Feedback Starbound: what worked and what didn't (or at least the way I see it)

Look, I love this game, but I feel like the official release has kinda killed the feel of the game.
Here are what's good about the game (in my opinion)

• The exploration of new planets. The tiering system feels unnecessary, but that's due to some other convictions
  
• The sidequests. Especially colony sidequests. They personally bring me back to the days of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Explorers of Sky, but these sidequests make the player relate to the colonists more than just look upon them as no more than a pixel farm. Not to mention they have individual personalities.
• Capture pods. It's like an infinite game of Pokemon as the universe literally has billions of different creatures (I do have one issue with procedurally generated monsters, but that's later)
• The ORIGINAL lore.
• The potential for so many interesting builds. The landscapes are begging for it.
• The Space theme altogether. Sci-Fi is cool.
• Modding Compatibility. Starbound is customisable to many people who can upload millions of steampunk alien ra- I mean make new and interesting ways to make Starbound their own (Steampunk is still cool though)
• The spaceship structure. Even though it doesn't move on the terrain (that would be hard to code) or is entirely customisable, it's the closest thing there is to a mobile base, and that's awesome.
  
• The Glitch speaking syntax. Guilty. Because I have a similar problem with emoting.
• Challenge doors. You're just mining, going about your own business, then you discover a piece of procedurally generated platforming action. If a player built one, they'd know all the jumps. One question though, how did they get there?
• What Pumpkin is on soundtrack. Homestuck was great and it's great to see that WP have moved on now it's over.
• All the Easter eggs (what game doesn't have them these days?) ALL HAIL GEORGE!!!
• Poptops. POPTOPS!
• ALL HAIL GEORGE!!!
• The constant tongue-in-cheek jokes about video game cruelty potential and just how insane this kind of lifestyle is. I can appreciate a game with that kind of moxie.

Okay, now I've stated the many, many good things about Starbound, we can move on to things that did not work as well.
First, the races. I have a large axe to grind with this one (I am human after all... you may facepalm now.)

• Races don't actually give that much variation. For those of you who have seen many of my comments, you know that I say that it feels like my character is a human in a cheap costume. Having robots, fish people, plant people, people who have studied flight for their entire existance, scientific geniuses and living star matter in the game is just begging for special abilities. However, the developers felt this would restrict freedom as obviously one race would be preferable statistically (Glitch, Novakids and Humans would probably have ended up as this if not done carefully) but what they didn't consider is people who would just pick whatever is handed to them first because there is no point in selecting a race. I am not one of those people. The aversion of this has sparked just as much controversy as the dev team were trying to avoid by introducing the new lore changes. Here are some issues that are still prominent:
  • The Glitch now act like biological entities because their programming told them to in the new lore. The contradiction is the player has escaped the hivemind, meaning that they are aware that they are a robot, meaning that they could just delete the requirement for eating food, suffocating, succumbing to extreme hot, cold, or radiation (when other machines work just fine) A minor case of contradiction is when the Glitch specifically say when they analyse a coffee plant is "These bitter beans have no effect on the glitch" Only for coffee to work on them when they drink it. Glitch do not have bloodstreams or hearts for the heartrate to increase, thus making coffee useless. Why did they get the buff anyway? I ended up too irritated to play one of my favorite races.
    
  • The Hylotl both have a contradiction and have been made less interesting. It was stated in the excuse codex for why they couldn't breathe underwater that they can hold their breath for a long time. How did they build underwater cities if they were "driven beneath the waves" if they couldn't sit still as if they slept on the sea-floor, they would have drowned? Going on land was a big no because the Florans were waiting for them, so collecting materials that could withstand water pressure was virtually impossible. Also, if they're so good at holding their breath, how come they can't hold theirs more than a human? Of course, there's always the excuse that they lived on Earth the whole time, therefore didn't need to go underwater (The Terrene Protectorate, I am saving for later, also ships will be mentioned) but then again, all races including the Hylotl speak like they have lived away from Earth for a really long time, meaning that the Player Hylotl didn't live on Earth, which defeats the argument of holding their breath, unless all Player Hylotl lived above the waves, which actually makes the Player less free to invent their own story. Also, what's this whole "Forgive the Florans" thing? Okay, they may have less of a grievance about things than humans, but that makes the Hylotl and Florans less interesting because the intense rivalry between them is bread and butter in the Starbound culture. As a final note, why is there a human boss in the Hylotl Grand Pagoda Library?
    
  • The Novakids are absolutely ridiculous in the fact that they are living star matter. They can't survive in radiation, but do you know what stars call radiation? FOOD! The Novakids are somehow unable to survive the very elements they were born from, they were born from stars. Of course, now they are part of the Cultivator as an excuse as to why they aren't in the main story ark thus meaning that they are not star matter, meaning they are pieces of a god? You call this a sci-fi game!? Why do they need to eat, when they have no apparatus for eating with? All they have in the way of a face is a piece of heavy metal, which seems to serve as some sort of brain. Dumbed down for the sake of fair gameplay.
  • Avians no longer fear Thornwing and throw themselves off the tower happily. That just doesn't work as a race goes.
    
  • The Apex Resistance is winning now. This just makes Big Ape and the Miniknog look way less powerful, thus blanding down the Apex. If they are on the verge of freedom, their culture makes no sense as it is a culture of knowing they will be oppressed for a really long time. And now to add the cherry on top, Big ape is a giant flying head... if you kill it, the Apex are free, and their culture is made irrelevant in future game.
    
