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what year does starbound take place in?

Discussion in 'Starbound Discussion' started by SeaworthySponge, Aug 16, 2018.

  1. SeaworthySponge

    SeaworthySponge And Do the MONKEY!

    just make your guesses here. Personally, I think it's in either sometime around 2400-2600
     
  2. FoxDE2

    FoxDE2 Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    20XX.
     
    Astronic likes this.
  3. YellowDemonHurlr

    YellowDemonHurlr Ketchup Robot

    Given the apparent tech level, I'd say within the next 200 years.
     
  4. Pangaea

    Pangaea Forum Moderator

    I have to admit I don't know much of the lore since I only collect books and don't read them (shameful!). So forgive me if this is against the lore. In theory we could break physics tomorrow and be able to travel faster than light. That's not the problem. The problem is the vastness of space. How long would it take to find the other species and develop a common language we could all share? How much longer to establish the Protectorate to such a level as is seen in the game? How long would the Protectorate be around before the Ruin attacks? I'd say it would take anywhere from a century (if we're lucky with tech development and finding others) to potentially millennia (if we're unlucky). So the game is at earliest 21xx.
     
  5. YellowDemonHurlr

    YellowDemonHurlr Ketchup Robot

    Oh yes, the lore codices... I think I must have banished them from my mind, and looking at them again now, I think I see why. They're an inconsistent mess on this subject:

    So, to summarize:
    1. Humanity has been spacefaring for thousands of years--so long nobody remembers modern space travel.
    2. Humanity has been at peace since they became spacefaring.
    3. Prior to being spacefaring, there was no lasting peace. This period ended centuries ago.
    So we apparently became spacefaring centuries ago and also millenia ago. Right.

    Personally, I think there's no way we could do thousands of years and still be stuck at the cultural and technological level depicted in this game. We're not Star Wars, we don't stagnate for thousands of years at a time.

    Also, regarding the Protectorate, it's 500 years old.

    Developing a common language we could all share might not take all that long if there's a strong impetus for interspecies interaction. We might not all speak the same language at home, but we'd learn other languages well enough to communicate with other forces, just like how nearly every nation teaches its people some English. In fact, English is a good candidate because according to old lore which has been redacted but as far as I know has not been contradicted, humans were the first starfaring race out of the ones featured in-game, so their language becoming a trade language is not unlikely. This becomes even easier if there's a universal translator at work (which there is, because it spits out translation errors sometimes when you talk to agarans).

    tl;dr: Starbound is set both hundreds of years in the future and thousands of years in the future. The Protectorate is 500 years old. Trade languages can be set up fairly quickly, and we know there's a universal translator at work.
     
  6. Tlactl

    Tlactl Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    Because of my obsession with Futurama, I set it to be around the year 3,000. That gives us a good 482 years before the protectorate exists.
     
  7. Daikon Ocelot

    Daikon Ocelot Spaceman Spiff

    That is a mighty fine theory of yours if a novakid would say. Wait, what are we talking about just now, and what years are we now (not realizing how forgetful they are).
     
  8. Cryptoid

    Cryptoid Pangalactic Porcupine

    I'd say around 2305. My reason is that we have to take into account of how different the races are. Just because they're peaceful, in a wide spectrum, doesn't mean that they're all like that. There's the Occasus cult in which they are hateful towards other alien species (not strictly human due to encountering some that were avian and glitch). So like what Pangaea said, the time it would take to establish a trade language and to create the Protectorate, it would take about 2 centuries. The reason would be that a certain percentage of humanity wouldn't want to interact with another species. So there will be difficulty in trying to establish peace with another race if some of your own don't want to. As for the universal translator, it would also take time to create such a device to communicate, for they have to first learn the language and the meanings behind it, to program into the translator.

    All in all it would take forever to create all of this, unless all races are dedicated to understanding each other. If this is the case, then development time is greatly decreased, and the time would be around 2087-2109. But then there's the Apex, whose form of government is totalitarian, and meeting another race that doesn't have this type of system would be a threat to their control by inspiring/strengthening rebellion. So then it would take time to establish a peaceful connection between them and the rest. Then there's the Floran, which would be slightly difficult because you would have to deal with their hunter mindset, especially since in the lore, it's stated that they hunt down and eat other sapient races. This would mean that you would have to educate them, which takes time to do.

    There's all this to consider, and how it shows at the beginning of the game, the graduation ceremony shows the stadium full of all the races, and the portraits also show that there's been five grand protectors portraits (I think) of different races indicating that time it could have taken to establish an alliance with.
     
    Last edited: Aug 30, 2018
    KairuMaco likes this.
  9. Roskii Heiral

    Roskii Heiral Heliosphere

    the year 2000!!!
     
  10. The Avelon

    The Avelon Phantasmal Quasar

    Honestly we can chalk the codices up to being simply erroneous. I might make a codex mod sometime including fixes for the dates and timeframes given. I like the theories presented here and the logic behind them - and I agree that there is definitely a universal translator at work. Not all of the races would be capable of plain speech. Avians do not have lips or cheeks, so they would have to be sublingual mimics like parrots. Their voice clips give the implication of voices more like pigeons. Florans aren't really intelligent enough to learn two languages unless they are Greenfingers...
     
