So, who's playing this? In case you don't know, Starbound is a procedurally generated 2D sandbox sci-fi game, with tons of planets and sectors to explore, generated locations to visit, and lots of items to discover. (And Doc, there's crafting and building too, like Minecraft.)

I've been hyped for this game for a long time, and out of sheer luck, a generous person gave me their beta key. I'm loving it so far - it's the unlimited kind of adventure I've wanted since I played Terraria.

They're going to reset characters soon to apply a big update, but afterwards, maybe some of us could team up.

Myself, Anonymous_SoFar and Sphenicus are playing pretty regularly. We also have an Oondi, and an inbound DiKatze and Figs from what I understand!

Doc, it's hard to explain... If you've played Terarria, imagine that game but with space exploration, actual story and infinite worlds and monsters that are generated dynamically. It's more than just a Terraria knockoff, though. It puts that game to shame and brings in part Terraria, Minecraft and The Elder Scrolls with six (soon seven) playable races, each with their own story. You can set up shop on as many planets as you want and traverse the galaxy in your starship (provided you find enough fuel to find where you want to go).

I'm playing a human, for example. There's also an avian race, plant people, the Apex (communist ape people), The Glitch (robots stuck in a midevil time period) and fish folks. Soon will come space cowboys who are creatures formed of space clouds.

It sounds a bit ridiculous, and i'll admit - when I first looked at it I thought to myself 'This looks stupid. At best it's a Terraria knockoff.' but it ascends above and beyond that game on every level, bringing something to the table for everyone who enjoys exploration and crafting games.

Edited by WindRider739 on December 8, 2013 at 22:43:05

Imagine Minecraft but in 2D. Now put it in space. Now make it so that a player can travel to an infinite number of randomly generated worlds where everything from the gravity's pull to the monsters are random. Add in a few boss battles. That's Starbound. I personally find it more enjoyable playing in large servers since it takes on a more MMO-esque feel. I can talk with people on ENTIRELY DIFFERENT PLANETS while I go about resource gathering and I think there's appeal in that.

I've been trying to secure guns in Alpha Sector for a fighting chance, but I kind of want to drip all the content instead of going on a server and doing it like an MMO. That gets boring, fast, for me.

After some consideration and looking at what kind of load I need to run it, I'll be hosting a 24/7 Starbound server after the next major update, just for Interordi and Creeper's Lab members (and friends). Considering the tiny amount of power required to run such a server, and the fact that my computer is on 24/7 anyway since it's my phone, this shouldn't be a problem.

The new patch has also added more randomly generated contents. I made a new character since characters got wiped, and on the FIRST planet, I found an Avian tomb full of warriors, skeletal birds, and crypts with money and weapons. FIRST planet!

My first planet had a magician shop and a giant Avian settlement. I had over 1000 pixels and two legendary weapons before I left.

My planet had murder everywhere.

Just found out that mods are being opened up for this to make the game even more chock full of content than ever before. Also, lots of suggestions being made at the forums - I'm hoping we get a planet bookmarking system myself so I can record where shops and villages are.

Current plan is to stripmine the current system I'm in, maybe dig a little deeper, and try to get as much material as I can before I fight the first boss. I need a faster assault rifle.

This game, so far, is an immense amount of fun. I've been playing with only one or two other people, and it has a great feel for adventure, exploration, and even building still. While it looks similar to Terraria in style, the game really plays very differently. The weapons, enemies, combat systems, and all that are pretty different, but mostly the whole focus of the game is changed. Where Terraria focused on cultivating a great world full of balance and neat things, Starbound has a more accelerated sense of progression. Every planet is different, and you never know what you might find.

Also of note is that the galaxy is shared between players. That is to say, everyone is on the same seed. If I find a planet with a huge castle full of awesome stuff, I can give you the starmap coordinates and the planet name, and you can go there too. Since there's a practically infinite number of planets, the entire gaming community could probably explore this game forever.

As far as difficulty goes, the game is fairly tame. It's easy enough to trap giant bosses behind big pillars of dirt and just slowly poke them to death with a thousand arrows. The flip-side to this is that the more intense monsters will 1 or 2 shot you while flying, jumping, or just charging straight at you.

Awesome but terribly addictive game so far.

I should try that trapping trick on some other bosses I've run across. My main thing right now is finding something besides airships, tombs, and dungeons. I want to find some friendly villages.

The best cheese is to just dig a hole and make a 1x1 hole in the roof of it and shoot straight up. Use a USCM bunker for the UFO.

That said, I'm running an active server 24/7 now with a few Interordi / Creeper's Lab people and anyone interested in joining just needs to PM me for the info!

I killed the UFO the hard way not too long ago. Of course, threat level 2 means the wildlife is already stomping a mudhole in me. Need to get some steel armor before I move on.

Exploring is the main focus, just seeing what kind of cool stuff you can find and what kind of planets get generated.

There's a fair focus on building, but if you don't want to build, you don't have to because your space ship functions as a base of operations.

Yeah, I just put all my stuff in my ship. No point not to, since I'm always bopping about the galaxy anyway.

The early game is focused on exploring while the later game is a bit more focused on building. There are five sectors, the first four giving difficulty levels 1-4 and the last sector yielding difficulties 5-10. Each sectors increase "difficulty" by scaling up stats on enemies but also unlocking new materials, which upgrade your personal stats.

Once you get to the last sector, the idea of settling down and building a base is a lot more prevalent, I guess. Traveling is a lot cheaper at this point in the game, so having a home base that isn't your ship becomes more appealing.

The one gimmick, and I don't know what their future plans related to this will be, is that a lot of items can only be obtained from structures found generated on planets. That is to say, you can't just craft them yourself with your normal minerals. For people wanting to make bases themed in one way or the other, they might need to go exploring for materials and stuff. It's an interesting concept, anyway.

Just hit the 10th tier today, so I'm not sure yet what the rest is going to look like, but still enjoying it so far.

That's actually something they said, Ribitta. However, the last sector (sector x) is a dumping ground for everything they haven't built yet. They've gone on record as saying that there will be a minimum of 10 sectors, but that only the first four tiers of gear cost and bosses exist so far. There's honestly so much they haven't put in the game yet.

To put it in perspective, do you remember Minecraft's 1.8 update, Doc? The one that changed everything forever? The one we stupidly looked at and said 'Now the game is complete. They won't be adding much more.'

Yeah. THAT update is coming for Starbound in the near future.

If you want a good idea of what this game is capable of / going to be capable of, peruse the dev blog http://playstarbound.com/tag/dev-blog/ and then read the most recent updates on the main page.