an early September window, and during a weekly town hall CEO Michael Wagner said the Phase III checklist sat at roughly 80% complete, with the team shooting for that Thursday, or Friday at the latest. No build shipped in that window.

Democracy module finally opens

Everything hinged on the Democracy module. Billed in July as C4’s first regional governance system and slated for Phase II, it never actually reached testing, and the studio maintained that Phase III would stay locked until the module was done.

Rather than building a general-purpose DAO, the design anchors governance to individual starbases. Players commit POLIS Voting Power to one starbase and vote on that location’s economic settings, crafting fees among them. Rather than fees changing on the spot, votes accumulate across an epoch and take effect once it closes, and if turnout is low the current configuration simply stands instead of a thinly backed change going through.

Territory determines access. A faction must push a region’s King system starbase to Tier 5 to unlock a class of building projects that includes a Diplomatic Wing. With one constructed, players can delegate PVP down from the top-level DAO, provided they also assign crew members to serve as diplomats at a ratio of roughly one crew member per 1,000 PVP. Any fee increases are returned to players according to the size of their diplomatic presence.

Campaign narrowed to a prologue

What became the single-player campaign began as an off-chain build of C4 under Chief Product Officer Danny Floyd, eventually expanding into a full offline mode that teaches the game with no assets on the line. Wagner has raised the idea of charging $4.99 for it, and the studio has indicated it could take over from Holosim as the primary free onboarding route.

Phase III covers only the prologue, which serves double duty as the tutorial and first-time user experience. Five acts follow the prologue in the finished campaign. How many of those acts will be ready by the time C4 hits mainnet is still undecided at ATMTA.

Wipe, and a harder map

Every account was wiped for Phase III. By design, the new starter bundle is thinner than what Phase II offered: instead of finished components, it grants resources, R4, Claim Stakes and a broader assortment of ships, meaning players must work back through Council Rank progression before the advanced gear is available to them.

Product Manager John characterized the phase as where the team puts balance and launch feasibility to the test using realistic numbers for income, recipes, XP, ATLAS emissions, NPCs, travel, map size and resource placement.

Warp and subwarp speeds both fall 67%, with the goal of making a subwarp trip between the map’s two most distant points take about 24 hours. Mining now calls for dedicated mining ships or fleets kitted out with mining rigs; ships without them keep just 5% of the normal rate. Fleets that are destroyed owe respawn fees. Resources now span more sectors and regions, rare materials sit deeper into the MRZ and richness differs by location, so losing key territory can strip a faction of practical access to a resource.

The current plan prices each Council Rank research point at 350 ATLAS on mainnet, and likely during Phase III as well, over 216 points in total — 75,600 ATLAS all told.

What’s behind and ahead

The public test realm went live in late May on the z.ink testnet, a week after the identity-linked SVM layer 1 launched. Roughly 18 months of work sit behind C4, which converts SAGE into a 4X game layering diplomacy over PvE and PvP.

Phase II brought Combat V2, on-chain NPCs via the Nemesis Engine beginning with Jorvik, Cultivation Claims for stimulant production, zXP support and a Goal system. Phase III is set to last 30 days using values near the release candidate, though progression stays accelerated so testers can still hit the top Council Ranks within the month.

Phase IV serves as the release candidate and a launch rehearsal. Nothing achieved there transfers to mainnet, although SAGE: Starbased license XP will grant a head start via a migration formula. ATMTA plans to fix a mainnet date once it judges Phase III ready, followed by a 30 to 45 day campaign spanning C4, the z.ink genesis event, token listings and DeFi integrations. The Starbased front end and its economic incentives are slated to shut down when C4 launches, with assets still able to be withdrawn and bridged to z.ink.

zXP earnings remain active. “Hop in. You have a galaxy to conquer,” Star Atlas wrote in the post announcing the release.