Quick Look: Starbound

This looks promising.

the complete No Man Sky

Starbound? I feel like I've heard of this game before....

SpaceCraft is back, with a vengeance!

The 961 day beta is over.

As someone who loves Terraria, but was underwhelmed initially by Starbound in Early Access, the final product is absolutely fantastic. It's got a great quest system as well, so you don't end up being completely lost, checking a Wiki all the time.

As someone who wasnt too hot on Terraria, I dont think this looks too interesting either. But new quick looks are always fun :). So thanks for that :D

Ursa is also latin for bear, and that mining shop was totally manned by bears.

Felt the exact same way when I bought in to help fund Starbound.

I chalked it up to playing way too much Terraria to dive back into something so similar but this quicklook combined with my time away from Terraria and Starbound has totally reignited my interest.

This looks better than Terraria in every way. It's still completely uninteresting to me.

I keep all my crafting stations on my ship. Apparently the intended way to upgrade it is to get more crew (one size per two crew) but I ended up buying the fake licenses.

On higher difficulties you cannot beam up from underground, you have to reach the surface before you can teleport.

I dunno, I did put a bunch of hours into it, and it does do some things better than Terraria, but on the whole it feels very average, like the sum of its parts should add up to a lot more than they do. I want to like it more than I currently do at any rate, hope they support it the way Terraria's devs have supported that.

I really wanted this game for a long time but that UI is so tiny. Yikes. Glad I never puled the trigger.

I wonder if anyone can confirm or not if you can change the UI scale in the options? Surely to God you can.

@andrewf87462: @sparky_buzzsaw

There is an UI scale setting and I think it goes up to 4X.

RORIE

If you enjoy Starbound, I cannot emphasize how important installing Frackin' Universe is to improving your experience. It adds a bunch of new, bizarre fascinating biomes, an entirely new, deeper crafting system that promotes experimentation and exploration over just climbing the ore ladder like Vanilla does, and adds tons of new options for gear, story quests, final boss, and more.

Vanilla Starbound is essentially on par with Terraria 1.0.

Frackin' Universe pushes it to Terraria 1.2.

@Rorie have you been enjoying Legion invasions in WoW?

Butthole-mouthed Sausage Ghost.

5/5

ABT.

Always be torching.

This game was on my regretful purchases list when I got it on early access years ago. I'm real happy I ended up getting my money's worth once it hit v1.0. It's a very different game now. I've already sunk in close to 90 hours after a bunch of exploring and completing the main and side story missions. Still haven't gone to all the planet types yet either.

As someone who's never really gotten into Terraria, I tried to give it a second chance after beating Starbound and unfortunately I absolutely still hate Terraria. The crafting, combat, and UI has always been aggravatingly clumsy imo. Starbound is such a superior game that handles crafting and combat way better.

Played this right when it came out and was very underwhelmed but it's looking so much better. Might jump back in soon.

Good tip.

always great to have rorie in content!

also i know i need to mess with the config file but when i first launched this i set it to 1440p and borderless and now my mouse is stuck in what appears to be a 1920x1080 region of my screen. sort of annoying.

I put almost 100 hours into this when it first came out on early access havent touched it in a while and I haven't kept up with development at all. I'm super excited to jump back in

im past the tutorial and soon as the game opens up idontknow 2hat to do... theres vehicles and stuff but i just dont get what to do besides mine and scan for artifacts i want a bigger ship and the game does a bad job for new players

@steveurkel: Find a village on a planet and do the randomly generated quests there. Eventually one of the quest givers will ask to join your crew. Once you get two you'll be given the option to upgrade your ship.

I haven't played this for feckin' ages. Not sure if I can be bothered to play any more of it. No Man's Sky is boring enough.

I fucking hate Pachelbel's Canon so damn much.

I've been short on pixels lately so I became a space slum lord.

I built a vertical tower with rooms that I put deeds in that barely fit a single hanging copper lamp, a wooden bed, and a wooden door, so I can collect rent easily. To improve my chance to get pixels rather than junk, I also installed the Steam Workshop mod for making residents pretty much only either give random rare items or just pixels.

Something like this basically except vertical:

I enjoyed Jeff's rendition of Ladies and Gentlemen we are floating in space on the oboe.

