Small look into the look at the differences between Terraria and Starbound, just read the comments.

Since it seems that so many people are torn between Terraria and our beloved Starbound, and since I'm bored, here's a thread that will try to look into the differences between them. Feel free to correct any mistakes I make or yell at me in the reply section thingy.

Anyways, let's go ahed and look at the differences between world generation. Terraria is more based to only having one world to explore, with limited random structures. The only thing that's different for each world is the ores/creepy biome you have. Say one world can have iron, but another doesn't and has lead instead. Now let's look at Starbound. Starbound has an unlimited (i think) amount of planets to explore. And each planet can have really cool random structures to find and explore. Which is really fun! And there's a few different sectors for new planets. I think that Starbound does a better job of worlds and sturctures.

Next, let's have a look at character creation and vanity armor. Starbound has a very nice way of creating characters with multiple races to choose from, and even change what clothes they're wearing! And if you want you can change their pose, that's also a nice touch. In Terraria though, there's only one race you can choose. Which is okay because they weren't going for a space-thingy with multiple races. And there's a larger range of colors you can have with clothes. But there's only one set of clothes. Now as I was saying with vanity armor, I think Starbound has a larger selection of vanity sets. But Terraria has dyes and more creative sets. But I do think that Starbound does a bit better than Terraria, but that's only because of race selection.

Now I'm not going to talk about actual armor or weapons because both Terraria and Starbound have a wide range of weapons and armor to choose from. So I'll just leave it that they're equal on that.

Now let's talk about building. Both Terraria and Starbound have many, many different blocks to use in building so I'm not exactly going to talk about different blocks, but the mechanic itself. In Terraria, your block placing/breaking range is kinda short. But you can buy accessories to lengthen your range (we'll talk about accessories later.) And to place background tiles you have to craft "wall" tiles. I find this very annoying because that means you have to craft a workbench but you might not have wood. You also can only place 1 block at a time, which makes your building more precise. Now in Starbound building is weird to get used to. First, if you want to place/break a single block you have to hold shift. What if you let go of shift? Well then you place four blocks at a time. This can be useful for some things, but often make things look sloppy if you do it on accident. Your placing range is also longer than Terrarias, so that's very nice. I didn't mention background tiles yet, did I? Well to place background tiles all you have to do is press right click instead of left click. And that is awesome! To sum this one up, I think that both Starbound and Terraria are matched in building.

I think now we can talk about crafting. Terraria's crafting is simple, if you have the right items, you can craft the item you want. You could also say Starbound is like this. But Starbound's WEAPON(or tool/armor) crafting is MUCH different. Say you want to make a silver pickaxe, well first, you don't only need silver bars, but also the copper pickaxe which takes the stone pickaxe to craft. Nearly every weapon/tool/armor peice is like this. If anything, I think that Terraria does a better job of crafting.

If you were expecting a boss section, well forget it. Because I haven't fought all the bosses in Starbound yet. But I have the feeling that Terraria out-does Starbound on this one.

Now let's talk about two things, farming and npcs. I'm sticking these in here because they aren't as important as the other mechanics that I talked about. First, the NPCs in Terraria are much more important than in Starbound. NPCs in Terraria will spawn in a valid house that you build if you completed a certain task. Like for the merchant you have to have 50 silver coins (and a house) for him to spawn. Terraria has a limited number of NPCs, but they're so much more interesting than Starbound's. Now Starbound's NPCs can either spawn in a town, or you can spawn them in yourself with a NPC spawning machine thingy. Now there are three types of NPCs, a civilian which doesn't do much other than talk, a gaurd which will fight you if you hurt a civilian, and vendors which sell things. There's also enemy NPCs (like bandits) but they don't live in towns. But still, I think Terraria does a better job of NPCs.

Now FINALLY we can talk about farming. In Terraria, farming isn't really great. All you can farm are flowers used for potions, which isn't that great. And there aren't any hoes or farming equipment. Now in Starbound, you can get seeds to farm with. But you first need a hoe, which is very easily crafted. Then go ahead and till some dirt and boom! You have farmland. There are very many types of seeds in Starbound and farming is much more interesting so therefore, Starbound has better farming.

To be honest, I don't think that Starbound or Terraria out-do eachother. I just think that they're equal. And whenever someone asks if I like Starbound or Terraria better, I just kinda, stop talking to them. Mostly because I can't answer. If you (or someone else you know) ever have trouble, you can go ahead and look(or show them) this thread. Now that I'm no longer bored, I'm going to go play Starbound. And if you read the entire thing, thanks!

