Where is it now? Starbound Edition

Starbound from Chucklefish (www.playstarbound.com) was another sandbox game that I was greatly looking forward to a few years ago. I first learned of it because of Terraria, another sandbox title from Re-Logic and a game into which I had poured hundreds of hours. Tiyuri (Finn Brice) was the main sprite artist working on Terraria until around the beginning of January 2012, after which he started up Chucklefish and work on Starbound began.

My love for Terraria at the time, along with my general love of science fiction, had me salivating over anything related to Starbound, though it would be well over another year before I could play the alpha, which became available in December 2013. I promptly threw money at the screen, downloaded it, and got a few friends to get it as well to play together. I left a server running on my local machine so they could play while I wasn’t around, which contributed to my inflated playtime on Steam.

The game was fun to play, even while not really having a lot to do. In fact, a lot of what was available was simply there as a placeholder until the content was developed proper. You could explore planets, fight creatures, craft, and fight bosses (which were definitely placeholders), but there wasn’t much to do other than that. The game’s progression would actually be complete redesigned eventually, following a more quest based approach. After exhausting the limited available content, I shelved the game, opting to wait until the game was more complete.

I only vaguely followed the progress of the game over the next few months. While the unstable branch of the game was was being regularly updated, the stable branch went for about 10 months without having an update pushed to it, which occurred in January 2015. It was at this point that I picked up the game again to try it out.

I’d say the number one thing that improved in the game was the progression, or flow, with certain features being more or less locked behind quests or missions to be completed. One could argue that this detracts from the sandbox nature of the game, but you have to remember that even Terraria and Minecraft had a certain level of progression. In the case of Terraria, you had to defeat certain bosses or craft certain items in order to progress through the game, while with Minecraft, it was through progressively better mining tools. I won’t spoil it for you, but having story based missions that culminate in a boss fight in the end are infinitely better than just randomly encountering a boss or summoning them via some item.

I think I may have played the game even less that time around. I still wanted to save the game mostly for release at this point, as to not bore of it before it’s even completed. That’s actually a problem I have with a lot of early access titles. That’s certainly the way it was with Minecraft, where most of my playtime was before the game went gold. Not that I really play early access games much anymore, ever since Cube World soured me on the idea.

As for the current state of Starbound, the production of the game is still ongoing, with a stable update being dropped just the other day, being touted as the “Combat Update,” the patch dubbed “Glad Giraffe” added a host of new features, including special abilities for two hand weapons along with new mechanics for certain weapon types, improved enemy combat, player controlled vehicles, procedural quests, new planet types, new sub-biomes, and new micro-dungeons. That’s just to name some major things. I suggest just looking through their news posts to see all the cool things they’ve been working on.

At the end of October, Tiy posted about what to expect before the game reached the big 1.0, mentioning three major updates, of which the combat update was the first. The next planned update is suppose to include major additions and revisions to the quests (as well as an actual opening to the game to explain your role in the world), an improved pet system, better world scanning, and the improved return of the survival mechanics, like hunger and warmth, on top of a “huge amount of new content.” There is also Steam Workshop support in the works. The last update before 1.0 is being dubbed the “Polish Update,” so it will likely focus on optimization.

There isn’t exactly a published timeline to my knowledge of when we can expect to see the game finally go gold, but it certainly looks like it’s getting closer. Hopefully, it’ll be before the end of 2016. Until then, I’ll just be waiting and playing other games.