I really wish No Man Sky becomes like this 3-4 years from now

@jdp83: You are an evil genius! I love it.

@sgtsphynx:

You monster.

@bathala said:

No Man's Sky 2.

Having played this off and on since it got into early access years ago: the 1.0 release held me for a few days before I blew past it. Nothing really stops you from making your ship the hub for all your storage and crafting tools, so you progress absurdly fast. Sadly after beating the story, I felt I wanted to do nothing. I don't like the base building, I don't care for the pokemon aspect, and I really had nothing left I wanted to see.

It's an ok game of that genre but it will run its card hand rather quickly.

As someone who never played minecraft or terraria but loved stardew valley do you think this would be a decent game to try? I know it isn't the same thing but there are some similarities between them

I sunk an absolutely bonkers amount of time into Terraria but could never get into Starbound. There's something nostalgic and cohesive about Terraria, whereas Starbound has always struck me as kind of a big jumble of ideas and styles that didn't really draw me in. The gameplay was similar enough that I couldn't find a compelling reason to start over again building houses out of wood and drilling down into dirt, except this time with futuristic lasers and drills instead of axes and picks.

I'm happy to hear it's improved a lot since early access but Terraria is still my home.

@jameboycolor: Eh its kinda like it but not really. Stardew has the terraria style interface to a extent but this is much more involved in different ways. Its hard to explain for some reason, but after watching this you should already know if it looks like something you would like. Check out some streams or whatever if you need further info.

Man this games been fleshed out a lot since i played the early access stuff months and months ago. Might have to start a new character and give it the 'ol college try!!!

This game looked cool until jeff pointed out the knock forward of that rocket launcher.

I have terraria but when the game was so damn small on screen i never managed to play it

This women's prison movie got wierd.

I've gotten to the end a few times as different races. I can say that the amount of tedium involved in survival mode is at least in my experience and desire - not worth it. You upgrade your ship as I'm sure someone has told you by either getting crew members (Fastest way is doing your own settlement and doing their quests as they pop up - as they seem more likely to join you than randoms)

I don't know that I had a lot of fun with any of the bosses, they just became sorta annoyances I had to push passed. Spike ball, Multi jump were my favourites overall, I found myself not using many dashes so it was a tossup between Blink and Sprint.

Two handed swords and sniper rifles are some of the best weapons - though I those limited item throwing weapons end up being some of the strongest things you get (Actually beat the final boss with throwing weapons since they took the most damage).

Once you complete the campaign I'm not really sure what you're supposed to do - as I'm not sure if there are just harder planets and better weapons to be found or not. Ships get super big too - so fitting a ton of stuff isn't too difficult (Though crew all gather around you as soon as you show up like attention starved puppies).

I had the same issue at first. Thankfully it can be solved by setting it to a lower resolution and just forcing fullscreen - it actually looks better this way IMO, high-resolution sprites just don't do it for me, and it's not like there's much detail in Terraria's art to begin with.

Certainly without those years of early access, and the millions that the game raised upfront, it wouldn't have fine tuned economy, clever choices, balanced weapons but this game also from the start had too few ideas (and plenty of ideas got thrown out).

Ultimately it fails at trying to square the circle of creating tight gameplay in a procedurally generated world. There is no emergent gameplay what so ever, liquids are boring NPCs mainly ignore one another. There is no scarcity, no conflict, no content.

The execution is alright, this game could have used somebody more imaginative or ambitious at the helm. It's pretty obvious that they sat on the money for all those years and used it to create other perhaps better games, Starbound just got some finishing touches some trim and a handful of missions.

Giving developers money upfront seems to remove some of that do-or-die motivation that is perhaps required to create anything of worth.

The fact that you can play things on the oboe just made me way more likely to play this at some point.

Looks like thing have progressed substantially. I'm definitely going to jump back in, thanks for the QL guys!

Interesting that Jeff mentioned No Man's Sky at the end. I'd love it if that game eventually evolved into something that was feature-wise similar to Starbound.

@onemanarmyy: Happy someone caught that. Thought I would be the only one.

I may try it back out again, but i remember even doing that it was too small. Risk of rain is another game that's like this, but i don't even think chaning the res did anything it's just tiny.