Starbound Wrap Up (2015 Beta Review)

Please note that this game is still in Beta, and is prior to change during 2016 - 20XX. Please do not take this as a 'final game conclusion'
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So, what is Starbound? Good question, Starbound is a Sandbox, Survival, Adventure Game developed by Chuckle Fish. The game try's to offer in game quests, items, and decorations to try and make your adventure 'yours.' While some users may think that Starbound is related to Terraria. It is not, nor Minecraft. (Apart from being 2D.) Starbound offers a more adventure feel compared to Minecraft, allowing you to explore more, and discover more in space, similar to Terraria.

Terraria is a 2D sandbox game developed in 2012 (don't quote me on that.) - 2015. Currently being a 'must play Retro Game', related to being creative, beating the shiz out of everyone, and discovering more and more as you go on your adventure, to eventually defeat The Wall of Flesh, and eventually The Moon Lord.



What's unique about Starbound is the fact that it offers a more appealing world décor, textures, and a lot more exploration to the game. Making Terraria, and Starbound confused as 'replicas', when they are really not, Terraria offers more fighting, and adventure, less details, but more pvp, compared to Starbound offering better textures, but less pvp options.

Yes keep in mind the game is still in Beta to.
But on topic; I played Starbound for about 5 - 8 Hours today, and completed a few quests, along with the first main mission. Did some mining, and also built a little bit. Honestly I was impressed,

Ignoring the fact of resource gathering, and farming. Starbound is a great game, Starbound offers unique lighting, 2D Themes, unique tree's, and so fourth. I had no issues with the game at all, and the game was very stable. (I would stay mostly at 64 FPS.) Using a Windows 7, HP Computer. Armor, and textures were very great as well.

A few problems I had with the game was the fact that mining was becoming boring after awhile. At first its fun because its your first time. But it eventually got super boring hopping to planet to planet, mining in a desert planet, just to find a diamond of a low chance of occurrence because of the hostile level. It literally took me half an hour just to find two diamonds to upgrade my Matter Manipulator. Not only that but because you need fuel to actually move to a solar system, you need liquid fuel, to do that you need to get a diamond to make a Matter Manipulator Component. So regardless you have to mine armor 90% of the time just to progress to the new tier of planets. Now this is a bad thing, because eventually you would want to just cheat the whole enterer game development. Only to get the next tier armor if your really having trouble getting the ingots.

Maybe if there were more interesting ores at the start, maybe that would make a difference, to eventually make a automation system, rocket boots, or I don't know, wings. So far there are only two ores to start out with, Copper, and Iron, and Core Fragments. (Core Fragments become useless once you repaired the ship thrusters.) I don't know, maybe add Uranium to make pipes, gold to make shiny things, things to keep the viewers entertained. And enjoy their free time.



I don't want to be to harsh to the game since its in Beta, and I understand its hard to start developing a game, you can't just put your idea on a piece of paper, and have it work. You need to have coders, testers, and all of that takes a lot of work, time, and money. Starbound is very unique as well, which is the quest system. You can build whatever you want, do whatever you want, and things like that. You don't have to be forced to kill 2000 fish things when you start out just to unlock a new quest, and useless reward to progress. You do not have to do that. So if you feel you just want to play 2D Minecraft, that's cool .

One of the things I may want to suggest is adding Modifications to the game to make the game more interesting if you want to. If you prefer making your own unique story. Just be prepared for Vanilla, combined with Modifications, as that may get a little confusing.




One of the things I also like is the game in general (Apart from the mining, and adventuring.), the game is doing great so far, and I have had absolutely no bugs. The only big downers I have really had was trying to find some structures for in game starting, I been seeing the same homes, or castles generated, and going around the planet I noticed that you were just going in a circle around them. Maybe try to reduce the amount of structures added, and instead just add one to make a much better 'start to the game'.

