на месте разрабов, если бы я узнал что контент для моей игры клепает 12-летнее фурричудовище с прайдом на аватарке в твиттере, я бы сделал всё возможное чтобы люди не узнали о его причастности к моему творению
@@ChesterCheatin Bruh, this game is like 7 years old. It's not fortnite that gets montly battlepasses, it's an indie game that have a lot of lost potential
The early iteration of Starbound where it was pretty much a survival game in space was much better than the forced story progression we got. Digging deep into the cores of ice planets, having to keep fires nearby to stay warm, figuring out how to summon bosses to gain access to new sectors that had even more hostile environments you had to creatively approach. Instead we ended up with these set dungeons, a bland story, an irritating required scanning mechanic, and the barrier of entry to other biomes being "just equip this pack and you're fine, lol." Absolute tragedy, which was partly due to the lead dev being absolutely incompetent. Oh well.
Agreed, I had way more fun back in the EA days when we logged in and tried to find things, but once they had a set story to the game... it lost a lot of the uniqueness of the races because none of the racial backstories made them stand out anymore since we're now basically playing Star Trek wannabes. Also, I miss the EA progression since your spaceships were all unique to your race as well as the ship's AI. Getting your ship working was such a huge achievement! Getting the ability to travel to the next planet in the system was another huge feeling, then... the ability to visit other systems? New sectors? Exploration was unlocked as you improve your ship, which made sense, but now we can just teleport to new places? Boring! Back then, you had to unlock the place and I think designate it as a teleport location before you can teleport to it.
Early access I was pulling all-nighters on this game, when I came back to it after 1.0 I was baffled. I had gifted the game to a friend, we tried to start a new game and were put on different instances of the tutorial/main quest, ending on different planets when it was over. "Do this and this and also that then maybe you'll be able to just explore and have fun with someone else". And this whole new starting experience was way more confusing while also being more railroaded and streamlined than the old one. I got the impression that the game just deviated from expanding and perfecting its premise to implement whatever useless feature was popular at the time. If I want to capture monsters there are already games doing just that very well. I bought StarBound to explore, discover strange new planets, stumble upon aliens settlements or ruins or whatever, some friendly, some hostile, learn more as I go and have fun. There was already some environmental story-telling, just adding some preset planets and sites, with maybe some semi-hidden optional end-game questlines to give an incentive to keep exploring and you already had a solid game. Instead they added a main plot, a bunch of cookie-cutter quests, and streamlined everything :/
Dungeons could've been cool and added to this if executed better, and the original game was SOOO much better overall. But at the end of the day they just took what made the game so beautiful in the first place and removed all of it.
Also, arrogant. it takes an arrogant person to tell Another person that they are doing it wrong, and that he will show them, then he fails miserable, lmao
just to add salt to the wound, in the alpha and beta, the races were unique: the glitch couldn't eat anything but tomatoes. The Florian were the only ones that could consume oculemon, boneboo or other fruits that were toxic for other characters, Hyotl could hold breath longer. And everyone had race dedicated weapons that varied in stats, making the novakids ranged weapons better and the florian melee ones the best. The story was bad, in fact it was the worst addition.
Part of that is probably because of the change in writers. Not to mention just how grim and dark much of the lore was before they toned it down from ‘agonizing immortal mutations, racial genocides, fungal zombies, totally unethical cultural practices, etc. to just… ‘Big ape bad, Florian not all savage, glitch are normally hive mind, and you’re part of the somehow good tennae protectorate.
Not only that, resting and eating and temperature all came together to create a surprisingly engaging survival system. Going into fiery or snowy planets, or even planets without an atmosphere, was a real challenge, not just a roadblock that you don't even see before doing a main story mission. Stocking up on food, crafting appropriately warm or cool armor or environment shields, hazardous worlds with poor visibility and terrain, draining moons for much-needed fuel, it had such potential to be an immersive experience unlike anything else in the market at the time, but instead they chose to go with incredibly shallow and generic mechanics...
Any idea from which update it started going downhill? I remember playing during early days, but don't remember the updates... There's probably old pirated versions still on the web, I would love to replay them, but really have no idea which one to search for, as I've ignored the game for several years =(
@@ewg5511 I'd say it was when they started railroading the storyline and crimping the variety for planet and monster generation. Things used to be totally wild in terms of potential appearances and combinations. Now it's all just kinda... samey. Not to mention the fact that now progression is locked behind a story that arguably ruins one of Starbound's biggest draws: Roleplaying. And I don't mean like, 'RPG' elements, I mean in the fact that It used to be a game where the story was entirely yours to make. Your origins, your experience, etc. Players would impose a story upon their character and see it through as they played the game and experienced new things. Now? Everyone is the exact same schmuck as one another...
I was so disappointed when they made the backstory for every race identical. You used to have a different backstory depending on which race you were, based on leaving your society (or just Earth being destroyed if human), but now everyone just happens to be on Earth…
The weirdest game dev horror stories are the ones that remind you it is entirely possible to un-develop a game. Imagine the weird time travel scenario: "Play Starbound before it leaves early access!"
"Novakids were a fan race and i dont think the person who came up with them got compensated" John Su. It was John Su who made the original Novakid piece, inspired by their OC, that later on became the base guide for the whole race
Terrain noise was actually toned down around the same time that jump height was reduced. It is much worse with the old values modded back in. However, some old dungeons with platforming built around old jump values never got updated to account for the change.
@@jss2a98aj I guess you aren't aware of how much Chucklefish gutted the fun mechanics in the early days to realize "Tiy's Vision" Do you remember "sand-surfing" aka the mining meta in early beta?
The part that I hated was that when they added in the story, it became non-optional. You CANNOT progress the game without the story, which means you HAVE to follow the pre-chosen progression curve. Want to make a sweet lava castle? Not until you've gotten so far along that you might've lost your inspiration. Want to start with a new character, but you already know all the crafting requirements for your favorite tier of stuff? Too bad, you need another few hours of hunting through random places and hoping RNG doesn't screw you out of being able to progress the story. Want to try mods? Congrats, if it doesn't completely redo the game, it STILL needs you to either skip ALL of the story at once or you HAVE to follow the story to progress still. That update KILLED Starbound as a 'sandbox game'. It was simply an adventure game with a few minor sandboxing elements.
Actually Fracking Universe completely revamps the progression, Im probably more than 30h in (also playing with Elithian races and Arcana) and never did one of the main quests so far, just the basic tutorial
@@theartillery9724 I don't really recall having a problem with the ship building, I selected a pre made BIOS tho, so I didn't needed to create nothing from scratch, the only sad part was that I needed to break some of the furnishing to make room for the tables. The skill tree is extremelly intimidating too, I really agree with you there, but many things there aren't really that crucial for the progression. If you ever try it again (and I really, really recommend doing) either look into an progression guide, or do what I did, I sticked to the normal progression of Starbound, focused in getting the new tiers equipments just like in the normal game, and whenever I needed to get something else for the production I researched that too, by focusing on that you will learn the tree in a fast and intuitive way.
Man, mentioning the Alpha reminded me of just how much the game lost over the years. I've seen the temperature system mentioned, but another thing was biomes were actually divided into stratums based on difficulty. A garden world was a walk in a park, any of the lava planets had the highest difficulty possible. Pets were at one point obscenely strong and durable and well worth going out of your way to catch. Races may not have had unique attributes, or at least not strong ones, but they at least unique looking equipment that gave them a sense of identity alongside the dungeons and towns. Also, we lost a decent chunk of dungeons, biomes, and towns over time as well. The lore purge was a mistake. The colorful biome used to be a lot more messed up because that's where people who encroached on the truth of Greenfinger wound up, transformed into neon-colored people who couldn't talk. The USCM bunkers with soldiers who had been driven insane with fear and paranoia. The Avian concepts seemed to die on the cutting room floor because we had the mysterious Thornwing only mentioned in lore books, but is implied to not only be the head of a mercenary company and has a vested, sinister interest in keeping the true nature of Kulex a secret and will literally bury people deep in some desolate planet's underground if they find out about it. Plus, the Florans were specifically designed to combat something, and the Tentacomet of the time (later rebranded as the Ruin) was implied to be Greenfinger's creation as well that had slipped out of their grasp and destroyed Earth. Which, if I recall right, was implied to not have been completely destroyed but only partially consumed and even had survivors who would have long since been driven to madness if/when you ever managed to get to it. There were supposed to be unique questlines for each race, different motivations to explore the stars and a decent number of mysteries to solve. But it really just boils down to the fact that the lead dev's a manchild. Like, I remember how much people just *hated* traveling down to a planet's core to repair the ship's FTL drive. It was a long, slow, tedious slog because the closer you got to where Core Fragments spawn, the tougher the ground got. Dirt became stone, stone got tougher, and finally you might as well have had a material comparable to Minecraft's Obsidian but in layers dozens of blocks thick. Then you had to go all the way back up, likely though the same shaft you had to dig to get that far. People just used softcore difficulty and died in lava as fast travel, eating the pixel loss because as you noted, Pixels are easy to come by. What was the lead dev's response? Change softcore so you dropped all items on death. Not *fix* anything, no. Not give players an incentive to explore more, or just implement the 'teleport from anywhere' mechanic they did later. No, the message was loud and clear. 'How DARE you cheese your way out of MY glorious vision! You peons FORGET that I. AM. GOD. You will MINE these fragments as I dictate, you will NOT play this game ANY other way.' (Of course at the time saving and quitting out of the game had the same effect of dropping you back on the ship with no repercussions, but nobody tell him that.) So yeah, no surprise that he turned out to be a piece of shit who exploited the work of others to make money, then ran away once (I presume) the list of easy victims dried up.