 

NPCs in Terraria are more important than in Starbound? I guess I never did anything with them beyond playing "Gotta Catch 'Em All" and building castles in the sky. The only times I ever bought things from them were bombs (yay for easy digging), sharkgun, and then the Goblin guy once 1.2 hit. Most of them seemed to serve almost no purpose that wasn't quickly obsolete, and their one-liners got old after seeing all five of them.

That being said, I like how Terraria had certain requirements to unlock NPCs, but also requirements on the rooms that could house NPCs. If Starbound implements things like that with the Renting functionality, this would be awesome (Example: Hedonism_Bot requires solid gold walls with red velvet carpet and a golden throne or he won't rent your room).

There are some things that Terraria has/had that I think Starbound should find a way to include:

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- Terraria's bosses were fun to fight (mechanics, difficulty, general lack of cheesability)
- Minibosses in some biomes (ice golems, probably others that I'm forgetting).  Certain uncommon-ish enemies in biomes were harder than regular trash, which kept exploration challenging and provided fun difficulty without being insanely hard
- Regular enemies had a chance to drop really good stuff.  Rewards during exploration!

There are some things that I remember from Terraria that I would really like if Starbound did NOT include:

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- The WoF could be summoned accidentally
    * ranged weapon / magic + edge of screen + unseen voodoo demon = oops)
- Combat balancing issues: [Magic + lifesteal + manaflower] > [ranged + best ammo] > [best melee]
- Regular enemies had a chance to drop really good stuff.  Grinding is tedious and was very plentiful!
- Grinding for souls of X to make wings in an attempt to have better than +1% movespeed
- Grinding for money to reforge equipment
- NPCs stopped being useful due to fairly-static inventory
- Crafting station progression.
    * Must make cobalt forge to make cobalt bars to make cobalt armor.
    * Must make mythril forge to make mythril bars to make mythril armor.
    * Must make adamantium forge to...

There are also some things from Terraria I really enjoyed, but I don't think they really fit in with Starbound's design:

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- Accessories that let me customize my character, RPG-style.  All my +Movespeed items for travel, all my +Def items for exploration, all my +Atk items for fighting
- Endgame Gravity Orb spell that auto-targeted enemies.  Was very enjoyable to use, but a bit too powerful.
- Lifesteal.  Either passive (armor/accessory/tech) or active (certain weapons/techs), because healing HP is always good, and can drastically complicate attempts at balancing certain encounters or exploration

Right now, Starbound's bosses feel like a 0.1 version, where they look cool, they have some different mechanics, but they aren't what I would call "fun to fight". They can also be cheesed using dirt blocks. Hitboxes are...not ideal. Etc. There's a lot of work to be done, but I like what I see.

And that's pretty much how I view this, Terraria is pretty much finished, and has done a lot of things well. Hopefully Starbound (as it is unfinished) can incorporate the enjoyable ones and maybe find a better solution to the things not done so well.

 

Yea I forgot to talk about the accessories(. -. oops), they do greatly add to the game. But I guess the NPC thing was more opinion based (bad on my part)

 

I loved Terraria, I beat it, I moved on. This is the new thing for me. Besides Destiny.

 

Didn't know you could beat Terraria, furthest I've got was planterra.

 

Got everything before the new, new update. Stopped there. Technically I didn't beat Terraria as it is now, but when that was all there was I ran out of things to do.

 

Yup, same. I did the halloween update too, where you could get all the fun lifesteal magic gear that pretty much made mages invincible, but haven't checked back since. I had a glowing-fungus-lined hellevator, too, so that the entire thing was lit up without a single torch!

And two boss arenas, and a halloween event arena... I think I only unlocked two of the super chests though, because that's just what I found by regular exploring. Seriously, 1/2500 chance of dropping a key mold? Forget that.

 

Me and my friends were playing Terraria a lot before I tried getting back into Starbound (about a month ago).. now I'm way to used to Starbound and want to get back into Terraria

 

Starbounds worlds do have more variety, but terraria's world generation is more important in my opinion. Why do I say that? Well if you never leave a world you are limited by what accessories and items exist in that world. And the game can be completed still, you can't do that in starbound.


Saying starbound has more races doesn't really mean much when its really just one race with a skin pack and different flavor text. You could say minecraft has a million+ races lol but without the flavor text. The idea of racial differences on the races themselves was thrown out long ago.

Skipping armor/items...NO this is the one area terraria is the super clear winner. Its item sets and weapons are vastly superior. Collecting accessories can be called the heart of terraria imo.

