Working tirelessly underground in the unstable branches of the game; Chucklefish has now finally gathered all the new features, fixes and changes and released the newest update to their flagship game Starbound. The last update (code name ‘Upbeat Giraffe’) came out in January this year and saw a huge overhaul in the questing and battle mechanics. This update (code named ‘Pleased Giraffe’) sees another huge plethora of content for veteran players and encourage people to come back in to play the game again.
A post on the official Starbound site details the entire changelog for this update:
- Colony System
- Colonize your worlds! Create a home, decorate it nicely, then place a Colony Deed to attract a tenant!
- The type of NPC who moves in will depend on the type and quality of the home’s furniture and decorations. Decorating a room with several objects from the same theme (such as a biome or material tier) will attract a tenant themed to match!
- Keep your tenants happy and they’ll periodically offer you gifts, some cosmetic and some very useful
- New Outpost Store: Frögg Furnishings
- Sells Colony Deeds as well as a variety of furniture in many themes
- The set of specialty furniture available will rotate each (out of game) day, so make sure you keep coming back to see the full selection
- Each furniture set can be used to attract a particular tenant that fits its theme
- Improvements to NPCs
- NPCs will now interact with each other and with many different objects in the world. Depending on their personalities they might get sad, excited, fall in love or do all kinds of different things in different situations!
- See who your tenants are and what they’re thinking! (press Alt to activate)
- Added many unique NPC dialogue options and updated some old ones
- Further improved NPC movement and pathfinding
- NPCs now switch between ranged and melee weapons in combat depending on their available energy, range, and whether they can reach the player
- Groups of NPCs now coordinate in combat to attack from different positions and divide themselves between ranged and melee
- Surface Biomes and Sub-Biomes (Tiers 1 – 4)
- Major visual improvements to background parallaxes
- All biomes have several types of unique critters (60+)
- Added a huge number of biome-specific microdungeons (450+)
- Added many new biome-specific cosmetic armors and other items
- Randomly generated monsters will now have color palettes that generally match the biome they spawn in
- Universe and Planet Generation
- Redesigned terrain to be more interesting and varied across all world types
- Reduced the number of open caves on the surface, improved cave blending
- Greatly increased the number of dungeons that can spawn on worlds and prevented dungeons from overlapping each other
- Added ores in the background layer
- Improved the appearance of planets in the navigation screen to better indicate the biome and surface liquid, added some visual variety to gas giants
- Challenge Rooms
- You can now find portals underground that lead to small instanced challenges. Defeat enemies, navigate dangerous traps or solve puzzles to earn great rewards!
- Challenge portals disappear shortly after you enter, so you won’t be able to enter through the same portal twice.
- Inventory and Merchants
- You can now sell items to most merchants for a portion of their value
- Added an ore merchant to the Outpost where you can purchase raw materials at an inflated price
- Added a third inventory tab for objects (similar to the materials tab)
- Added a sort button to the inventory window to sort items into their appropriate tabs
- Items will not be automatically picked up into the hotbar and materials and objects won’t be automatically picked up when their respective tabs are full
- Added an indicator to inventory tabs when they contain new items
- Added an animation to highlight newly picked up items when switching to a tab
- Tools and Interface
- Wire and Paint tools are now unlockable modes for the Matter Manipulator and have clearer icons to indicate their functions
- Inspection tool can now examine liquids, indicates when something is too dark to inspect, and doesn’t try to describe entities (such as monsters) that have no description set
- Targeting will now prioritize monsters and NPCs at the cursor position, and won’t target passive monsters such as critters
- Combat Changes (WIP)
- Rebalanced all damage and armor values for players, NPCs and monsters
- Reduced the damage per level increase of weapons and added a bonus damage stat on all tiered armors, allowing weapons to stay viable for longer
- All randomly generated melee weapons have fancy new sprites
- Reworked monster skills and added a windup animation. These will be further expanded and rebalanced in the next update.
- Reworked weapon projectiles, increased bullet speed, added elemental damage types. These will be further expanded in the next update.
- Progression Changes
- Reworked the materials used for crafting progression, greatly reducing the total amount of ore required to advance through the game
- Added various upgrade items which can be found throughout the world or acquired from quests, either whole or in pieces
- Tech Card – can be crafted from Tech Chips, used to unlock new tech
- Manipulator Module – can be crafted from Matter Module Components, used to improve your Matter Manipulator
- Upgrade Module – used to improve utility items such as light packs
- Improved many progression quests, but these will change much more in the future
- Farming Changes
- Crops now require water to grow! Tilled soil will initially be dry and needs to be moistened by a watering can, rain, or by dropping water on it
- At each stage of a crop’s growth, it will consume the soil’s moisture and need to be watered again to progress further
- Keeping crops under too much water for too long will cause them to be washed away, so be gentle!
- And More!
- 200+ new objects and materials that can be bought, crafted or found in the world
- Many changes to the Floran mission – Including a new boss
- Improved chest loot and added improved graphics for standard and weapon chests
- Added multiple upgrades for the lantern stick back item to improve its brightness
- Racial flags can now be bookmarked as teleport destinations (but won’t enable you to teleport from underground)
- Added particles and sounds to smashable objects and made many more objects (such as bushes and spikes) smashable
- Reworked Status Pods to have more interesting and useful effects, including a chance to spawn ore or pixels
- Added underground vines and more underground variety to several surface biomes
- Experimental feature that shows NPC ‘status’ on occasion
There’s also a few minor changes and bugfixes but the above shows the actual depth of new content available now for Starbound players. The most exciting thing for me that has definitely hooked me back in is the colony feature that makes having a home planet worthwhile and an inventory system that can be sorted!
Starbound is available for Early Access still and is still being continuously worked on to be full of content. The game also has modding capability to increase longevity. It is available for purchase on Steam for PC, Mac and Linux users. There is also currently a PS4, Vita and Xbox One version in development.