> Plus, the Florans were specifically designed to combat something, and the Tentacomet of the time (later rebranded as the Ruin) was implied to be Greenfinger's creation as well that had slipped out of their grasp and destroyed Earth. Which, if I recall right, was implied to not have been completely destroyed but only partially consumed and even had survivors who would have long since been driven to madness if/when you ever managed to get to it. ...Huh, so that explains the Eyeball cultists if you squint hard enough.
@@gratuitouslurking8610 Yeah, there was so much stuff we lost over time thanks to the lead dev and I hate it. Especially since it's unlikely that there'd be an overhaul mod ambitious enough to bring any of those untapped concepts back.
i heard Tiy was kind of a dick, but got anywhere i can read something more indepth? Terarria's Redigit recently did something similar with the Luck and torches, that was a big shitshow
I do find it funny how the 6 different races have unique backgrounds to them and different ways you can interact with them in the story while the novakids are kind of just "Yeah we are space cowboys"
In comparison to the other moddable games it is very stable, and very easy to mod. Or I should say, it is extremely stable under immense modding load, but not optimized very well.
@@klo1679 its not a modding heaven, my friend. I believe it can be modding Empyrean.... ...considering how even Terraria is independent from that garbage mode, which is truly a Calamity for a community
I actually really like that it TRIED to add an actual quest hub and story instead of the barebones survival game it started out as. It could have gone a long way toward separating it from Terraria. But the WAY they implemented it was truly awful, and the story itself was incredibly generic garbage even if it weren't implemented awfully.
@@Ventorath And really, they could have avoided the whole "let's force everyone to go through the quests" thing. Even if the story and the quests weren't plain bad, they'd still be something you don't want to play around with and explore - it'd be one run through the game and goodbye. A game like this can have quests. But they need to be in line with the game - freeform, optional, spontaneous, procedural... Think Star Wars: Galaxies' encounters. You fly to a planet, and while exploring, find a village that's being attacked by monsters. With a few clues, you find a dungeon, fight through it, collect loot, solve the quest, yay. Or you get a quest to find a lost person - and as you fly around planets on your normal exploration runs, you can ask people about them. Quests that ask you to build a bridge, tunnel through a mountain, help rebuild a village after a flood, deliver food to refugees. Quests that change the world - the way you do them, or don't. That's what sandboxes are about. Not a premade list of quests (or worse, a _linear_ railroad of quests, like we got) that you are expected to finish. Of course, the _variety_ of quests will always be limited - but noone is forcing you to do yet another fetch quest; if you want to help, gather the leather for the villagers. If you don't... don't. Fixed quests feel a lot more like you're expected to finish all of them; and it's a lot harder to make them feel like a part of the (changing!) world. In a sandbox like Starbound allows - you didn't help the villagers. They're all dead. No more trading on this planet. Not a game breaker - but real, lasting change. A linear mainline quest you need to do to progress through the game... that's always been for themeparks, not sandboxes. Not a bad thing, but certainly not a good fit for a sandbox.
Yeah the story mode is shit. I understand wanting to give your sandbox game an ultimate goal, like the Ender dragon, for people who need that sort of thing. But the pre-story progression was more fun and open-ended. Remember how they promised that they'd allow you to progress however you want - through combat, trading, farming, mining, or anything else? That sure changed. Now, you not only MUST do combat to progress, but you also need to run through these setpieces that are the same every time and that you can't mine through. So a sandbox crafting and mining game gets turned into a side-scrolling arcade with a tacked-on story and no alternate progression paths. What's even the point of having the procedural world if everything important happens in set levels and the resources you need to survive those levels can be purchased?
A story mode... that ripped out all the really damn cool lore and backstory that had been put in and had been teasing early access players, leaving it forever unresolved. Adding a story... killed the story. Amazing work.
@@wolfieinu "So and so is missing and there's a band of raiders to the east" iteration 9,687. ugh the random quests are ALL THE SAME and KEEP HAPPENING ON TOP OF EACH OTHER. can't even walk through a village.
@@Loderyod FU is really fucking annoying and difficult to get used to, along with locking off large swaths of content with an artificial “””tech tree””” Minecraft and Terraria tackle this issue of progression by just making everything available from the start, or in terraria’s case, make the player not even aware of the content until it’s available to them FU doesn’t follow this premise, instead, it just plops you down with a lengthy tech-tree and tutorial, saying “I dunno just figure it out”, with XP limits and quests you *have* to do before you’re allowed to have any fun.
I remember in the early life of Starbound, when it had interesting temperature mechanics. That said, I still prefer the physics of Starbound over Terraria. But I think the biggest problem with the game is that that gameplay cycle was broken, kind of like FO4 oddly enough. Interacting with the colony system and other settlements should have been the core of the gameplay loop, but instead it was just there as a loot grab and quest hubs for the main story. You can play the entire game without touching the colony system at all, and I think that's sad. Throw in like you said, the simplification of mechanics and empty updates. I also found mods just made overly complex tech trees.
I think it would be nice, coupled with more survival and progression mods, if Colonies could produce resources that you yourself can't. Specialist blacksmiths forging advanced alloys, chefs automatically creating food, farmers to deal with land nearby, weaponsmiths or researchers working to help you get better stuff, maybe determined by the quality of lab they have. A colony should be a safe place, a home to come back to and enjoy, instead of... whatever it is now.
Honestly I wish they hadn't bothered putting the colonial system into Starbound since, like the rest of the random stuff added as stretch goals (besides the Peacekeepers), it took away from the core experience of jet setting across the galaxy. You're a member of a kind of intergalactic FEMA meets USAF, not Bob the Builder. On ship sustainability and services should've been a big part of the design mechanics for the same reason the Protectorate used modified cargo ships, it keeps you mobile so you can spend more time on the ground saving lives and fighting disasters.
I still remember the first "death" of Terraria. We fans were truly sad because that meant no more updates, so when Starbound was announced, it was the first time that I remember truly felling hype for a project. After the major disappointed that was the release of the alpha, I stopped feeling for hype traps. That is the reason why I was already ready for the disappointing No Man Sky Release: I still remembered Starbound. At least Terraria came back from the death and gave us some amazing content updates until it's definitive but happy development death (even when it was already awesome back then), and even No Man Sky managed to pull one of the best 180 in game development history.
Just leaving this here because it seems like you might not have heard yet; Terraria is actually getting another update soon, a cross-over one with another game calls Don't Starve. Maybe you meant another Terraria update like 1.5 though, the creator already said he wouldn't go past 1.4.1 though and now we are headed for 1.4.3 lol.
I feel you. I was pretty active in SB forum, was part of fan-made weekly "newspaper". Oh, I was so hyped. TBH, I never was so dissapointed in game (devs) as I was during my few first attempts to play this game.
I remember the good old days when I could spend hours crafting all the different parts to a robot, only to find out it's a boss and die. Genuinely one of the sickest bosses I've ever seen.
I used to talk to Demanrisu on the Chucklefish chat, a chat where the Devs hung out often. At some point I asked them how to get into the Starbound development, and (I now realize) I was basically told not to. Only now I can understand why.
@@palecaptainwolfkayls8499 I posted a big thing but it looks like UA-cam automod deleted it. Big Google doesn't want you to know the real secrets I guess lmao
As somebody who bought Starbound during alpha, a lot of changes made it feel like a bait-and-switch. I put money on a sandbox game with survival mechanics and the promise of a procedural universe too big for a single person to explore. Animals being made with a random mix of parts made combat on each planet feel unique, regardless of whether the player went to a similar planet before. The dungeon variety was a bit limited (as should be expected of an alpha), but what the game had was fun to explore. Each race had unique weapons that functioned completely differently and unique traits to make race choice feel relevant while also strengthening the narrative. I spent money in hopes of updates adding more procedural dungeons and planet biomes, maybe even diversifying planets more by making some have multiple biomes. The game only got boring so fast because it needed more variety and fleshing out in the areas where it excelled. What I ended up getting after updates is a linear RPG that doesn't feel like a sandbox anymore where the features that attracted me were neglected and removed.
What made me lose all interest in Starbound is how you teleport to every boss fight and mission. In - for example - Terraria, you can prepare an arena for the fight to make it easier, but it takes work and planning and effort and there's so many ways to go about it, it's fun and makes the whole fight all the more satisfying. Starbound? You teleport in front of a big robot and shoot it until it dies. A boss fight becomes a gear check and you cannot do anything about it. It sucks.
And it would always be annoying to have to go run through those missions over and over again if you wanted to get the figurine/boss weapon from each boss. It just isn't fun after the first time.
Honestly what i would love is like You teleport somewhere Go through the dungeon Then you get to a big open spot and are given some time to build a arena The catch is that whatever you build is saved bwetween trys, and though the build time gets shorter, you can keep adding on to your arena
I remember that stage of the alpha where bosses were like that. And pretty much everyone who was vocal on the forums was, at the time, lamenting about how Starbound was just becoming "Terraria but worse". With that kind of feedback during development, how is it a surprise and a disappointment that the devs started focusing on ways to make Starbound fundamentally different from Terraria?
Starbound, I feel, is entering an era of modding where people are breaking new ground and surpassing these percieved 'limits'. Lua, as a coding language, is incredibly versatile and has kept games like Roblox alive for 15 years. That said, since everything in Starbound's modding is coded in Lua, it's more than possible to recode a complete overhaul with the help of a large team. Exhibit A being Frackin' Universe. Additionally, a competitor to FU has recently entered the limelight, under the name Arcana. By implementing a few new mechanics, as well as integrating magic into a sci-fi setting in a convincing way, Arcana flips the entire game on it's head and implements brand new possibilities for play: Such as a Wizard playthrough, restricting yourself to staves, wands, or other energy-hungry weapons that don't resemble guns.