Terraria does have some items that require previous items like true night's edge

Terraria wins at bosses by a landslide. Many of these bosses aren't just hard and require and area, but they can be fun to fight repeatedly. And the rewards for doing so are there.

Starbound has better farming...umm no? Starbounds farming is largely invalidated by the fact that you can MASS massively buy crops from npcs for pennies. Terrraria you can farm stuff you cannot buy that's very important. You can farm the green jungle ore, the blue mushrooms, day bloom, fireweed, blinkroot, deathweed, a few others. I think you can also farm crystals too. Terraria just has a lot of that able to grow naturally.

The things starbound does better is small stuff like needing to find cooking recipes, removing backwall, more weather types.

Terraria wins npc easy they sell a lot of important stuff and detect what weapon you have for the weapon ammo salesman. The items they sell change based on time of day or event or biome. They also change stock when the player has done certain tasks. For instance the witch doctor knows if you have the tiki staff and are in the jungle biome to sell you the tiki armor set. During the bloodmoon the druid will sell you corruption seeds.[DOUBLEPOST=1409697446][/DOUBLEPOST]

Not really if your a gun user. The ammo guy for blank bullets, the party girl for confetti bullet making material (Highest knock back bullet), near endgame the shroom guy for the autohammer to make the gunner armor and hoverboard and stuff to make mushroom biomes, the witch doctor for venom bullets, bomb guy for bombs and tnt. The merchant for torches/glowsticks/rope. The druid for cleaning/corruption/tree seeds. The rocket guy if you were using a rocket set and for some reason not using the stinger. The steam punker any time you need a new teleporter or clem solution. The mechanic for more wires and leavers. The goblin dude for rerolling new items.


The painter was largely useless
The pirate was only useful early on for fighting bosses with cannonballs
The clother was largely useless
The hair stylist was largely useless
The wizard was largely useless after buying his crystal ball

But to me the most useless npc in the game was the nurse...but I played mediumcore so if I died to a moon event they just camped my spawn and I was gearless. So her healing meant nothing.

 

Ok I can see where you're coming from. I knew that Terraria would probably win armor+items but I didn't want to write all about that. And yes, SOME npcs were very useless. But that doesn't compare to Starbound's array of useless characters at all. And yes, I know that you can farm useful stuff in Terraria but it's just more fun in Starbound (it's an opnion, kill me.) And wow, you sir are a HUGE Terraria fan.

 

personally I think starbound wins on character creation because of races, but terraria is close because of the colors you can make
then with vanity armor, terraria wins because of dyes and (dont have actual numbers) I think terraria has more armor (funtional and vanity) sets and the whole thing with accessories, but stabound has much more potential because of character proportions
in the end I like them for different reasons

 

I really like how much more armor Terraria has tbh,

 

I need to point a few things out. You don't need to make cobalt and mythril forges because they don't exist, you only need to use adamanTITE to make a adamanTITE forge. The accidental WoF summon is your fault. grinding for money and souls isn't hard at all. If you play the game, the rare items aren't so rare. Lifesteal isn't that OP, complete the frost moon (not frost legion) without the blizzard staff and come back. Sorry but they are both good games, leave it at that.

 

I'm actually not. I haven't even finished the frostmoon once. The ice jerk kills me and the rest of the night I'm stuck spawn camped. I might seem extremely biased towards terraria but its because starbound is mostly ore grind and doing things to become less fun like sand destroying ores (Where terraria rewards players for mining silt/slush), needing core fragments, ore drops, so on. So it plus the lack of stable updates makes me go 100% terraria. But really I prefer other games over both.

And like poster above said, Grinding souls and money isn't hard at all. You can even afk all night while your minions kill things. Come back after you wake up and grab all the loot.

 

It's good to see this is being discussed as I have yet to see any one do so before this thread. I personally love both games but have gotten used to star bounds character art and can't really get back to terreria because all the characters are so tiny even though I do like the enemy and boss design. Also wouldn't it be better to do an in depth analysis and comparison when starbound is fully completed?

 

Honestly, just about everything except two points are better in Terraria than Starbound: Character design and movement. I hate movement in Terraria. You feel sluggish and as though you're moving through tar, and it isn't so easy to make good looking characters in it with how few pixels are involved.

Those problems are a little game breaking to me after playing Starbound, because going back to Terraria feels unbearably slow.

Despite that, I love Terraria. I just can't play it anymore. Terraria feels like an actual game. Starbound just feels like a sandbox.

Edit: That, and Terraria doesn't have space ships. +1 Starbound. Shame the space ships are pretty boring.

