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Revisiting Starbound in 2021

Recently I replayed Starbound. For those who haven’t heard, there was some considerable controversy regarding Starbound between 2013 and 2017. And then further accusations for the company in 2019.

In short, Starbound is block-based adventure game set in a futuristic galaxy. You dig for resources, explore hostile planets, repair and upgrade your ship, gather a crew. Or you can just build yourself a little house and spend your time fishing.

I was personally caught in the controversy over Starbound in 2014. I’m not a person who pre-orders games, so I had no intention of buying Starbound before it was released. I think pre-orders are foolish, like most of the internet seems to… but still preorders games in droves. However, I had friends who were exploring the beta and one of them purchased it for me as a wedding present.

I was quickly hooked. It took a formula that had been honed to a keen edge by Terraria in 2011 and added a twist of exploration that might have been the last thing missing from the earlier game. See, in Terraria you have a single world map. Maybe two thirds into the game, you’ve likely explored most of the map, but Starbound offers 12.667 quadrillion planets to explore, and you’ll be hopping between them with frequency.

The initial controversy came over a number of matters:

• The Release Date.
  • In 2013, Chucklefish, the developers of Starbound promised a 2014 release date. After very little communication, the game was finally released in 2016
• Missing Content
  • Content promised to be in the game was never added, or that existed in the beta was removed. This content included:
  • A unique introduction for each race.
  • Post-game content in the form of Sector X.
  • Clothing/Warmth systems when exploring frozen areas.
  • Huge amount of cut content when transitioning from beta to 1.0 release

Of these omissions, the one that grinds the most is the unique introductions. At the point of release, tilesets, NPCs and other required assets to create a unique starting experience for every race existed within the game. They were, however, never used. Every race goes through the human starting, witnessing the destruction of Earth by Eldritch horrors. The trend continues with Chucklefish’s treatment of every race outside of Human (and perhaps Floran) as second class citizens, lacking in lore and most factors of interest. Here’s a short summary of the Races and their lore:

• Humans
  • The Humans witness the destruction of their ancestral home world, Earth, and launch into the galaxy with a desire to hunt down and destroy the Ancient Ones responsible. As you explore you’ll find USCM (United Systems Colonial Marines) installations and prisons and interact with what remains of humanity.
• Floran
  • Meat eating plants who like to kill things. And eat meat. There’s really nothing more here than a venus fly trap in vaguely humanoid shape.
• Apex
  • A race of hyper advanced monkey people. The devs saw Planet of the Apes. And luckily one was reading 1984 and came up with the cheap story workaround of “Dystopian society. Info is classified. No lore required.”
• Glitch
  • Robots who think they’re in the middle ages.
• Avian
  • Bird people. Just throw some aztec references at them and it will be fine.
• Hylotl
  • … Fish people. Oh and they’re Japanese. For reasons.
• Novakid
  • There is literally no lore for this race at all.

This pattern was repeated across the whole game, where it felt like it ran out of steam. That the developers just lost interest in the project over the four years they worked on Starbound. When 1.0 was finally released, for those who followed the development of the game, it felt like a slap in the face, when not only were promises not delivered, but parts of the game that were functional and fun in the beta had been unceremoniously removed for good.

Starbound became the poster-child for early release promises broken and didn’t explode onto the scene so much as sort of fizzled out shortly after its 2016 release.

So why revisit it?

It is 2021. Starbound has undergone a number of updates since its original release.

• 1.1 added Fishing and Novakid villages.
• 1.2 added endgame in the form of procedurally generated Ancient Vaults, containing random bosses and terraforming technologies.
• 1.3 added mechs and refined space travel.
• 1.4 added bounty hunting.

And the truth is… it’s a fun game. It’s not the game I was promised when the company were releasing it, but it isn’t bad.

Though the reason I’m writing this blog is that so, one day, I can write a follow up about the total makeover that comes in the form of “Frackin’ Universe”