I think Futara's Dragon Mod (Playable feral dragon race with an entire custom gameplay system with alot of depth and fancy visuals) and Feast of Fire and Smoke (extremely remarkable gun-play mod with really well made animations and presentation) are the 2 mods I can think of that pushed that boundary.
This is wild. I'm 22 now, and basically had starbound buzzing in the background of my entire teenage years. I have 900 hours in it, not because I was a hardcore fan, but just because I would boot it up, play a few dozen hours every few months, and then move on for a while, and it all added up. Looking back I noticed all sorts of weird stuff that I didn't manage to understand, "Where did Rho go" was a question I asked quite a few times. Now it all makes sense.
@@TheSkrylar That was TinyBuild's fault. Never let the people who spam-tweeted Matpat begging for more Hello Neighbor content "help" you with your game.
been following starbound since beta and one thing i DEARLY MISS is random starting planets. i had instances of starting with planets with tentacle biomes (a since retired biome i dearly miss), and the acid rains made for a fun challenge. i also miss quadrants too. they were honestly pretty cool.
the fact that 1.0 basically gutted a lot of the infinitely-more-interesting lore from the alpha builds annoyed me so much that i spent weeks making a mod that re-incorporated the alpha lorebooks into the current game. complete with minor tweaks to make the old lore "fit" into the current game. even then, there's absolutely no way you could make the story we ended up getting in current starbound good. every sense of mystique and intrigue was basically neutered in favor of making the protag a "chosen one" figure of the protectorate and it pisses me off to no end. i love starbound as a sandbox to goof around in, both as a game and as a grounds for modding, but the amount of wasted potential and horrible treatment done by tiy really pisses me off. starbound really should've just been a sandbox from the very start. period. but it's also the shit that happened behind the scenes that riles me up even more. someone in the comments said this already, but i really hope at some point we get an open source reimplementation of starbound like what we have with morrowind and openMW. solid vid, glad the algorithm did good for once.
If someday Starbound becomes open sourced or modders/game devs crack open this game, I'd want to be a part of that community every step, I would want to see Starbound be reborn and fixed. I've played the game for a long time, and even with my potato of a pc, I for some reason still enjoyed the 5fps I'd have just trying to walk across my house. And it was all because of the imaginative freedom, I could do practically anything, and mods just expanded on that idea, some of them linear but still fun. I say again... I hope one day this game is opened up, and reborn.
Starbound's soundtrack is so good, I go back to it frequently. It captures something so deep about the beauty and wonder of space exploration. It pains me whenever I think about the actual game
Incredible video! I wasn't expecting a 50 minute deep dive into the history and potential of Starbound in *2021* but I'm glad you made one! This game's community may be small and tired at this point, but it's surprisingly active. I'll definitely help share this video around, hopefully we can get more people to check it out!
I've been an OG starbound player for years, since alpha and early access, and fell in love with this game. The soundtrack, atmosphere, visuals, and potential was so captivating and beautiful. I really hope this game comes back more than ever.
My actual favorite part of this game is the inspect lines different races have. I played with the avali mod and really enjoyed the dialogue my character gave when inspecting stuff
The Avali inspect dialogue sold me on their species. My favorite parts are when they encounter incredibly primitive technology like copy machines and just break down into Angrish, and when they discover the Gnome Villages and immediately begin Roleplaying as a Rampaging Kaiju.
*Some thoughts on modding:* It's not really about Pertience or Fun, it involves people looking at moons like a blank canvas and working on them since nobody has yet _(Less Dead Moons is an example)_ , or deciding that yes, the crewmember AI is stupid, so they work on rewriting the AI, or work arounds to solve the AI problem Also you can optimize Starbound, some mods reprogram the entire way the game handles spriting or lighting, you can actually go crazy with Starbound mods and it's probably why people still bother to mod this game to hell, because they *can* And you can add new mechanics, it's how Racial perks are made possible in the first place, we wouldn't be able to add new mechanics to races if you could only "edit" what the races have, is it hard to overhaul the entirety of how Mechs are handled and add new mechanics and behaviors? yes. Does that stop people? of course not I play modded almost full time and I still love this game, Starbound is a malfunctional masterpiece that people love to death because of how much the community is just grown to this idea that the universe is incomplete and someone's outta fix it, whether it be you, me, or anyone before us I don't support Chucklefish's unpaid labor "tactic", but Starbound was the incidental result of that, and the result is this concept that was built from ground zero with hopes and the ability to fulfill these hopes ourselves, and this ironically feeds into the idea that this game is about a vast universe full of potential and has creations that were made long before you stepped into it, where you'll find your own way to contribute to this universe I don't think relying on mods is a bad thing because relying on mods to survive is actually great, and it's what enables games like Super Mario 64 to still have active lively communities, 20 years later I don't know where did the "mods shouldn't fix it" comes from cause honestly the entire concept of modding is to add something more to the game, improving the final product, be it a good game or a bad game, and thus obviously providing more longevity to a game, it was literally never a bad thing, you can say Super Mario 64 is on "modding life-support" and you'd be right and that literally doesn't mean anything, it doesn't devalue the game and it's a very positive point to have, it's far from negative
"mods shouldn't fix it" because big mods rarely work together and small mods are... small. the content void is too big to properly fill it with mods. would be better if Chucklefish just sold it away.
Speaking of fuel, you don't even need to buy it. Last time I played, crewmembers could upgrade fuel efficiency for your ship indefinitely, until your space flights are free and your game crashes when you open your fuel tank due to your fuel cap number not being processable.
I never bought fuel, but I only ever needed like, one moon to gather enough liquid fuel to last the entire campaign. As for the ghost, it’s oftentimes relatively easy to avoid and the “Rush to make it to the surface” that OP mentioned in the vid doesn’t apply since, well, you can beam back up from wherever.
@@dudu28r81 I seem to have outed myself here as a casual only player. Since it isn’t mentioned anywhere as far as I know, I didn’t know about that being the case.
@@sqentontheslime1967 It's actually where most of the difficulty comes from, not dying(and therefore not losing your items) is easy enough if you have played the game through like once before.
They fixed this unfortunately. Crewmembers now improve fly speed or add capacity, a fixed amount per crew member and diminishing with more crewmembers of that type. It is possible to do mech encounters until you have enough though, or one of the bounty hunting quests leads you to a stash of erchius fuel that is hard to run down.
Man, what a great video. I found it out of nowhere and wasn't expecting such an in-depth review. Starbound was the first game (besides minecraft) that I've played 100+ hours, and for years was my favorite one. It had all I, as a kid, wanted to experience. It had exploration, customization, spaceships, survival, construction. I've spent hours playing with my best friend of the time doing nothing but exploring, searching for documents and trying to understand a bit more of the story of such interesting universe. And then... 1.0 came. There was some great stuff, I have to admit. Some features just brought more life to Starbound, but some... just felt weird. The game became so linear, so... stiff. It didn't feel like Starbound anymore. And now that I listened to your video and found out about all the unpaid labor stuff, I just cannot recommend this game anymore, and I say that with a sinking heart. It's so sad to see so much wasted potential. It could've been one of the best sandboxes ever, but ended up as a big chunk of unfinished features and linear gameplay. And, as you said, mods have a limit. Moreover, I think mods are not supposed to fulfill an incomplete game, but to boil over it. Devs' moves to throw the responsibility to keep the game alive to modders, despite of working to a certain extent, is just... wrong. Seeing one of my favorite games being abandoned and having so much s**t involved behind the scenes is really heartbreaking, but life goes on. I just wish starbound's dev had actually learned something from Terraria.
Thanks for the comment, man. This really hit. Starbound was a game with great potential (it still is!). Even with the history behind it, I wish Chucklefish had made a formal apology and kept on with the project. It could have rivaled Terraria in the Sandbox market!
@@TheGoodTrash Rip all techs from Angry Koala, I miss the Butterfly one, being able to move wherever you wanted was a blessing for building. Or at least I think it was that one... I'm a bit surprised that you didn't go into detail about features added and taken away and changes to the loose narrative, Boss summoning and moving advancing to different systems by moving onto a different Star map. Same coords but had the newer planets and resources and all that. That said its hard to be mention it all in adequate detail and you would have to be brief. Out of curiosity, when did you first pick it up? I got it when it was in... Alpha and we waited a long time before we got the station and new content. A bit sad it had to wipe everything.
correction, no mans sky finished their game, not fixed it, you literally can't play starbound on its minimum pc requirements. hell, I have a computer FAR more powerful then its recommended and the game is still a mess, mods only make it worse and I consider mods to be required for play.
The issue is procedural generation vs curated experience. Curated experiences are limited, but being hand-crafted have the potential to be something deep and engaging. Procedural generation is leaving most of the experience up to your imagination; the idea that 1,000 monkeys on type writers will eventually create Shakespearian works, if you squint hard enough. Combining both processes is tough. In Starbound's case, you have 7 races across multiple worlds with differing biomes. Trying to sprinkle curated experiences randomly across those worlds is going to leave most people disappointed. You are going to come across repeats. This cheapens the experience and makes it dull. Dungeons are a good example. If you have seen one Glitch Dungeon, you have seen them all. Quests are the same. Arguably, the best Starbound experience, is your first one, when everything is fresh and new. Moving on to mods, those are something of a mixed bag. Frackin Universe, probably the biggest and well known, succeeds in doubling down the best AND worst parts of Starbound. More planets, more dungeons, more crafting junk, more mindless grind. Frackin Universe almost requires you to play with the wiki open, as many of it's systems are obtuse and grindy. FU is brilliant, frustrating and disappointing with it's end game devolving into a Terraria-style "murder hundreds of creatures in specific sub-biomes to unlock recipes and unique crafting junk" that reminds me of post-Plantera dungeon cranked up to 1,000. On the other hand, the RPG Growth Mod allows you to slowly level up and improve your character's movement drastically. I find it is more "essential" than FU simply because I can FEEL the improvement of my character more than just increasing damage, health, and energy. It feels good, man. The lack of solid direction neutered Starbound. Either through a lack of talent or drive, the game withered on the vine. Core features are not properly fleshed out resulting in a lackluster exercise in tedium. Additional content, such as mech suits are an interesting idea, but the implementation is uninspired and crude. They feel more like a tacked-on mod then a properly integrated part of the core gameplay experience. Even worse, it's another strike against the concept of Early Access games, adding it's name to the pile of half-finished could-have-beens that drive potential customers away from future promising titles. A solemn reminder that, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably will be.
