It's kinda old news, but I just now saw this. I guess it got lost within the Game of the Year / holiday madness. (Gentle reminder: don't read YouTube comments.)

Blog posts here and here.

After what feels like forever, Chucklefish is finally committing into releasing the shit-ton of nightly updates into the big branches. The update is now live on the unstable branch and is going into a stable release hopefully within the month. This is probably the most important thing they've been skimping on for the past year or so, which understandably made the game look really bad for a lot of people. But here it is now. Ta-da...?

Some of the major bullet points:

• New Race (space cowboys with space trains)
• Upgradeable spaceships
• Upgradeable matter manipulator
• Major combat overhaul (it's not fully terrible anymore)
• Game doesn't lag like hell on my laptop anymore
• Hella content (biomes, items, etc)

Full changelog: http://starbounder.org/Version_History/Nightly

I don't mind playing a super buggy game, so the nightlies were good enough for me. It's still great to see that they're finally pushing for a stable release though. I'm liking the newer versions a lot better than the previous stable one (which I didn't like), so good for me I guess =P It's a much more welcome development than most other recent early access happenings. What do you all think?

I'll probably jump back into Starbound once they get out of Early Access, because I was tired with how barebones some of it was.

I wish more Early Access games took a page out of Prison Architect's book - they manage a fairly meaningful monthly schedule with new alphas that is killer, because even if I'm tired with some of the AI bugs, I still pop in every now and then when they add stuff like having to isolate former cops in your jail so that they don't get shanked in the shower.

Hurray for Starbound to leave the vaporware-zone? I kinda was expecting a 2014 release and it's going to bomb in 2015. The small hype they had is long past.

Better late than never, I guess. According to steam I haven't played it since 2013; my brother said they had put out almost no updates since then. At least they're trying to get back on track?

Great! I had a lot of fun with Starbound, but didn't want to get too deep in while it was Early Access. I might check back in a bit to try the combat out, but hopefully this is one big step closer to release.

@ghostiet: Yeah, Prison Architect and Nuclear Throne are easily the two best Early Access type productions (for us customers) that I know of right now. It's kinda bewildering that Starbound managed to be so successful with the way they're doing it. I mean, they apparently have enough funds to survive at least another 9 years of development. I guess there's not much incentive to push for a stricter schedule, for better or worse.

I'll check this out. Though I'm kind of leaning toward waiting for the stable version. I really want to see this game do well(since I love Terraria) and I'm glad they've gotten organized. I felt that the initial build was pretty scatter brained and kind of disappointing. The blogposts make it looked like they've thought things through after all this time. I remember hearing that they actually all moved into one office together across countries, which I imagine halts developments quite a bit. Even still, I totally forgot about Starbound for most of 2014. At least they finally put out something ,right?

Glad I decided to wait for the actual release. I had no idea they haven't been pushing updates.

Holy crap, I didn't know this was still in early access. Didn't it come out a long ass time ago? I was wondering why it didn't go on sale over the winter break.

@rollingzeppelin: People might go apeshit if it went on a proper sale, to be honest. It had a shitstorm on the level of Spacebase DF-9 a-brewin', especially considering the window of hype it had, including that crazy Humble Bundle thing where they added a 1000 copies as a 10 dollar BTA and they killed their site for an hour.

@trafalgarlaw: We'll the've sold more ~1.5 Million units at the full early access price, which honestly is much better than many games which go on sale on steam, including terraria whith it's 4 million units sold, partially for 2 and 3 dollars a copy. I'm taking numbers from memory from the arstechnica articles.

Terraria with its updates also fell into that trap "that more content equals better" and now instead of a little gem it's just a jumbled mess of almost endless possibilities, none of which seems worth pursuing. It's the difference between a coloring book and 3 crayons, and a 100 colored pencils and a white sheet of paper.

Starbound was 70-90% ready when they announced early access, but they've received so much money, expectations on both sides got completely out of whack, and they got stuck reinventing the wheel. With all the negativity, buyers remorse and disappointment and being the clone of a rip-off, i don't know what they can do. They could use a story to flesh out the universe a little, they could use MMO like universes on dedicated servers or at least an in game way to share stuff (little big planet style), but none of these things suit the conceit of Starbound which is "do anything, be anyone", we are just a sandbox / perpetual constuction site.

Don't buy early access.