Even if you're coming from months of Starbounding, 1.0 marks a massive change in the series. It's like a different game. Here's a handful of the biggest changes, though it's by far not an exhaustive list:

First on the combat agenda: new weapons! The standard array of melee and ranged weaponry has been expanded to include a wider variety of both types, including something I swear is a laser guitar. Weapons now have secondary abilities to give you more options in combat, such as creating a barrier against shots or spinning in a circle to hit enemies on all sides. All of this new shooty/slappy stuff needs something to shoot/slap, so the update brings in truckloads of new enemies to fight. Each biome has a couple of new baddies to encounter, and just as before, they're weird. Like, what is that guy about a minute into the video? Space mole?

Another big new addition to the Starbound universe are teleporters. Previously, players could hop from ship to surface at the press of a button, but that's about all Scotty could do in terms of beaming. Now we can place and register teleporters on planets, jumping between locations or even transporting to other players. Building a teleporter requires cores, which can be found on-world. The tradeoff for all of this is we lose the ability to save/quit to sneak back to the ship. When you exit, you appear where you left off.

The last stable update for Starbound was in March 2014, which seems like forever ago. It was worth the wait, though, as now combat isn't lame, space travel is better, matter manipulators aren't useless, and there's plenty of new tech, items, weapons and armors to hunt down and make. So many that a bullet point list of the highlights is the best way to display them:

One of the biggest new features in the Starbound update is a complete overhaul of the combat system. The smack-retreat-smack method in the game has been, at best, unsatisfying, and at worst, plain awful. The new system adds breakable shields, 360 degree melee attacks, parrying, an improved status system, and a completely new weapon class, staves. New enemy types are also jumping into the mix, like sharks!

The features list for the Enraged Koala patch isn't as fleshy as some of the previous patches. New to the Starbound world are some new death animations, Valentine's Day items (swords, costumes, decorations, etc.), changes to projectiles, and a handful of bug fixes and content additions.

Developer Chucklefish took some much needed time off this past holiday season, now back in full swing with an incoming Starbound patch. Bugs took a lot of their time to clear out from the latest version, but they did manage to get some new features added in with this patch (such as that cool pixel revolver)! They wanted everyone to know that they will be putting on the finishing touches very shortly and can expect it to be out by next week. In the future, other patches won't take as long as this one did.

Maybe it's not so surprising, however, if you consider that the game's crowdfunding project (conducted through their own site) raked in nearly 2.2 million dollars, 600K in the first three days alone. People wanted this game then and apparently they want it now, too!