They can do similar to nemesis system which randomize if an event can repeat procede in different ways or lock. But this needs a whole lot of contents.
frackin universe is actually pretty fun if you ynow download that one hack mod to easily get items.... im not even joking its literally unplayable otherwise
The Problem with FU is actually a fairly simple one... It's a Modpack, not a mod. It's a fairly crude mashing together of at least dozens of different mods and general content, similar to a modpack that's just pushed together and ran. It isnt really reorganized or tweaked to run better, like say, Feed the Beast Modpacks, with tweaked recipes and general rebalancing, a Quest Book to give a simple goal to work towards, and overall streamlined. It's just kinda... t h e r e.
Frakin' is such a monolithic mod, but it def feels like unless you're specifically wired to like everything with it, that you basically should skip it. I eventually got tired of playing the game 'what mods don't work with FU this time' about the sixth or seventh time I didn't play Starbound for a bit, came back on a whim, and spent the next 30 minutes digging to the Frakin' wiki to see what new mod was added to contributions and/or incomatibilities.
Procedural generation is i feel like a hard topic on 2d games. On 3d games like deep rock galactic, you know the kind of caves you'll get but its always random (with some exceptional hand made cave parts) but you enjoy it in a way. Here its just big layers, random balls, small and annoying corridors, little to no ores and tada. If there was at least biome themed generations, like ice had more vertical caves or fire had more horizontal, underground forests had bigger open areas,... it wouldnt be this annoying everytime. Probably. Not just the cave, the surface could really use some more biome specific generation. Also yes, replying to a 8 month old comment. Hello there.
Really wish that, in the (long?) future Chucklefish would not copyright their races because it's by far maybe their most unique thing, above everything else. I'd undoubtely add in another scifi setting and sell as a game or animated series or whatever, just because they are charismatic. We can only dream for, I guess.
You could just do what i call a "Backslide-Zakuzov" manoeuvre. 1: Steal It (No one will ever know) 2: Airlift It (Into SPORE) 3: Bop It (Hit it with a big stick until it looks less like either)
Starbound was so good during the beta, but the drop in content and fun of 1.0 really killed it for me. Kind of wish they'd release the source code for the beta versions so that someone can improve them without adding a cheap story or removing 75% of the amazing content...
Former Starbound dev here. This write up is surprisingly accurate and well researched, the few inaccuracies there were was conjecture from lack of info. Starbound was a game that had massive potential that was let down by inexperienced, poor management and a creator that let power and fame go to his head. It's a textbook example of what happens when you have a team made entirely of people who don't understand nor like each other and each have differing visions of what the game should be. There ended up being no real unified vision, and Tiy was unable or unwilling to be decisive in forging one outside whatever he felt like at the time. He would commit to things far outside of our scope and casually introduce work multipliers which was why he ended up having to bring in his slave labor, because it was way more than us 3 artists were able to handle. I got out as soon as I was able to post release and took a few years off to reflect and learn from the experience. I started my own game with my own company that I'm hoping to right the wrongs that Starbound did.
@@adarax86 Farworld Pioneers. It's on Steam and there's early gameplay video's on UA-cam. It's like a cross between Starbound and Rimworld, and it's basically my vision for Starbound that I wasn't allowed to do.
I was hooked on starbound, i remember skipping school to play it instead when it was all new and it was incredible. But it devolved into: -fly to planet -sprint and do horizontal rocket jumps until you circle said planet -find nothing of interest -move onto next planet rather quickly and got boring, then they added a bunch of stuff but i was already too burnt out. Its now stuck in this state for me where i consider it one of my favorite games but not because its fun to play anymore but because its like a legacy kinda good game. The great times had were so great that its still memorable despite a relatively quick decline.
You overestimate the Crimson's ability to consume the Jungle. Between having to convert mud to dirt and not being able to spread through that dirt itself, the Jungle will barely be touched by the time the rest of your world is consumed, if you allow it to go unchecked at least.
I loved the erchius fuel harvesting on the moons too! It was such a tense and exciting moment. Having good tech, rope, and an escape plan to escape the clutches of the ghosts with 3000 fuel always felt so satisfying. I feel the "100 fuel per trip" ruined it for me. You can go anywhere you want for only 100 fuel now. I miss when a trip to a far away system would empty my tank so I'd have reason to go harvest some more.
Let's not forget how easy and linear armor and pack progression are either. I got tier 6 armor and the final pack upgrade off 2 full tanks of fuel, and beat the game in 20 hours going in blind. The experience was so shallow, with most of the time spent being just trying to find the settlements I needed, that I was left to wonder why the game was so old but still so basic and unpolished, and found this video
Starbound...the only game I ever put more than 1000 hours on, bought for four people, and have literally sat back and fallen asleep to the soundtrack. I love it.
It's heartbreaking to see starbound go like this; I tried to play terraria but it wasn't a good replacement for it. I really love when games allows me to interact with NPCs and these NPCs can interact with the world themselves, not just talk, and for me it was super fun building a colony with lots of NPCs moving around, playing with the arcades I built, and even going into the western barn I built, one would play the piano and another would dance; I once decided to build a base with a lot of glass on a lava planet (in the lava) and while experimenting I decided to build a trap door that would trigger some hidden doors that locked you in while another opened to spill lava inside, and an NPC decided to go in and push the switch while I was still building it, and opened the trap door letting in all the lava and killing us both (and filling my half assed base with lava)... I guess it was not smart building the part that lets the lava in first, but that was fun and unexpected. Crewmates and pets were disappointing because of how stupid and useless they are, but since I really like having an NPC traveling with me, and helping me along my journey I kept them. Also, the exploration and space theming was super fun while it lasted, and I really loved every moment of building and decorating my ship, while also having my crew and the two NPC tenants I had there interact with all the things I built (for instance, flick the lights off on a room, and turning on an hologram of a planet on the table in the middle... all that with a single switch). I've not found any other game that makes me this happy (and yet sad and angry at it's many, MANY flaws); I'd say fallout 4 got close but the NPCs were not that fun and even felt lifeless (though I really liked companions).
I like Terraria, but I've always preferred Starbound's aesthetic and combat systems greatly over Terraria. Problem is, Starbound boss encounters are a total joke (what's the point in better combat if I don't have to play well with it, ever?), the story is literally just wandering aimlessly until you find a dungeon in which you spam 'Scan' on things, which is worse to me than just not having a story (though I'd love it if they actually implemented a good story in a good way -- its just not what happened). And I guess that's mostly it. Starbound could have been a real competitor and with the base look and mechanics, I would have greatly preferred it. But it didn't pan out in a way that felt good. I still boot it up from time to time (modded to hell and back -- but mods in Starbound don't really change the core gameplay much anyway), but realistically I end up putting in like 12-16 hours then I just stop, because mods don't really fix that there's no real progress to be made. You're just progressing to the same lame, undertuned bosses and generic story... but slower. The systems that make it slower are interesting, but not interesting enough to actually bother finishing the game with them. RPG Growth is neat I guess, but you're just getting stronger than intended for content that was already insanely easy.
I'm gonna be honest, I saw that this video is 40+ minutes long and figured that I'll just take a quick look at what this video is continue to search for more vids. Stuck for the whole thing and genuinely enjoyed the video. Thanks a lot.
so ummm the thing about the "strict physics update" being the solution to the player not moving twice as much (as illustrated with the player's speed being doubled) is incorrect. the difference between strict and adaptive updates is that adaptive means "run as fast as possible (optionally up to a cap, like 120 or 240 fps)", meaning it is as smooth, and allows for as precise player input as the machine can handle. Strict means you run updates at a specific rate religiously. It just so happens that often it's good to use adaptive, except in the case of the physics updates, because of a quirk of our highly optimized physics engines that makes them work better with a constant delta time between updates. For this reason sometimes you see engines implementing callbacks for both adaptive updates and strict updates. But nothing is stopping you from building an engine that runs everything in strict mode, or even running the physics in an adaptive regimen for that matter. It would work, and the character would move at the same speed regardless. Not having a strict mode physics update is not what causes the lag, nor the speed difference. What causes this is bad optimization, and the code not multiplying the speed by the dt (or in other words, a very very gross and rookie bug), respectively.
