Days after launching as an early release beta, Starbound has rolled out the first of many updates to add new content and tweak the old. The main focus of this patch was to re-balance weapon damage and the leveling system, but several new items and enemies made the cut, including a staple for sandbox games: grappling hooks!
Taking plenty of cues from creative exploration/building games like Terraria, Starbound hands you a spaceship and lets you explore a seemingly infinite number of worlds, all while fighting monsters, gathering ores, crafting equipment and uncovering secrets. Online play supports up to eight players adventuring through the galaxy together, making tasks like tackling dungeons or raiding prisons a little bit easier. Also, there's a great and powerful ape god. With propaganda posters.
Starbound is currently available in its beta form. If you dive in and pre-order now, be warned that some updates actually wipe your old games, forcing you to start over from scratch. Beta woes and all that, right? The team is working on fixes that will hopefully make character deletion a thing of the past. In the meantime, it's actually sort of fun to pillage and plunder knowing your life has an expiration date. Really, it is.
See below for a more complete list of fixes and additions in the recent update.
Added a stance system to w HUGE balance patch, every item, creature, armour and weapon rebalanced. Levelling system entirely rewritten eaponry, not currently used but will allow us to add secondary attacks to weaponry very soon. Added early implementation of creature taming (more features coming soon) Added grappling hook Added new boss and new sector of the galaxy Added new hats Added new mining items Added new throwable items Added new weapons Added pixel compressor for high cost banking (idea from Ncrpts) All the monsters behave smarter and are less likely to get stuck Baby monsters Disable using the beam-axe to light caves underground Fix the game on XP (hopefully) Guns more common in tier 3 New monster palettes Ore rebalance (probably way way too much ore at the moment, will be fixed later, enjoy it) Small bipeds now socialise with each other Some monsters now graze on grass (can look ugly, needs finishing) Tons more fixes and smaller additions Tons of new sounds Underground chests more common Underground detached/rare biomes more common Underground random encounters more common You can no longer attack through blocks