Feedback All my gripes with Starbound so far.

Before I begin I will clarify that I'm enjoying what the game has, but still. Also, a lot of these must have been mentioned/discussed before but here it goes anyway.

1. The music. It's cool but also indistinct. I have no idea if any of the songs mean anything in particular to the game or if they're just kinda there, with a few exceptions (when you go mining an asteroid/attacking another spaceship). There's no fadeout either, the songs abruptly end and change all of a sudden.

2. Biomes, NPCs, dungeons. If I go to a gentle star and find the same exact things as all the other gentle stars then something is wrong. Either the RNG is wrong or it doesn't have enough to draw from.

3. Mech stuff. This one's new, I bought the game recently so they were part of the game from the beginning for me. The only thing you really need them for is traveling in space. Nevermind the grind and the rarity of mech part blueprints.

4. Story/missions. Boring and uninvolving. Supposedly we're uncovering this big ole' mystery about the civilizations that colonized the universe, but we're not, we're scanning green stuff to fill a bar and progress in a "mission". There are no clues, you are not figuring anything out, the old lady keeps saying nonsense. It's not exploration it's busywork. At the very least in the kill-the-boss missions you can say it was your skill/equipment what did the trick, in these story missions you can't, it's all the old lady's doing, you're just along for the ride.

5 Enemies/monsters/AI. Again boring, indistinct. All monsters have like 2 or 3 different types of behavior. All NPC enemies act in the exact same manner. Every enemy in this game is super cheeseable except for bosses (and that's probably because I don't know the bosses all that well yet).

6. Controls/movement. Double tapping for dashing is dumb, it should be completely optional to even have this. Most techs are kinda pointless, except for the morph ball ones. They should allow you move in new interesting ways but actually feel restrictive. Rocket jump in particular comes to mind. Also why can't we mix and match some of them? Like wall jump and triple jump for instance. Why do I have to choose between water ball, speed ball and spider ball, it kinda makes you choose one and forget about the others, who's gonna keep coming back and change for every little planet and mission. How about double tap to sprint and a separate button to dash, they have wildly different uses and one way or another you need both (well not need, but you get I mean), and this applies to the other techs as well.

That's all I have for now, I don't talk about building and decoration and whatnot because I mostly focus on the exploration. TL;DR The game has a lot of features but lacks a lot of polish.

It's a good game in the end and at its roots it has some very good moves, like fully supporting modding, just consider that I didn't make this thread about the good things.

 