Thank you for the comment! Most of my work has been in Unity and Godot, so I haven't dealt with adaptive updates as much. I'll keep that in mind in the future! And you make a great point. If they just multiplied movement by dt, it would've worked either way. Since Starbound uses a custom engine, I think the dt wasn't added in at all, causing the oversight to go unnoticed. So in the video, separating the update functions is a clean way to fix the Starbound Engine without having to go back and multiply every movement function by dt.
i was a huge fan of starbound when it was 2017, i played that game religiously and fed into my obsession of space/sci-fi media. i loved the game a whole lot since i never seen it in its alpha or really paid attention to its criticism- just liked the funny space game. i was esp obsessed with novakids and made lots of art n characters of them [hell my 2nd internet alias is literally just based off of the name] but yeah the game had a heavy influence on me. stopped playing it after awhile and i tried coming back to it when the update came out, only to find out all my mods were incompatible and nothing worked. pretty much two years of gaming down the drain. tried it vanilla and realized how dry the game was without the heart of the mods. and now watching this video and getting a full picture of how badly the game had it going, a piece of love for the game mmmaybe kind of died a little bit for starbound- but it still sits as one of my favorite games. very cool video tho
this is scarily accurate to how my 2017 went. i was obsessed with the game, i even had a novo kid obsession too with me implementing my character in stories, ect. but i stopped playing on a dime just because it felt repetitive. its so hard for me to get into it again, but its still one of my favorite games, def top 3. prob just because of all the good memories ive had playing it when it felt new and expansive.
i picked the game up after everything, including the 1.4 apocalypse, and actually had a similar experience - i just liked the funny space game - and now i'm terrified for the future, thanks
You know, this actually got me thinking about what my ideal Starbound would be like. 1. NO FUCKING OUTPOST: Instead you get a message from Esther Bright broadcasted as a distress signal. which leads you to the ancient gate thing where she is, and she gives you the quest. In fact, if multiple main quests are implemented for different species than it should be like this for all main quests. Instead of going to the outpost (which no longer exists), or having to stumble upon it in a basically infinite galaxy you have a far reaching communicator, and even then you still have to get in range. 2. More interesting underground and moons: I feel this one is self-explanatory. 3. Shops still exist, but because they're restricted to settlements and colonies, because they're not at the outpost they're not as common: People buy and sell things, it's simple fact. Surely not everyone mines their own Erchius. 4. Get rid off fossils: Fuck fossils. Okay, so not entirely. But fossils only serve to waste the player's time compared to everything else so put it on the back of the shelf and work on things that actually serve a purpose. 5. Races have different advantages: Of course you have to pick a planet type for the player character they have an advantage in to start on. 6. Frackin' Universe content: Frackin' Universe is amazing, my only problem is it's content is all locked behind a really fucking dense tech tree. The biomes added by FU in particular all work well with the "space adventure" theme. Some of Frackin' Universe's content can go the back shelf while we're at it too if only because the tech tree is so dense, at very least it should still be in front of fossils since it's a hell of a lot more interesting. 7. I want to be able to select my ship at the beginning, or buy new ones: This is mainly for mod ships. 8. Player-made Space stations should be capable of acting as colonies: Not only would this mean another place you can put colonies, but this time your colony is mobile. Speaking of which... 9. I want to be able to buy, find or steal massive megaships. You compared your ideal Starbound to Doctor Who, but I think a more fitting comparison is Star Trek (if only because of the space theme). The "megaship" would have multiple doors you can enter, customizable rooms and other features that make it a mobile base, all the advantages of a colony while taking the middle man out of having to build a teleporter in your base. Buying a megaship would be extremely expensive, finding one would be a rare stroke of luck and stealing one would require immense skill and effort. And all three options make a good story while the megaship in your possession is proof. It's also good for large multiplayer servers. It would also probably be one of, if not the hardest feature to implement. 10. Spaceship battles: This is more a problem than of the others as unlike the rest it doesn't just require alterations to existing mechanics, but entirely new ones. But it's a logical progression from megaships. Yes, there's stuff that won't please everyone such as still being able to buy Erchius from shops. But not everyone wants to have to mine a moon every time they want Erchius.
Jesus christ, watched the whole thing then was expecting to see millions of views... welp, nevermind, but i gotta say that was a great video and you 100% deserve all that support
Apex: "Oh, you are a Floran! That must mean that you kill people on sight and that you are completely incapable of speech!" Floran: _I should probably resent that, but I could really go for some monkey steak right now..._
Thank you so much for this in-depth description of Starbound. Having played since its very beginning, I definitely agree with your critical review. This game has insane potential, sadly it remained hindered by bad decisions. FU, Shellguard and others are some of the biggest mods I've seen on steam in terms of work that was put into it and they exactly tap into this potential. I deeply wish that these mods continues and keep on bringing back this lost potential. Hell, I would love (and pay) for people like you to take all that's good from this game and the mods and put it into a game that would give us the REAL Starbound.
Starbound was and always will be one of the games of my childhood. Me and my best friend would play for hours upon hours in high school, sharing coordinates to areas we thought were cool, starting new characters once we got all the armor sets of others. I still remember the hype when he found a rainbow cape. I hope one daay another game comes along like it.
For me, a person who put 500+ hours in the game, mods are the only reason it's alive today, but no matter what happened, I still enjoy it. The modding community are still out there, releasing mods daily if not weekly.
I miss this game with every ounce of my being. I miss being infatuated by the lore of Kluex in particular, only to discover.. well.. it never went anywhere. Only leading to loose ends. All that hunting for effectively nothing hurt pretty damn bad. :(
Wow, this video does a great job at explaining the game's... unfinishedness. The way you explained all of it was incredible too! You, my friend, have earned a subscriber.
Unpopular opinion: Hiring space penguin mercenaries is better than doing quests to get crewmates, because: 1. They're penguins; 2. They're cool; 3. It's fun to storm a planet with an army of heavily armed penguins; 4. They're penguins.
Part 6 really speaks to me as a modder. I'm the creator of the Inu race mod, which was a project i created in response to Gonjamoon's neko race mod. I had a lot to do in my road map while i was still actively creating assets for my mod. One of the biggest problem i had was finding a reliable template for every new versions of Starbound to keep my mod playable and so that i could test out the assets. So as it was the coding method was kept the same way for a very long time until they changed it one day. It infuriated me, because everything i did and tried did not work for my mod and since i couldn't test the assets i ended up not being able to do anything which kept me from working on the mod til this day. Not that i have much in it to finish the mod now that i have heard of this debacle.
@@carnage0685 I haven't exactly given up. I just don't feel inclined to do the work right now, because theres too many things i have to figure out before i even try to reboot the mod and given the time i don't have i don't see it happening anytime soon. Honestly i don't feel like contributing to a developer that exploits people to earn profits either. Had enough of that from EA already, but i do want to finish this project for my own fufillment and enjoyment. So theres that.
I still am reeling from when the early versions had survival, and randomized content, but later versions changed survival to a tech on/ off switch. Rather it be a timed enabling (vs always on enabling) with looped grind for custom play experiences. Ex. Old versions required a constant need to make safe areas and base camps for warmth, and issues like acid rain or oxygen tanks were a timed resilience from some researched tech and farmed material instead of develop some tier then ignore everything before it with always on breath-everywhere-optimal-heat suits. Worlds then felt redundant because all risks were stripped away and new potential risks to see kept dwindling smaller and smaller. Was just window dressing and gameplay off/ on loops. THATS (imo) what removed pertinence for anything a mod could address. Also miss when races weren’t bound to tech upgrades, and you knew what you’d see on a planet solely because that race was unlocked along with that tech. I do love the npc quest system (with potential crew hires) because of the looped grind. Sorta re-created the looped grind for survival per planet. It was just incredibly shallow, which was exacerbated by the glass ceiling of possibilities allowed from limited quest trees; as well as the redundancy of structured quest form.
the removal of survival, and the addition of surface ores killed the game for me. mining was so fun in alpha, then they added tons of ores to the surface and a guaranteed tech upgrade on the opposite side of the planet and there was no longer a need to go underground. just run around the planet, pick up ores, take the upgrade and repeat the same thing on another planet.
Yeah what I liked about early starbound was that the game felt like it was about surviving increasingly harsh environments and the random generation could throw any intersection of a thousand dangerous elements at you potentially all at once. They got rid of all that and then it’s like ok. What’s the point
I remember that there were handcrafed outpost sidequests that they later removed for some reason. They were far more fun than all of that randomly generated junk we have now
My biggest problem with Starbound was that almost nothing feels special after the first time. There is no area or dungeon (besides the story missions) where you think, "oh, there must be some significance to this place, because it's in the game!" No, it's there because random generation, just like everything inside of it. It constantly reminds me that if I were to leave the planet and never return, I could find exactly everything in that dungeon, on some other planet, somewhere else. While I feel Terraria has a similar problem, it's feels less of an issue. Maybe because it feels more like a sandbox than a story? I dunno.
I feel like its because in terraria, despite all worlds having the "same" content, you spend much more time exploring and building and fighting and so you grow attached to it. In starbound, nothing gives you a real reason to spend time in one planet besides colonies (but even then the planet doesnt rreally matter). Heck, you probably spend more time in your ship and your starting planet is your warehouse for the random garbage and npcs you gathered, just like me. Its this lack of actual value to a planet that makes it feel bland and expandable. If at least some plznets had one resource in much higher quantities than the others on it, it would be somewhat worth to set mining outposts up.
