Notice Ask us anything.

How will pet taming work? is it a like pokemon when you lower their health and catch them, do you feed them their favourite food and can you find and incubate eggs that will turn into your pet? thanks for being amazing

Closer to the Pokemon style of taming. Given that we want you to be able to tame so many creatures we don't want taming them with goodies to be an easy mode for defeating them.

 

Will there be special solar events and entities like supernovae, black holes, neutron stars and such?

There is an event system planned, not sure if it will be there for release. You may also find black holes and so on on your ships nav.

 

Will we be able to change the character's appearance after creation?

I'd like to add an NPC or machine that does this up to a limit

 

How big of a role will vehicles and mechs play in the release of the full game? Will there simply be a few different types that players can use or are there plans to add modularity and creating to player vehicles?
Thanks!

At release, summoning mechs and vehicles will be part of the tech system. A deeper system might come post release.

 

In some videos I did notice that with melee weapons you can deal damage through walls.
Is it intentional or it will be fixed?

It's tempting to fix it, but it's also one of those "haha I'm breaking the game!" things that a lot of people enjoy. We're still giving it thought.

 

Will I have to worry about portforwarding or anything of the sort for multiplayer?

Sadly it's very difficult to get around requiring some sort of port forwarding. We'll look at some external options to make it super easy for everyone though.

 

Do you have a rough idea on how many techs your going to create? Also thanks for creating starbound, you rule man!

Maybe 5 or 6 per tier at the moment. This is on top of other items that give you abilities and whatnot.

 

Any examples of (big) community suggestions that have made/are going to make it into the game?

The space station 'guild hall' style system came together from many different community suggestions.

 

will animations be moddable, or are they hardcoded (e.g. - frame rate, positions of items in hand, etc.)?

Moddable!

 

Will enemies and bosses scale with how many people there are in the game?

How interactive will friendly NPCs be?

How will vehicles be balanced?

We're looking at whether or not scaling based on player number is a good idea. Sometimes it's actually more fun when teaming up makes the game easier. Assuming there is still SOME challenge.

 

When I watched Yogscast playing Starbound and saw that UFO boss for the first time, it immediately reminded me of a Metal Slug boss fight (which is awesome because I love that series so much). And my question is, was there a bit of inspiration there or is it just me?

I know some of the artists have been a bit inspired by Metal Slug and it's awesome animations.

 

Any ideas on when the Roadmap will be updated? I loved looking at it to see all the progress made, and use it as a very rough timeline for when the game could be nearing beta, but it hasn't been updated in ages.

Yep, sorry about that, I'm out of country right now but I'm going to update the roadmap myself when I come back around the 14th.

 

How is the development on the fun little sunday features going? We saw alot of progress with the music system, but what about things like space stations and similar features?

Will we be able to place blocks in a space layer without worrying about anchoring it to asteroids, regardless if there are asteroids on a planetoid or moon?

We've been kind of powering through the weekends on regular features at the moment. No time for relaxing development

 

Cages Homes for animals of varying sizes? IE: Goldfish bowls, and doggy kennels? Will we be able to build a zoo?

You'll be able to build your own homes pretty easily, at any size you want

 

Will there be "metropolis cities" filled with skyscrapers and mindless worker drones?

The system supports creating a metropolis, but not at release.

 

<mother-hen-mode>
Is the team pacing themselves carefully to avoid burnout?
</mother-hen-mode>

We try!

 

Will there be unique planets that have qualities that no other planet can have?

Yes

 

Creatures we tame will be babies, yeah? Do we have the option to not let them grow up/evolve even if it means they can't fight, or is it an automatic process after so many days have passed?

I'll try to make sure this goes in there

 

How many planets are in starbound? I hear billions, infinite, and quadzillon, so it would be nice to know the exact amount or rough estimate.

a wubillion