Starbound

Its up on steam. *you may need to restart the client.
Emails going slow. however, if you still have your original email, you can just follow it back to the humble page, that is now updated with the steam key.

very buggy. Seems to have a long ways to go still.

yeah. Its early beta so can't lean on anything too much yet. We'll see how it develops.


My experiences.
Start it up.
Crash on load. have to stop the process iirc.
start again. good to go.

Crash on shutdown. Have to stop the process to load it up again.


NPCS/monsters are randomly generated. This is neat in making weird monsters, bad in the fact its very hard to tell if a monster is hostile and hasn't seen you yet or neutral. Hostile DO generally make noises of aggression as a tell. but again, they may have simply not aggroed yet.
The other problem is because of this random generation drops from them are all uniform. Pixels aka gold aka cash when killed with a weapon. or leather/meat when killed with a hunting weapon.
This makes all the monsters basically exactly the same, regardless of how they look. I don't know if they have something planned here, but right now this is a terrible choice. and really boring.
"champions" do spawn and drop items.

I do not know if world size is random, or if all are one size. But the first world I spawned on was giant, and seemingly empty.
Played for hours and found 2 chests, no champions. 4 apex bomb shelters(which have nothing in them but deco), 2 avian house(again just deco)1 friendly avian npc who didnt seem to do anything.

Lots and lots of digging. like 5 kinds of cobblestone, which all get turned into the same basic kind on collection.
Nearly full silver now. tons of iron/copper. silver is a bit too rare it seems, for how much you need of it early.

Had to wiki/reddit a few things.
1. coal is fuel for your ship.
2. you can repair your pickaxe. right click ore in your inventory, then while its hovering, right click your damaged pick. 1ore=1bubble. must be equal or greater then axe quality.


heat mechanic is neat.
Particularly in hostile environments. frozen/moon. First place I went too was a moon. about 10seconds there, while Im jumping around testing moon gravity. screen starts going white. haha. evac! evac!


I wonder if they are going to keep the place material on liquids. letting you tunnel through it with ease.



Summoned the first boss too early. Didnt make a dent, ran away.
Was in iron/copper. And using iron bow, and basic sword I think.

will try again with full silver, and crafted iron weapons.

the weapon system is hard to read. that armor pen is really important it seems.
Crafted iron weapons read 5 pen, 28 damage vs the starter sword which is 1 pen, 25 damage.
Those iron weapons however hit monsters for like 60-100.
And bows are not attacking weapons at low levels at least. don't use it vs the boss, even if it seems like you should.

To be fair, cheesing bosses is kindof on par for these games.
Death arenas and all.


Also you can build it. just don't (E) activate it, until ready.

Figured out glass is made by smelting sand. Fine sand or sand work. dry does not.

Nothing else seemed to. couldn't smelt light metal or anything. did forget to try smelting steel platforms, but doubt it.

I dont know about any zoom. usually thats locked more or less for balance reasons.
But you can use ctrl to look further in one direction at a time.


edit: apparently there is a zoom in options. But yeah. zooming out makes the game easier. shouldn't really let you go too far.

hrm. yeah. todays run gave me a much better idea on a few things.


Planet size. Don't know if starter world size is random, but I clearly got a big one. on that map. its one planet alone. and its pretty huge.
Ran around it today and it took a good 6 days to cover the thing. found 3 avian temples. not much loot though.

Went to a level 3 arid planet however, earlier. and it was TINY. visibly so on the map as well. took 1 day to walk around. that one had a floran prison, and some slavers.



The ufo boss makes more sense to me now. and its not clear early.
Challenge rating and armor pen.

Silver armor is 10 armor. Alpha sector, is up to level 10 threat level planets.
Iron weapons you craft are 5 armor pen...

You need level 9-10(10armor pen) weapons from higher difficulty worlds to kill it more reasonably.