I put a good bit into Starbound, I've seen all the generations and such a billion times. It's gotten to the point that I can go into certain generations and know where and what content is in a chest around 80 blocks away, at least in a few instances. I really wanted that cape that leaves rainbow sparkle particles everywhere you go because I thought the sparkles actually being an object on the ground was dope. You can find it on deserts with 6 rainbow wood trees in a mostly horizontal line that goes slightly uphill as you go to the right. Dig straight down between the first 2 trees until the 3rd cave (it's thin) and look left. :3 If you search online you can actually find specific coordinates for a planet with that generation on it, though it may be a bit hard to find the coordinates online since previous versions are shown as well. And apparently the entire universe that is the map is a static generation. The only thing that changes is your starting point. If you go to the GlaDOS cluster in one game or 500 games it's going to be 100% the same. Not seemingly 100%, ACTUALLY 100%. Which I'm fine with because I can know exactly where the Gucci loot is. Tangent aside, I really like the game still. Vanilla or modded. Yeah it's got problems, unkept promises, a lot of beloved content that got removed, etc. Multiplayer is essentially broken most of the time too. Yet I still love it. On a conceptual level, this is perhaps my most favorite game ever, but I still shut people down from buying it because of that whole "not paying the staff" bs. I would absolutely love to have more people to play it with but if that is how you feel you can treat staff then I'd rather tell my friends to pirate the game than hand over their money to a cause like that. I really wish I could help the game. Like honestly I do. I'll probably still be playing Starbound every once in a while 20 years from now. But one thing I have learned is I am not good at coding, at all. I can read it and understand it but me trying to write it is like trying to put out a grease fire by drowning the fire in more grease. Best use I could be is finding bugs and pointing them out to someone else, Sprite work, or conceptual design. On top of that there is another issue. Seeing as soon many people have contributed, and also left the development of the game, there's more than likely a lot of questions about "why did you do it this way instead of this way" that couldn't be answered and a lot of experiences that couldn't be shared along the development process. Trying to clean up what feels like spaghetti code, whether it is or isn't, can create even more problems than solutions too. All in all, I hope that the past devs get rightful compensation, and not just from sympathetic people, but from their would-be employer. I feel like if he stepped down from the project and the previous team members came back then perhaps Starbound could become a wonderful thing again, but by now Starbound is probably just a terrible memory to most of the past team. Maybe they could all come together and make Space-bound, the unofficial remake of it's legally distant ancestor. Maybe a group of fans that work in data mining and programming could make a clone that is simply better. Maybe I'm too optimistic. One things for sure: I love Poptops and I want Starbound to be done right.
I adore Starbound to no end and it hurt seeing the game and its community turn into a desolate wasteland. Starbound has just about my favorite world in all of fiction and they made a lifeless husk with it. I miss this game so much. No game will ever make me feel the way Starbound does. I can’t even go back and play it anymore because it hurts to do so.
Thank you for documenting all of this, it's still one of my favorite games despite everything going against it now. I've played and supported this game since the literal day it was open to their supporters on kickstarter (or wherever they funded it), and vividly remember all of the quirks and honestly lack of content alpha had. I've used mods since they came out so I've tailored my playstyle and enjoyment from them, and honestly I'm scared to go back to vanilla and accept that vanilla is just a completely different game. I always have an itch (that I give into more times than not) every couple months or so to start up a new save-file with a few mods added or removed and try and do something fundamentally different from my last file. A truly sad tale, but I can't come to dislike this game despite all it's failures. You've got yourself a subscriber. (This entire comment is scatterbrained; I cannot form a cohesive thought without spending hours of my time when it comes to things I am emotionally attached to. And by golly, I am emotionally attached to this game.)
There's honestly so much I want to talk about but it'd just be repeating all of the talking points on the video and reminiscing several of my save-files. Once again, great job.
A phenomenal deconstruction of the bizarre directorial decisions that lead a game I'd backed and looked forward to for years into irrelevance, even in the face of a dedicated community.
I really want to see this game did great. It is MY favorite game after all, despite all the flaws. I really want to see someone picked up the pieces and make a better game, better development, better relationship between the player and the devs, and overall the better "Starbound" we deserve.
I honestly forget how Starbound as an unmodded game works because I've played with Frackin' Universe for the last few years and haven't looked back since
Hang on... Isn't "a game that has a lot of stuff missing but people have enough fun with it that they make mods to fix the issues they have with it" basically the idea behind Minecraft nowadays? Food for thought. Great video! Your ideas for the game are amazing, and I would've loved if that's how the game actually was. It's funny that the "why explore when you can just buy it" thing runs so deep that I literally got a quest from an NPC to make a torch, I opened their shop GUI, bought a torch, and the quest advanced. They complimented my craftsmanship. It's the funniest thing that's happened to me in the game so far. I love the PBG Hardcore reference (I still remember when that lag death happened, RIP Peebs), the Don't Starve reference (I've been obsessed with that game lately, wonder if it's thanks to a certain crossover, eh?), and the Diggy Diggy Hole reference when you were talking about mining! I'm usually skeptical about anecdotes from people I don't know having issues with a more "public" figure. I've mostly learned my lesson about trusting random internet strangers. But if even Toby motherfucking Fox has issues with the developers and believes what everyone else is saying, then screw Chucklefish.
The creator of the Avali Triage mod, which adds a species called Avali to the game with a unique culture, architecture, apparel, weapons, and spaceship was asked by Chucklefish if he was willing to allow them to add the race to the base game, he asked what he will get in return and was told his name in the credits.... he turned that down immediately mod still exists btw...
That was not Avali Triage. Triage is the successor mod to the one Ryuu originally made. The reason Triage is a thing is partly because of this. Might have even caused a mass exodus of modders at the time to abandon the game if I remember correctly. It killed the modding scene for a while. By now it has finally recovered.
the problem with starbound summed by an Angry joe quote: "As vast as an ocean, but the depth of a puddle." A lot to explore, but all of it meaningless barring main story objectives.
When Starbound first came out I hated how the toolbar worked. About once a year I check out the game and ask "have they fixed the toolbar yet?" I force myself to play through the game a little farther each time. Not because it's better but because it takes longer to get to the first dungeon. I stop when I get to the boss fight. I realize that throughout this entire dungeon I've gone through, crazy space tech and all. My character has gotten nothing of value out of this place. Oh I may have gotten a pistol that does 1 point more damage and there's a Mcguffin unlock behind the boss. But it makes me miss Terraria and the artifacts you'd pull out of places that did different things, and the rare monster drops that were a happy surprise. So I go and play Terraria again with mods instead.
Obviously Starbound is AMAZING, you just havent realized it yet... Every time you try it, you realize it sucks ass and makes you want to play the Better Version (Terraria) instead :V
Actually, there are many mods which modifies the crew and moons, just really because crew is useless and moons are boring. Also, the economy isn't that simple: what is more sustentable? Buy fuel and ores (which are VERY expensive) or just go to the moon mine fuel and go to the underground mine the ores that you want? But, after all, great (and underrated) video
Thanks! And yeah, the mods for crewmembers especially are great. My preferred one is Earth's Finest. Going back, I wish I had a section highlighting specific mods, since the Mod Workshop really is the game's greatest achievement. Are there many mods for moons? In my research, I only found three (including the mod to remove the erchius ghosts).
@@TheGoodTrash Actually, there are, like less dead moons or even less dead moons (probably the ones that you found) and some other mods which the moon isn't the main point, but stills modifies it
I do wonder if, someday, the Starbound game engine could be made available for others to build their own games upon (much like with the Doom engine for example). Personally, I've always wondered what the game could've been like had the story focused more on colony management and terraforming planets over exploration (more akin to games such as Factorio), or if the game had a focus on procedurally-generated plots (more akin to Rimworld), with the player having to explore a procedurally-generated galaxy in order to complete various smaller procedurally-generated quests in order to progress through a much bigger overarching procedurally-generated storyline.
I think the best example of contextual generation is Dwarf Fortress, while it is still be developed, DF develops the context from the ground up, a cave doesn't just suddenly have some werebeast living in it, that person was born into this world and eventually got bit or invoked the ire of some god and was cursed to be like that and then they fled and ended up in that cave, there wasn't any short cut taken in making that story. I think in some sense contextual generation has to be made this way or you end up losing out on details, or at least you have to painstakingly think of them all up and code around them (Aka why does this guy have a grudge with some cult on the whole other side of the planet?). On the topic of needing an ending, I don't think it does, it needs goals though since an ending is a goal but a goal doesn't have to be an ending. There could be plenty of personal goals for players that they choose to be their end, helped along by the game, and even if there is a main ending to the game it has to effect the world that you can continue to live in or it doesn't feel like it was worth anything. For example in a fantasy game having the Big Bad causing problems in the world that will end with that guy ends makes the story important, you didn't just get your "I saved the world" pin you see the effect, you see the town raided by the evil army can be rebuilt, the town that was occupied by that army doesn't suck to live in, and I don't know the castle of the guy is eerily quite now that all the enemies in it are gone. In a space game this might more be the theme of the galactic threat that was spreading to... stop that, no more tentacles trying to grab the planet I have my base on please. I really trailed off on that last one, think I was just rambling to myself about stuff I feel passionate about.
I feel like with all this list, something's missing and that is what killed Starbound for me: work/reward ratio. So much stuff takes ages for so little rewards. Mining is painful because of how many ores you need for a bar and how many bars for anything (looking at you rails) and the ore detector being a high tier thing. To compare, terraria has the spelunking potion which makes it still annoying but more of a small chore. Plus you find other stuff along the way. Here its just pain pain and pain. Rarely found any "big" deposits, which could've been a nice addition tbh: planets richer in a certain resource, making you set up mines and such. Farming doesnt feel like a viable way to get money (or at least to me) and withour mods for space or ceiling sprinklers, its just stupid. Theres cargo trading with space stations so why not do that with crops around the cosmos? To compare with terraria again, their only farming thing is plants for potion and wood. But the potions are so good, necessary on expert and higher difficulties, you need a plant farm (and fishes). But it doesnt require water or sun or a lot of space. Another thing is space travel taking years and overall boring. Click buttons. Wow. The bounty hunter thing is ruined by that one thing, just having to spend 80% of the mission waiting in your ship. I feel like this is one of the main issues with the game. I wish chucklefish studio wasnt braindeadfish studio and actually took gamedev and their junior devs seriously, or the community's advices.
There's a huge rumor about a puppy the team adopted but suddenly got replaced and any talk or question about it was immediately suppressed on their forums. They said the puppy may have died because they put it's bed really close to a lot of electric cables, according to some pictures of it.
I still play Starbound to this day religiously; it's more fun with friends when you ignore the lore and nuances and just have mindless fun in it's sandbox and vast universe. I remember playing it a while ago with a friend back when I first heard of it's launch, it was a great experience since we had no idea what we were dipping ourselves into. It was a great time seeing cool things for the first time and having those "wow" moments. It's really only in a playable state with mods, they're the only things keeping it from being a stale, wilted husk of a game that could have been.