  • Humans have basically been talked up to being the most important race in the game with the whole galactic empire and Terrene Protecorate. Why are humans all such big deals when the others have essentially had their leaders thrown to the side?
  • Agarans have been marginalised as just strange rather than the original menace. This means that their story has been compromised to be just another intresting picture, like the colour of dirt blocks.
  
  
• The story is probably one of the biggest offences this otherwise great game has. I'll have to list all the issues here:
  • The Dev team pretty much had to throw away any interesting subplots in order for the main story to function. Hiraki Corale, Thornwing, most of Greenfinger, Hewlett Deckard, they're all vetoed. Which is quite a shame as they were an interesting plot to read, even though the player couldn't pursue them. Instead, we are given some bland books about how daily life is, save for the couple of codexes which try their hardest to make sure it's totally justafiable that the exotic aliens are no more than funny looking humans.
  • You are forced to help Esther, or at least in the first mission in order for the shops and your ship to work. This just villainises players who do not like the main story as the ones who betrayed Esther. You can never truly escape the main story, it will haunt you from the sidelines for the rest of the game.
    
  • Earth's destruction has become a main focal point. Originally, humans were just as important as the Apex issues, or the spread of Florans, but now the destruction of Earth is for some stupid reason, the most important part of the game. Earth is one life sustaining planet, while other races evolved on life sustaining planets, and you don't hear a thing about it. The destruction of Earth, before this story, was not even that important if the PC wasn't human.
  • Why is there an on-board pet that has followed the player when they spent a long time at the Protectorate? More importantly, why was it on the ship during the incedent? If it came from Earth, the next question is what was a Snugget doing on earth in the first place? Why is it specifically a Snugget and not some other animal. If by chance, the player has not lived their whole life on Earth, then how did they feed the pet and where did they keep it? There's obviously something they missed here, which will probably be deemed too unimportant to explain.
    
  • The Ruin and the Cultivator.
    • The Ruin is a being of pure hatred manifested a physical entity. Made of evil doesn't work in a sci-fi game as emotions are neurons floating around in someone's brain. The Ruin is just in the wrong genre altogether.
      
    • The Cultivator is a god. Why are there actual gods in a sci-fi game. Like the ruin, it's in the wrong genre altogether and just doesn't fit in place.
  • The Ark itself is something that doesn't belong in a game like this. More to the point, why is the gate to it always on the planet the player starts out on? To get the player into the story as soon as possible of course. That doesn't quite fit as since the player can use another character to find the exact same spot as well as their own gate, meaning that for some reason, on specifically lush planets that have no civilisation whatsoever, something, or someone, placed millions of tonnes of stone on these planets before running away, or the mystic energy from another dimension placed the gates only on lush planets. This is strange because could they not have put it in forest, desert or barren planets where there is breathable atmosphere at the optimal temperature with reasonable levels of radiation? Or, if they were placed specifically for adventurers on a planet with a civilisation which could come across said gate? If nobody has set foot on these planets, how did the Outpost residents find it before you? And why is the outpost in the middle of a mystic ruin in the first place? Too many questions, too many questions.

And now for some gameplay issues:

• Hotbar is cumbersome and confusing with the manipulator button in the centre.
• Tiering system for planets and ore doesn't quite make sense, or at least it doesn't with my complaints about races, also the narrative depends on a tiering system, so apparently it has been overridden.
• Procedurally generated monsters do not have any more power than Charge and Swoop (not sure if this has been changed, though there is hope)
• Picking up dirt variations have been removed. Looks ugly when a mess needs to be fixed.
• S.A.I.L is now just the human AI. That's just boring.
• Seriously, is it so hard to do 20 minutes research on metallurgy? Tungsten is simply too brittle to use as common steel. Aegisalt has a similar problem as I know a bit of chemistry, and chemistry states that salt is brittle. Brittle means it isn't malleable. If it isn't malleable, you can't bend it into shape without it snapping.
• And why do I need tungsten for the moth traps if other lights don't need tungsten filaments? More to the point, why is titanium necessary for the construction of a sewing machine? Sewing machines were around before titanium was. Be cautious around anachronisms. Also on this, why hand out capture pods when a healing machine isn't available (or is there an effect with a medic crew member?)

Now, that was rather negative, but I do have some suggestions just in case (which someone or other will probably attempt to make a counter list to)

• Race Variation. There's a mod for it. One of the most popular mods, it's not even half built yet. Take a hint.
• Remove the main story or move it to the side. It doesn't quite belong in a game such as this. At least make it optional. It's better than dragging around the guilt of betraying Esther.
  
• Procedurally generated monsters with more abilities. Variety is the spice of life (not sure if procedurally generated monsters do or do not have various powers)
• The ability to name procedurally generated monster species. Xenobiology would become rather popular if such a thing happened. It's small, but the possibilities are fascinating.
• Moving the manipulator icons on the hotbar to the far left or right, just so flicking through numbers is a little more comprehensible.
• A more flexible paint tool would make sense in a game that focuses on building.
• Do your metallurgy research. If you're going to make a sci-fi game, put the science in it.

Apart from these issues, Starbound is a great game with good mechanics and huge potential. Definitely one of my top 20 games.
Thank you if you were able to read that entire page.
Sincerely, me.