Starbound

New to the game? Cool, so are we! Here's a few things you should know that will make your life a little easier.

• During night time, some races need warmth to survive. Florans are especially susceptible to the cold. Your warmth is denoted by a bar on the bottom of the screen that will show up when it starts to down (the bar contains an image of a sun to differentiate it from what used to be the bar for hunger)
  • To regain warmth, stand near a fire! Torches will give a small gain (you will see a little arrow appear at the right of the bar for positive gain, and ones will appear at the left for negative) but the most gain comes from a campfire.
  • Moons are especially cold and can't be tackled without many torches/campfires! Or, and from what I have found this is the way to deal with it, get yourself some leather armor! Kill all mobs you see with a bow until you have enough leather to make a full set. Do it even if you don't plan to go to the moons as the leather armor has really high armor value (at the time of writing this guide) and will be useful to you for a while!
    
    
• Armor has 3 icons and each represent a thing (shocking I know)
  
  • The shield is how much physical damage you will reduce
  • The energy bolt looking thing i'm not sure. It's either like laser/magic damage reduced or it adds to your amount of energy (green bar under your health)
  • The sun icon shows how good it is at keeping you warm. You'll notice that leather has the highest values and even just having the hat on will keep you warm and toasty on the beginning moons. (I believe later tiers get even colder)
    
    
• As you do stuff, you will notice a hunger bar will pop up to say you are hungry. To bring this up manually, hit your ALT key.
  • To refill your hunger bar, eat! Monsters will sometimes drop meat when killed, and this chance is much much higher when killed by a hunting weapon. Currently there are two, the hunting bow and the hunting knife. Using either will increase your chance of the monster dropping meat by a whole lot.
    • Once you have your meat, plop down a camp fire and hit your E key over it to bring up the cooking menu. If you shift click on the raw meat it will automatically place it in the right spot, then you just click cook and chow down by grabbing the cooked meat and left clicking somewhere in the game world but outside of an inventory screen
  • Another way to refill your hunger is to eat crops! You can till soil by crafting a hoe and left clicking on the soil. Once the soil has been tilled, place a seed on it. It will eventually grow into a crop you can gather by hitting E over it. Not sure if you can eat just the raw crops or if you must make them into something though. As it stands, your best bet is monster meat. (Unless you are a Floran, then you can eat the eyeballs that fall off eyeball trees)

• If your socks do get rocked and you die, no worries, you will spawn back on your ship! However you lose a percentage of the pixels (currency) that you had. Speaking of ships....
  • To fuel your ship, go to the panel near the chair at the rightmost part of your ship and activate it. You can put into there Coal Ore or Unrefined Wood and it will act as fuel for your ship! No where is this explained so, be glad you read it here and didn't spend hours wondering how the #$#!@* do I make this thing go.
  • Once your ship is fueled, you can visit another planet by activating the chair at the rightmost section of the ship and then hitting random. It will take you to a random portion of the galaxy map. Then just click a star, and then a planet and hit GO!
  • Make special note of the threat level the planet says it is. This is extremely important if you actually want to survive because...let's talk levels!

• In this game, the most important stat when fighting a monster is your weapon's Armor Penetration and your armor's, well.. armor value. But armor pen is extremely important for dealing good damage. a difference of a few armor pen points can be the difference between 25 damage and 100 damage being dealt to a monster.
  • Monsters, from what I have experienced, seem to have armor equal to their level. So a level 25 monster will have an armor value of 25. That means that a weapon with armor pen 25 will do exactly the damage it states, but a weapon higher than that will do SO MUCH more! It's damn near exponential. I'm not sure the growth but , like I mentioned above, two or so points above a monster's level of armor pen your dealing 80-100 damage per hit.

• For the sweet love of time make a pickaxe! And an axe! They are far far far faster at mining/chopping than your matter manipulator and in these kinds of games they are usually what you should strive to upgrade first as the more you do, the easier mining gets. A hoe is good for farming but there aint much to that now so it can be overlooked.

The game's progression is through the ores and each time to get to the next tier you will likely have to create a better workbench. The game's tutorial quest line will take you to the first tier of advancement but after that, it's up to you to figure out how to advance further. Usually, however, you advance by crafting an item that seems strangely out of place, and on that note...

The quest line will at some point require you to craft a distress beacon. Not to spoil what happens, but you are going to want to have an iron hunting bow before you craft and activate the beacon. Also, have some building blocks with you and your pickaxe in your hotbar and remembering that digging can save lives!

Here's a more spoilery bit if you want to know exactly what you are up against:

Once completeing that quest you will have a Molten Core with which you can make your next work bench! And after that, well, the next upgrade is a little less obvious in how to produce the items you need for the next work bench. Here's a hint, you should make that gun that grabs brains from things... but look below for it being spoiled!

Anyways, hopefully that helps start you off and gives you a better understanding on some of the things that the game just does not explain well. I had to lookup how to fuel the ship after hours of trying to find some sort of fuel in the world! Enjoy your time in Starbound and remember it is a beta, and it's one of the most beta beta's i've seen in a while.

Deuces.