I really think the main problem is that they just kinda added stuff and then never really went back to it, like their is so much to do yet no depth to any of it.
loved the video man, this game has been really fun, but I get lost in imagining what it could be with more dev time and effort. Nice presentation - keep it up!!
It's impressive to me that terraria's sandbox is effectively one world that is book-ended by oceans, and somehow each playthrough in that feels more expansive and unique than each of my Starbound playthroughs.
This is truly one of the best videos about Starbound ever made. You have a real talent for the longform UA-cam documentary too! I got this game pre-alpha. To the point where I'm one of the folks in the credits. It's lack of a release and delays was SO freaking disappointing... then the LONG delayed beta release itself was even more disappointing. So many promises were broken that I lost track! This was literally the first game that made me rethink preordering, even if I believe in a project. I don't think I've played the game without modding since a few weeks after release and there is no way I'd ever go back to a non-modded play. I tried it once and I just couldn't bring myself to hit play. Thank you so much for putting this together! You've absolutely earned a sub and a bell ring from me. I look forward to seeing what you'll make next!
It felt to me like Starbound didn't have a clear direction in mind during development. The alpha / beta saw really pivotal features being added and removed and added again. For instance, the first temperature system would cause you to slowly freeze to death or overheat based on a thermometer, but the implementation was quite frankly bollocks so they scrapped it, then later used a similar concept as one of the planet access gates.
are we just going to forget the alpha temperature system? i loved the idea of having different armors stored in my spaceship for extremely cold or extremely hot planets. back when we still had underground biomes i found this flesh biome in many different planets and i formed my own story about why this is spread across the entire galaxy, and that we maybe could summon bosses in these flesh biomes, terraria style. this game had so much potential, but the devs didn't even understand their own game. Tiy calling himself a terraria dev and using this as advertisement for starbound should be criminal. he did nothing more than copying a few licensed weapons into terraria, and it shows. he can't design his own sprites, he can't design a game, he can't lead a team, heck he can't even PAY his team.
Good video, was definitely worth staying up until 1AM for. I think Starbound is probably really fun for the first playthrough, but by the time you’ve beaten the Ruin, there’s not much else to do. Also the optimization getting someone killed like in PBG’s case isn’t even the worst that can happen, it really sucks and I’m dumbfounded on how my computer runs it better than everything else I boot up. I’m interested in talking more about this over discord if you have the time, I should be available via the FU server.
To this day i still play modded starbound and i still love it, maybe im blinded by nostalgia but i remember staying up so late in high school listening to lofi and playing this game. It just has such a nice relaxing tone
@@TheGoodTrash Perhaps, but in all seriousness, this is a video that I really wanted someone to make: an analysis and explanation of all of Starbound's many issues and what it could have been had its wasted potential been realized. I even learned some things about the game that I didn't already know, and if anyone ever questions my opinion that Starbound is not a very good game right now, I'll definitely refer them to this video
I think that games like Starbound, ones that are kept on life-support by their active mod communities, have a duty to step back and only make changes that enable that community. You mentioned that the mod support for the game is limited to the Asset system. Instead of adding a content patch that breaks a bunch of mods, simply exposing more of the game's mechanics to modders would allow the already successful mod community to continue their work. That's what the entire thing was built on right? Free content thrown into the game by passionate fans? Instead of doing it in a shady way behind the scenes, be proud of your community and work to support their efforts by ONLY exposing more of the game's internals. The game was built on the backs of what were effectively content mods by "contributors". The least you can do is carry that forward.
This is a wonderful video that goes really intricately into a game that totally benefits from having an explanation like this going into the depths of the process of this game! Great watch, and amazing job!
I found a bug in the game where I didn't even bother having to pay pixels at the shop for fuel. Just pick up some fuel, travel to a ocean planet, dig underneath the ocean, and then build what is essentially a giant plinko machine. Turns out, when a liquid tries to enter a tile that already has some liquid in it, it will be blocked from entering that tile. This causes some fun stuff where you can have a layer of erchius fuel under a layer of water under a layer of erchius fuel. BUT, if you try to pour a tiny amount of liquid into a pool of erchius fuel, it just so happens that the game will combine the smaller liquid into the larger liquid. Basically, all liquids are transmutable into other liquids in Starbound, so long as you have some of the target liquid. Erchius fuel is a liquid. Water is a liquid. What place has a lot of water? Ocean planets. Infinite power for spaceships, unlimited erchius fuel. Just add water.
You know whats interesting about the child labor portion? Dawn Felstar (assuming female, not sure), owner of the Starbound discord, started up a porn channel which had kids in it. Claiming kids couldn't access it, but also made it so you can gain access by typing "?18" anywhere. I saw several 15 year olds in the channel. People who told me how old they were in DMs. I protested the channel, so she banned me permanently on that one singular thing claiming that was my third strike (first two strikes were one harmless joke people found funny including her at the time). So to me, this felt like Chucklefish had a pedophile in their community running everything. Chucklefish told me Dawn was not an employee, and yet, Dawn also had me banned from Chucklefish's main discord too because I had forced Dawn, to remove the porn channel after my ban by going to discord devs about it which forced the deletion of it. I was told later that the porn was still a thing there, in the main discord where children go to play and talk about the game. I still have a screenshot of the argument involving the porn channel and Dawn telling me it wasn't going to be removed. I was a modder way back, but after the above, and the fact that Frackin Universe devs stole what they wanted any time they wanted and would not be punished for it in any way, I lost all faith in the game ever getting better. I lost interest in it, and stopped playing entirely years ago.
Never been to the Starbound discord, but I am in one for another game being "published" by Chucklefish. The same mod team, including Dawn Felstar, is present in that one as well. They always did strike me as rather odd. Thankfully I haven't seen any signs that they have a secret porn channel there, though.
Yeah, I actually really miss the Alpha version of the game a lot. The procedural generation of monsters and planets were my biggest draws to the game, seeing things that nobody had ever seen before and exploring parts unknown. Now every planet looks like every other planet of the same kind, and by the time you visit any world you'll already have the exact type of backpack you need to make the unique challenges of that planet redundant. Going to a no-oxygen planet? Here's a backpack that lets you breathe forever. Going to a cold planet? A warm pack to let you never freeze. Gone are the days of cowering beside a fire to keep warm as a swarm of blood-spewing locusts with turtle shells peck away at a two tile thick wall. Gone are the days of never knowing what type of biome you'll find when you go underground. Everything looks the same, and all the quests are so 'unique' they're boring. After your first playthrough, you're done. There's nothing more to see. It's no longer a sandbox, but an adventure game. And a pretty poor one at that, since the sandbox systems are there to let you cheese progression in a hundred different ways. Rather sad, that. When it first came out, Starbound was on track to be my favorite game. Just, ever. But bit by bit, they added and removed features that just made it more tedious, less fun. I still like the game, sure, but the progression tree is kind of a joke, and the story arc is so tedious as to be unrewarding when it's finally completed. A lot of potential, dashed against the rocks. Plus the whole 'free labor' thing, apparently. Forgot about that for a while. Pretty shit, innit?
Maybe it was just me only discovering starbound a year ago and I would probably have a different bias if i played it during alpha but the game became my favorite pc game of all time, yet its not because of the changes that were made, but whatever thats left of the original concept of the survival/sandbox aspect, the building aspect of the game is absurdly huge that i couldnt run out of any ideas when it comes to building colonies I've read forums, reddit posts and videos on why they dropped starbound but honestly most of them pointed towards them not liking the idea of an infinite survival sandbox game and all I've seen are comparisons on the rpg aspects between starbound and terraria, the bossfighting and the narrative of the main campaign, while i do understand that it might be important for some players, but in my personal experience, thats not the only part of the game, its a game of patience, creativity and time. The people who complained about the game were more likely to speedrun the game than to spend their time with it, maybe thats a bad thing for a game, but i've loved the endless cycle of things you can do in a game.
My favorite moment in Starbound was watching an exposition cutscene so long that I starved to death during it in multiplayer
This game satirizes itself, huh?
The fucking explanation of the "plot" when you meet whats-her-face for the first time right?
I think it properly satires the programmers being paid with exposure.
@@PandaPelley yup! We died laughing once we realized what happened
LOL
Chapter 1: Hey this game sounds cool
Chapter 2: eh, went in the wrong direction
Chapter 3: UNPAID CHILD LABOR
@King I can see your comment
@King same here, just rn i got del again
@King If you saying swear or prohibited words, youtube will delete your messages automatically, without reaching other people.
@King From my history only messages with prohibited words was deleted.
Video owner can also delete some messages.
на месте разрабов, если бы я узнал что контент для моей игры клепает 12-летнее фурричудовище с прайдом на аватарке в твиттере, я бы сделал всё возможное чтобы люди не узнали о его причастности к моему творению
i wish somebody made an open source reimplementation of starbound engine, this would truly give the game a second life
Starbound seems like a lost cause to me, the game is dying a slow and painful death.
I want access to that engine so badly
with how terribly optimized it is, anyone would be better off rebuilding from the ground up entirely
@@ChesterCheatin Bruh, this game is like 7 years old. It's not fortnite that gets montly battlepasses, it's an indie game that have a lot of lost potential
@@Rayce_Istanus How is that related to what I was saying?
The early iteration of Starbound where it was pretty much a survival game in space was much better than the forced story progression we got. Digging deep into the cores of ice planets, having to keep fires nearby to stay warm, figuring out how to summon bosses to gain access to new sectors that had even more hostile environments you had to creatively approach.
Instead we ended up with these set dungeons, a bland story, an irritating required scanning mechanic, and the barrier of entry to other biomes being "just equip this pack and you're fine, lol."
Absolute tragedy, which was partly due to the lead dev being absolutely incompetent.