A lot of current features are still missing from the game, and that is okay. Because I understand that it takes developers, staff, and users a huge amount of time to write coding down, make art, etc to help the company become better, and better, eventually maybe once there out of Beta the game will become much generally produced . Maybe! But we cannot predict so far.

Honestly I think the game is doing a good job, I would honestly give it about four and a half stars on Steam, maybe I will increase it once it becomes accordingly better .

Hope I helped you guys .

 

Interesting post, was a good read.

I don't know if I'm just lucky but on my new character that I created (I havn't played in like a year so I started a fresh) I have ~20 diamonds already and I don't even have steel armour yet, perhaps you were unlucky?

 

After a while you'll be like "Oh look, another diamond" i have like, 500 with me because i find at least 3 in every planet's surface

 

Pretty much,

The only time Diamonds are super common is when you are in very hard, or intense planets. Basically the 'invaders zone' - Extreme Difficulty,
Honestly I hope they remove this, and instead buff up how many diamonds you need per upgrade, its been getting me ticked xD

 

I mean, what i said is kinda of unrelate as well because i have around 500hrs of game and i don't change characters that much

 

I completely disagree that mining takes up a huge chunk of time. In fact, I think that the ore requirement for armor and weapons are ridiculously low... 20 bars for a full set of armor, and around 3-4 bars for any weapon of choice. That's a grand total of 48 pieces of ore for most tiers. (Add another 20 ores for mixed sets).

Ore is so abundant, you can find ALL that you need within a single planet.

I JUST started a new character 2 days ago, and am quite stunned by how little time it takes to progress. (I do have high-level characters, but I did not allow any transfer of materials between them).

I estimate that in early-mid game, I spend 90% exploring the planet surface (for chests and the like), and 10% mining... and I have more than enough ore. (Incidentally, I've never had to hunt diamonds either -- they are fairly abundant in chests). Also, core fragments are NOT useless after repairing your ship. They are used to create Upgrade Modules, which is handy if you are unlucky in the chest department.

As of this evening, my new character is at the split point, (the ferozium, aegisalt, rubidium tier). She has a class 3 ship, and still has 19 diamonds to her name. One mining trip will get her ALL the ore she will ever need... sadly.

I'm actually really disappointed that mining is such a passed-over part of the game. I do go spelunking to find rare weapons and BPs, and have thousands and thousands of bars of metal .... which is only really useful for creating furniture (copper/iron/titanium sets, et al.)

 

I've started a new character to try out the rekajiggered combat fully and see how well it affects progression: Wincewind the Glitch. Specializes in spears mostly because of the ability to jab the spear out and wave it around to keep enemies a nice safe distance away. (Aside: the combat numbers need some work, you're a shade TOO vulnerable even after you get your first set of legit armor. It's not terrible, but it's not where it needs to be.)

Mining I haven't found to be tedious at all, as the ore tends to come in decent-sized clusters. I'm a little iffy on having to go core-deep so soon in the game, but at least I'm fairly sure the game always sets you down on a tiny world so it's not as far down as it could be and the rocks aren't super-hard.

Honestly the hardest part as far as progression goes at the moment is navigating the first-draft crafting table setup with its kinda nonsensical upgrading methods. The Matter Manipulator even sans upgrades seems to get you through decently, and once you hit the Outpost it's not hard to quest up some Modules to boost its power.

And a lot of it DOES boil down to luck. I found like four Quest Doors on my way down, which netted me some decent weapons and such. Your mileage may vary.

 

Bump. Color changed due to Mods not being able to read the review as well.

I was inferring that the only way to get Diamonds was to actually visit a really hard planet to be on, where everything basically wants to kill you, I didn't know you had meant 'Don't worry, you will eventually find a lot soon', type of thing.

Keep in mind I have only played for about 2 - 8 hours of the game, completing the first mission, mining a little, and so fourth.
Maybe the distractions of building may be keeping that 'mining excipernce', so boring after a while, but that's just me. I mean its still fun, but it eventually becomes super boring in the start of the game.