  11. Daikon Ocelot

    Daikon Ocelot Spaceman Spiff

    According to your theory, if compared with our world, it means that the Terrene Protectorate was formed before the World War I, the World War II, the Cold War, and even before the United Nation was formed. Moreover, it means that the human in Starbound has already found space before our world can even found an aircraft. The human in Starbound must be much more intelligent than us that they can reach common ground far more early than us. If only our world was like that, our world would have been better.
     
    Cryptoid likes this.
  12. Cryptoid

    Cryptoid Pangalactic Porcupine

    Thanks for pointing that out. So my new estimate would be, according to my theory, 4056.
     
  13. The Avelon

    The Avelon Phantasmal Quasar

    Something else that got pointed out in that post is that it may not be the same universe. Multiversal theory dictates that there are countless realities and that any (specifically, all) possible realities are extant somewhere in the multiverse. Humans could well have formed the Terrene Protectorate in our Dark Ages, and achieved advanced technologies far earlier as a result of being granted the Artifact and possibly some or all of the technology for creating matter manipulators.
     
  14. SeaworthySponge

    SeaworthySponge And Do the MONKEY!

    this means the protectorate formed in the 1500s, or is this some hyper-esoteric fandom inside joke
     
  15. Roskii Heiral

    Roskii Heiral Heliosphere



    inside joke
     
  16. Pangaea

    Pangaea Forum Moderator

    That's what I was going to say. Maybe in the universe where Starbound takes place there really were ancient aliens that visited the Earth is BCE. Maybe they shared enough tech that humans were space ready in what we would think was thousands of years ago. Perhaps Starbound really does take place in 2000. It's hard to say.

    Given that biologically the races of Starbound (excluding Novakid obviously) are similar we'd have to assume they'd evolve on planets similar to Earth (in the Goldilocks zone of their host star). The nearest star (other than Sol) is over 4 light-years away. How much faster than light is the FTL drive? Without knowing that we can't know how quickly humans would reach other stars and find other habitable planets with life similar to Earth's. I'm going to repeat myself a little but and mention again the vastness of space. Simply finding planets with other life we can understand could take immeasurable amounts of time. Then again, we could assume every takes place in the Milky Way and narrow the search down to 7.85 billion light-years (very rough estimate). Even then it could take a very long time even with FTL travel.

    On the other hand, the humans in Starbound don't seem to be that different from humans today. That means they haven't evolved much (if any) beyond what humans are today. So maybe the Starbound universe humans really did achieve space a travel in what we would consider ancient times.
     
  17. YellowDemonHurlr

    YellowDemonHurlr Ketchup Robot

    No, human history in Starbound has got to be nearly identical to our own. You can tell because of this bridge:
    [​IMG]
    That's Tower Bridge in London, from the prologue. If humans had been given alien technology during the pre-industrial era, the Butterfly Effect would ensure that...
    1. Technology, including architecture, would look different because they have different materials and techniques available to them.
    2. Popular aesthetics would be different.
    3. Drastically different events would have changed who has children with who, meaning that the people who designed Tower Bridge in a tech-boosted timeline would be different than the ones in our time, meaning they'd make different design choices.
    So a bridge built in a tech-enriches 19th century might look something more like this. To get a Tower Bridge that looks like ours, you need a very similar history.
     
  18. Pangaea

    Pangaea Forum Moderator

    That's all true but we have no idea how old that bridge is. It could be thousands of years old by the time we see it in game. Maybe the technology and aesthetic for such a structure happened long before it would happen in our time. Perhaps it has been preserved an rebuilt a few times over the course of its life. Also, the history wouldn't necessarily have to be the same. Maybe it was all different and the bridge is 1mm taller. That's enough of a difference for it to exist in another universe. Or maybe it's bright pink in colour. Or maybe it's built entirely out of wood. Who knows? Any difference in the bridge is enough. Just because it looks similar doesn't mean it is. We can't say what those different design decisions would be.

    Or maybe that's all rubbish. Maybe the bridge has stood for centuries or even millennia and Starbound happens in what we would consider the future. Raises the question of how and why the bridge is still standing. Surely with advanced tech they would repair/rebuild it with different designs. So why is it still there, looking the same, so many years in the future?

    Chucklefish clearly wants us to go mad trying to figure this out.
     
  19. Masiakasaurus

    Masiakasaurus Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    Plenty of the tech in Starbound is outright magic - teleportation, the matter manipulator, the magic wands. Given that I think pinning it down to any particular date is meaningless. It takes place in The Future.
     
  20. Daikon Ocelot

    Daikon Ocelot Spaceman Spiff

    Well, many of the tech in Starbound are coming from the outside, and not from the inside. What I mean is that the foundation, the base of their technology is not coming from their own kind. I think the gift given by the Cultivator is one of the reason of their rapid advancement.

    Example:
    1. The Protectorate's matter manipulator that was given to all of the member of the Protectorate is actually a replication of the real matter manipulator given by the Cultivator to the humans.
    2. The Avian crystals that were used to function various machines by the Avian people was also a gift from the Cultivator given to their god, Kluex.
    3. The floran greenfingers, I think they also receives the ability to control plants from the gift that was given by the Cultivator to the floran.
    For the glitch, the apex, and the hylotl, I think the case is also the same with the race I mention below (except for the novakid, I don't know their origin very well). I conclude that is why they have such an advance technology, and that is also why they are far early more advance compared to us.
     

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