Ok. I finally beat the game and went to the vault and everything and I was disappointed with it because I can only upgrade the unique weapons. Honestly my high tier generic super spinning sword was way more useful than any of the other stuff, beating both the final boss and the vault boss with it was easy enough. Too bad I can't upgrade it. Another pointless (and easy, even with higher monster strength) dungeon.
So I'm gonna go back a little on all the points now that I went all over the game.
1. Eventually I did start to recognize the songs for each area a bit better, though not a lot, the songs were still somewhat indistinct and kept ending abruptly.
2. Biomes, NPCs, dungeons. I hate my crew. I really do. They keep getting in the way of me piloting my and interacting with my stuff. Also, it was more or less pointless to drag them around planets and mission because the AI sucks, that applies to enemy NPCs too I guess. The small boosts you get from the chemist NPCs don't really last long enough and they don't apply the boosts if you drag them off to the planets.
So here's a thing that kept happening on volcano and scorched planets that I went to in order to find me some strong weapons. I'm walking around the NPC village to find missions and loot and then it starts raining fire, as it should, because it is a scorched planet, the problem being the fire destroyed the houses of wood villages, nevermind the avian airships. And then the meteors start falling and every goddamn village goes to crap. I get it, this is something that has to happen because of the planet, however as soon as you start walking around picking the destroyed stuff automatically the NPCs start attacking you and that's it for questing in that village. Too bad you can't return the stuff or pay for it or something. Which brings me to the same point I was making in the beginning, interactions with NPCs are extremely limited with both villagers and crew members, even enemies. It was kind of cool when the special dudes surrendered though.
Going over the biomes in the wiki I find that my point stands. There's very few and there's very few variation between them, like there's a cobblestone section right, you keep moving around and you end up in a different looking cobblestone section which is supposed to be a different biome, nevermind that you find more or less the same creatures and treasure, but oh, you found the mushroom biome! Well, you get slightly different treasure and like one mushroom unique creature. And so on and so forth for the slime, the flesh and slightly different flesh (the one that yields cell matter, which by the way I never had the need or the interest in finding what to use it in). That one biome with the tiny cities that yielded balls of gnomes was fun, if you like dark humor that is.
As for the dungeons, whatever, nothing new to add there. The story missions were sorta allright, though there's really only six of them. The baron one was the shortest and most boring of course it was cool when the monkey and the plant girl came to help, too bad they left immediately without interacting with the baron or helping against the dragon.
So I played avian and I'm kind of annoyed that my character acts all religious and shit, kinda feels like he's not really my character. See the thing where they compare the stuff they find to their own culture makes sense for each race, presumably your dude was raised among their people or whatever, but I hated every other reaction. That goes to the old lady mumbling idiocy all over the place too.
3. The mechs. By far one of the most underpolished and pointless mechanics in the game. There is literally no reason to mess around in space with the mechs. The only point of doing that, is like, a couple of unique weapons which quite frankly are not even remotely interesting and more mech stuff. Which you won't be able to craft, coz you need a gazillion salvaged mech parts. The thing is, if we need so many mech parts then why in the hell are they so hard to get, why can't I recycle the old mech parts, why do the space enemies drop stuff I craft so easily like copper wire, silicon boards, or just plain old copper. See I guess it makes sense for the floating rock monsters to drop ores, but then how does it makes sense that we the only way to get mech parts is by raiding other ships and fighting space enemies.
Again the biggest problem with all of these is that the mechs are completely pointless and unrewarding. How about getting my crew on some mechs too and having them fight space battles with me, that could make it a little more interesting and add new ways to interact with the crew. How about bandit spaceships attacking me and my ship for a change with my crew manning battle positions and mechs to defend us. Coz, I mean we act all high and mighty saviors of the universe but we are the ones starting all the fights, really, we didn't have to get in uninvited on that bandit spaceship and proceed to murder them all. If anything they were defending themselves, and here you are stealing their poor reserves of space fuel and like, a lonely schematic and a gun.
Not such savior then, that's for sure.
4. Story/missions. Already talked about it above and my point stands, the villager quest are just fetch quests with the occasional bandit murder, whether it's groups or a single dude. And what a surprise it was that only the kill a group of bandits missions yielded decent rewards, as the wiki points out. Now I'd complain more about this fact except that tenants have a higher chance of giving you highly rewarding quests making building houses more important. See that's how you integrate gameplay mechanics, it makes other actions within the game more meaningful. How about something mech related, like allowing your outposts to have mech guards thanks to stuff you did while fighting in space. Let's not even go that far, how about a garden and an animal pen improving the outpost with additional items or jobs or whatever, like your outpost could evolve into an awesome important colony eventually.
5. Enemies/monsters/AI. I did mention above already that the AI for us and them is really stupid, I mention it in the starting post too. I carried around monster balls to catch monsters that I found cool or interesting and at the end of the game after countless planets and exploration, I had four, two of them because they looked like pokemon, the other two because I thought they'd be useful/strong (they weren't). For all the randomized monsters thing, the unique ones are actually the least unique ones considering how often I found them. All across the galaxy. But hey, that one cat in human spaceships is the possibly the last and only cat ever. It's a shame the game breaks it's one mythos so often. Shouldn't hyoltls be more wary of you if you're floran for example? How about all those planets where I found hoylotl villages next to floran ones. And why do we even have empty planets, magma planets, and toxic planets. I mean at least the ocean ones house underwater hoylotl cities, that was cool. The other ones not so much. Were they there to add to the mythos of the game? Like some complex decoration to give out the message that hey this stuff can happen too. It's a decent attempt but again, no polish, no elaboration, nothing. Frozen, magma, toxic and barren planets are as empty as they are boring, it'd be nice if for example there was more evidence of something that left a mark on those planets, you know, kinda like in toxic planets where you find old pipes and see buildings in the distance, as if an entire society had somehow impacted the planet to become like this. Too bad they don't really elaborate and there's only small patches of disconnected pipes and such.
6. Controls and movement. I guess everything was reliable enough. I only ever used the multijump, air dash and water ball combo, everything else was kinda worthless. The spike ball is too slow and we already have rope and (plant matter up the wazoo, even if you run out of rope) the batman hook thing, which by the way should act a little more like the rope, at the very least it'd be nice to have a variation of the same gun for that. The bikes were another pointless feature. The terrain on planets is too uneven to make use of them, you can't attack while on the bike, can't install guns or spikes on it or something. And boats, why would I even bother with those, considering how empty magma/toxic/frozen planets are, if you go exploring an ocean one you'll probably want to go the depths where the action is at. So yeah, very pointless. Speaking of pointless, how come when I reached the nothingness at the bottom of a barren planet I died, oh and also lost my items to the mysterious abyss, talk about annoying, also nonsensical.
There was one thing I noticed though. The phase matter items and therefore, the green stimpacks weren't all that easy to get. The speed augment for the EPP didn't help much. Why does the game want me to be slow, there's a lot of nothing to cover after all, aside from 2 dungeons and 2 villages tops, there wasn't a lot going on in the planets, why not let me get quickly to the interesting parts now that I'm supposed to have all the cool toys. The bike, again, doesn't really help.

TL;DR again. Still lots of features but really, really lacks polish, the game is basically a group of barely connected features. Barely connected grindy features I might add. Like I imply above the grindiness would be more interesting if it lead to different developments in different areas of the game that lead to the player going over those features as well and so on and so forth.

I do enjoy the exploration and everything and the first couple of times seeing the different dungeons (specially the more elaborate racial themed ones) but the novelty of it was lost very quickly. Specially considering that they have the same treasure as literally the rest of the game, except for specific decoration I guess (that you can get elsewhere).