Also I was not aware that Core Fragments were needed to upgrade items, I will have to fix that quote :/.

 

Diamonds can be found in chests on the surface of ANY planet, including the very low level ones. They are also at the bottom of even the very first planet, albeit in low amounts. However... you really only need diamonds to give to the ship guy and/or to make Manipulator Modules. Thus, you will never need massive quantities of them -- just a handful in early game, which, as before, can easily easily be found in chests.

The new character I created is only about 6 hours old, so she's very much early game.

Building is best done at end-game when you have a 4x4 Matter Manipulator at full power. (And if building is your main interest, you can use admin command to spawn a super fish axe or even generate blocks through the console.) The devs don't want us to go on rampages destroying every village, etc. just for blocks, so they are changing the way that works in the next update. People playing Nightly have said that you can scan blocks into the 3D printer, and simply print them. Hopefully it will make your building experience more fun

 

It was, but it was a dumb comment because you weren't even referring to it I see your point though, and agree

 

I bought the game this winter and i kind of had fun, but once you reach around tier 4-5 armors and after the mech fight things get reaaaaally boring. I think starbound should follow their cousin example like terraria and make mining interesting. There is also no point in making farms because your character never starves or to do a camp fire at all....

In the bright midnight planets are really interesting, they have some indeep lore and they have a lot of stuff to explore under that obsidian terrain. I think developers should do more planets that are unique of their stars such as midnigh planets. Poison planets are just a recolor of water planets and they're kind of boring, same with magna planets but you cant really explore down there because is full of magma...

I also hear about the game around 2013 and hear they had this food system and i though it was interesting, but now that i bought it i just feel like it's a really cheap gameplay but it has some surprises. Hope developers can backpedal on some choices they've made. Also, the mod community is really good, i liked the A.V.I.A.N. mod is really helpful, it made me want to continue in the quest stuff, the boring A.I of the ships feel really boring... also i feel like the game is really floran oriented too, i wish they had personalized dungeons for every race like they did with florans.

 

Trick is, around tier 4~5 is where the game's current build is MASSIVELY unfinished. There's more story missions and "endgame" content to be added, so there's gonna be more to do at higher levels.

 

I hope this is true, at least i wish to see a mission with every race like they did to florans. You get to see a little of their habitat and i just love those kind of things in a game.

 

We've seen teaser images of Avian and Apex-based story missions, and the whole game will have a background story going on centered around the destruction of Earth. They've talked about an "endgame dimension" with high-tier planets of all biomes, possibly some new ones.

This game just had an unusual development cycle that let us in on all the unfinished bits, which actually led to more bits staying unfinished...

 

Its most likely related to the Terraria Moon Lord, but instead of 'the moon lord', it being based off of Mars.
The Human race said their home planet was destroyed, but the only logical reason would be the sun, but they claimed they were being 'attacked', it is claimed that Mars (In real life), may have life, or used to have life. Therefore Mars had attacked Earth (The human race on the game.) Because of the current technoldgy they had during their time, the game may most likely be based on the The Third Generation of life, or the fifth. (Due to their space ship décor, and what they have made.)

There is an Ark in the Outpost, if you see it, there is a missing head. Which may most likely mean a new race is going to be added. (Unuo those people in the Dark Planets.), or possibly the mushroom people. But that is unknown at the moment. If you look further up, you can see a hand reaching towards a Universes Core, and a weird squid arm trying to get a planet, or part of the core.

The hand may be a reference from God, or the Moon Lord from Terraria, along with the Squid that is unknown currently, but it may be based off of The Mars Planet that attacked Earth.

If you also look in /admin in game, go to a furnace into the crafting menu (any furnace.), and you should see some moon related items, or the upcoming items being added which is kind of cool.
Judging by this, there may be even more lore to the game, and possibly a 'final boss', match type of thing.