 

If I had to choose between Starbound and Terraria; I'd say why not both?
But to be serious, I agree with many points the OP made. In terms of general exploration and just experiencing new landscapes and worlds and so on, Starbound is much better than Terraria. In Terraria, you create world for world, in which you do have a lot of freedom, but in Starbound, you get literally millions of worlds right from the get-go. Also you have several pre-created villages, castles and so on in Starbound, where in Terraria, there's the dungeon, there's the towers in hell and... that's already pretty much it.

I'm not so sure about building... On one hand, building things is really convenient and fast in Starbound, it's much easier to make huge, impressive buildings. On the other hand, Terraria has many different types of bricks, wood and a whole lot of furniture, so creating your home there feels really kind of... prestigious if you want it to be like that. Especially since you could make most of the things more or less yourself. In Starbound, you can get loads of different stuff, but much of it you'd have to loot from other planets. That is also kind of nice, but it's just... different, I guess.

Having different races in Starbound is really a great thing; something I love a lot is how they can comment on things they see, and these are also different varying from race to race. That gives your character some extra personality, besides how you just create your base and so on. Speaking of characters, I do think Terraria does a little bit of a better job with them. Some of Terraria's NPCs are crucial to have (like the arms dealer when you run out of ammo) or just very useful. In Starbound, you do find some merchants every now and then, but they are usually far away and not always that useful. I don't really need another set of starter clothes, thank you. Also, I love how you can build a little village or even town for "your people" in Terraria. I know you can use spawners in Starbound, but... it's just not the same, harder to get and it feels just less natural.

Crafting in general is a bit more refined in Terraria and generally works a bit better. I also love that you can simply store your coins somewhere safe without a penalty (and without using mods). Farming... Well, Starbound has tons of farmable crops, which is very fun, but I think Terraria is a bit more, let's say "tactical" with its farming, in a way that you can farm plants you then use for alchemy, for instance.

One thing I believe Terraria is better in is combat in general. Not just the bosses, but also simply going into the hardmode jungle, the dungeon, and so on... it really keeps you on your toes. In Starbound, the movement feels really fluid, I love the two-hand system and the way you swing swords feels really pleasant, but still... Combat is generally not that fun. Randomly generated enemies have a few different patterns, but once you learn them, it's usually the same. When you have to go to a new threat level, enemies are sometimes so powerful that they kill you in two or just one hit, which is really not fun at all. In Terraria, when you go to a new, dangerous place at first, it's always a huge challenge and you CAN die easily, but it never feels quite that... cheap. I think on this part specifically, Starbound still has some work to do.

All things considered, I'd say both are really great games. Starbound is already great and has the potential to become even greater, since it's still in beta, and if they improve and re-balance a few things, I think it will work out marvelously. Terraria is pretty much already finished. Amazing as it is, it's unlikely that we'll get something really surprising and game-changing.

So yeah, there's my two cents. Starbound is much stronger where exploration is concerned and Terraria is better with fighting and battles, especially bosses. I love both of them and really couldn't say which one I like more. 10/10, for both of them c:

 

Maybe I should write a theory on how Starbound pulls players away from Terraria cx

 

Clearly it's because the gravitational pull of the millions of Starbound worlds outmuscles the gravitational pull of a single Terraria world.

You know it's true because I used physics.

 

I'd say Terraria right now is heaps better. But gets boring after you've done it all.

As for StarCarrots points,


I disagree with exploration and looting.

I'm sure I speak for myself only but I find having to loot things from other places to be able to get them in my house EXTREMELY offputting. I just doesn't feel right. I don't like playing the bad guy and I hate looking at something I like from an Ape's house and having to steal it. This would be much, much better if they were all craftable with different patterns that you find all around. At least I'd like that MUCH, MUCH more.

Also there should be a penalty for looting. Grabbing something from a village or place with sentries/guards should make the whole place instantly hostile.

but that's just my playstyle. I really dislike that from Starbound.

As for exploration, I'm not exactly sure why but after I got to best armor available (which I did in my third planet) I didn't feel compelled at ALL to explore (and I loved exploring in Terraria and most other games).

I just didn't feel any point in it. Most planets felt like copy carbon copies of themselves with altered properties, I really dislike looting private property and there was nothing unique anywhere. Whereas in Terraria I liked looking for hearts, hidden caves with special chests, *that very rare ore that I needed so much*, "transmog" items, etc.

I feel like this will be a LOT better when it's closer to release which is why I backed the game and bought it so soon. But as it stands it feels very inferior to the finished game that is Terraria.


This feels like it has a lot more room to grow though. So we'll see.