Oh well.
Agreed, I had way more fun back in the EA days when we logged in and tried to find things, but once they had a set story to the game... it lost a lot of the uniqueness of the races because none of the racial backstories made them stand out anymore since we're now basically playing Star Trek wannabes.
Also, I miss the EA progression since your spaceships were all unique to your race as well as the ship's AI. Getting your ship working was such a huge achievement! Getting the ability to travel to the next planet in the system was another huge feeling, then... the ability to visit other systems? New sectors? Exploration was unlocked as you improve your ship, which made sense, but now we can just teleport to new places? Boring! Back then, you had to unlock the place and I think designate it as a teleport location before you can teleport to it.
Early access I was pulling all-nighters on this game, when I came back to it after 1.0 I was baffled. I had gifted the game to a friend, we tried to start a new game and were put on different instances of the tutorial/main quest, ending on different planets when it was over. "Do this and this and also that then maybe you'll be able to just explore and have fun with someone else". And this whole new starting experience was way more confusing while also being more railroaded and streamlined than the old one. I got the impression that the game just deviated from expanding and perfecting its premise to implement whatever useless feature was popular at the time. If I want to capture monsters there are already games doing just that very well. I bought StarBound to explore, discover strange new planets, stumble upon aliens settlements or ruins or whatever, some friendly, some hostile, learn more as I go and have fun. There was already some environmental story-telling, just adding some preset planets and sites, with maybe some semi-hidden optional end-game questlines to give an incentive to keep exploring and you already had a solid game. Instead they added a main plot, a bunch of cookie-cutter quests, and streamlined everything :/
Dungeons could've been cool and added to this if executed better, and the original game was SOOO much better overall.
But at the end of the day they just took what made the game so beautiful in the first place and removed all of it.
Also, arrogant.
it takes an arrogant person to tell Another person that they are doing it wrong, and that he will show them, then he fails miserable, lmao
I wish I didn't have to deal with it.
just to add salt to the wound, in the alpha and beta, the races were unique: the glitch couldn't eat anything but tomatoes. The Florian were the only ones that could consume oculemon, boneboo or other fruits that were toxic for other characters, Hyotl could hold breath longer. And everyone had race dedicated weapons that varied in stats, making the novakids ranged weapons better and the florian melee ones the best.
The story was bad, in fact it was the worst addition.
Part of that is probably because of the change in writers. Not to mention just how grim and dark much of the lore was before they toned it down from ‘agonizing immortal mutations, racial genocides, fungal zombies, totally unethical cultural practices, etc. to just… ‘Big ape bad, Florian not all savage, glitch are normally hive mind, and you’re part of the somehow good tennae protectorate.
Not only that, resting and eating and temperature all came together to create a surprisingly engaging survival system. Going into fiery or snowy planets, or even planets without an atmosphere, was a real challenge, not just a roadblock that you don't even see before doing a main story mission. Stocking up on food, crafting appropriately warm or cool armor or environment shields, hazardous worlds with poor visibility and terrain, draining moons for much-needed fuel, it had such potential to be an immersive experience unlike anything else in the market at the time, but instead they chose to go with incredibly shallow and generic mechanics...
Any idea from which update it started going downhill?
I remember playing during early days, but don't remember the updates...
There's probably old pirated versions still on the web, I would love to replay them, but really have no idea which one to search for, as I've ignored the game for several years =(
@@ewg5511 I'd say it was when they started railroading the storyline and crimping the variety for planet and monster generation. Things used to be totally wild in terms of potential appearances and combinations. Now it's all just kinda... samey. Not to mention the fact that now progression is locked behind a story that arguably ruins one of Starbound's biggest draws: Roleplaying. And I don't mean like, 'RPG' elements, I mean in the fact that It used to be a game where the story was entirely yours to make. Your origins, your experience, etc. Players would impose a story upon their character and see it through as they played the game and experienced new things. Now? Everyone is the exact same schmuck as one another...
I really miss the Alpha, Beta, etc. Sectos.
I was so disappointed when they made the backstory for every race identical. You used to have a different backstory depending on which race you were, based on leaving your society (or just Earth being destroyed if human), but now everyone just happens to be on Earth…
And everybody become space jesus.
They even still have pixel art for alternate origin stories in the game files
Somebody actually added that back in but once again, shouldn’t need mods for that.
That’s the exact thing that tore it for me back in the day and condemned Starbound to a shelf at the back of my steam library.
@@JacobNintendoNerd99 Same, while some mechanics were improved, what Starbound once was just makes me feel disappointed when I play the game.
The weirdest game dev horror stories are the ones that remind you it is entirely possible to un-develop a game. Imagine the weird time travel scenario: "Play Starbound before it leaves early access!"
That would make a really cool piece of art actually
"Novakids were a fan race and i dont think the person who came up with them got compensated"
John Su. It was John Su who made the original Novakid piece, inspired by their OC, that later on became the base guide for the whole race
thank you for the information, do you maybe have a link to it or something?
Terrain noise was actually toned down around the same time that jump height was reduced. It is much worse with the old values modded back in. However, some old dungeons with platforming built around old jump values never got updated to account for the change.
I imagine they went with the excuse that those areas were meant to be inaccessible without "discovering" movement techs like double-jump and such.
@@PandaPelley I don't think they are even aware of it being an issue, much less making excuses for it.
@@jss2a98aj I guess you aren't aware of how much Chucklefish gutted the fun mechanics in the early days to realize "Tiy's Vision"
Do you remember "sand-surfing" aka the mining meta in early beta?
@@PandaPelley I'm aware of a lot of cut and unused content. I make mods to restore some of it on occasion.
@@jss2a98aj make a mod that brings back the stupid Christmas spirit drop that broke the game for a few weeks back in like, 2013
The part that I hated was that when they added in the story, it became non-optional. You CANNOT progress the game without the story, which means you HAVE to follow the pre-chosen progression curve.
Want to make a sweet lava castle? Not until you've gotten so far along that you might've lost your inspiration.
Want to start with a new character, but you already know all the crafting requirements for your favorite tier of stuff? Too bad, you need another few hours of hunting through random places and hoping RNG doesn't screw you out of being able to progress the story.
Want to try mods? Congrats, if it doesn't completely redo the game, it STILL needs you to either skip ALL of the story at once or you HAVE to follow the story to progress still.
That update KILLED Starbound as a 'sandbox game'. It was simply an adventure game with a few minor sandboxing elements.
Actually Fracking Universe completely revamps the progression, Im probably more than 30h in (also playing with Elithian races and Arcana) and never did one of the main quests so far, just the basic tutorial
@@theartillery9724 I don't really recall having a problem with the ship building, I selected a pre made BIOS tho, so I didn't needed to create nothing from scratch, the only sad part was that I needed to break some of the furnishing to make room for the tables. The skill tree is extremelly intimidating too, I really agree with you there, but many things there aren't really that crucial for the progression. If you ever try it again (and I really, really recommend doing) either look into an progression guide, or do what I did, I sticked to the normal progression of Starbound, focused in getting the new tiers equipments just like in the normal game, and whenever I needed to get something else for the production I researched that too, by focusing on that you will learn the tree in a fast and intuitive way.
Man, mentioning the Alpha reminded me of just how much the game lost over the years. I've seen the temperature system mentioned, but another thing was biomes were actually divided into stratums based on difficulty. A garden world was a walk in a park, any of the lava planets had the highest difficulty possible.
Pets were at one point obscenely strong and durable and well worth going out of your way to catch.
Races may not have had unique attributes, or at least not strong ones, but they at least unique looking equipment that gave them a sense of identity alongside the dungeons and towns. Also, we lost a decent chunk of dungeons, biomes, and towns over time as well. The lore purge was a mistake.
The colorful biome used to be a lot more messed up because that's where people who encroached on the truth of Greenfinger wound up, transformed into neon-colored people who couldn't talk. The USCM bunkers with soldiers who had been driven insane with fear and paranoia. The Avian concepts seemed to die on the cutting room floor because we had the mysterious Thornwing only mentioned in lore books, but is implied to not only be the head of a mercenary company and has a vested, sinister interest in keeping the true nature of Kulex a secret and will literally bury people deep in some desolate planet's underground if they find out about it.
Plus, the Florans were specifically designed to combat something, and the Tentacomet of the time (later rebranded as the Ruin) was implied to be Greenfinger's creation as well that had slipped out of their grasp and destroyed Earth. Which, if I recall right, was implied to not have been completely destroyed but only partially consumed and even had survivors who would have long since been driven to madness if/when you ever managed to get to it.
There were supposed to be unique questlines for each race, different motivations to explore the stars and a decent number of mysteries to solve. But it really just boils down to the fact that the lead dev's a manchild.
Like, I remember how much people just *hated* traveling down to a planet's core to repair the ship's FTL drive. It was a long, slow, tedious slog because the closer you got to where Core Fragments spawn, the tougher the ground got. Dirt became stone, stone got tougher, and finally you might as well have had a material comparable to Minecraft's Obsidian but in layers dozens of blocks thick. Then you had to go all the way back up, likely though the same shaft you had to dig to get that far. People just used softcore difficulty and died in lava as fast travel, eating the pixel loss because as you noted, Pixels are easy to come by.
What was the lead dev's response? Change softcore so you dropped all items on death.
Not *fix* anything, no. Not give players an incentive to explore more, or just implement the 'teleport from anywhere' mechanic they did later. No, the message was loud and clear. 'How DARE you cheese your way out of MY glorious vision! You peons FORGET that I. AM. GOD. You will MINE these fragments as I dictate, you will NOT play this game ANY other way.'
(Of course at the time saving and quitting out of the game had the same effect of dropping you back on the ship with no repercussions, but nobody tell him that.)
So yeah, no surprise that he turned out to be a piece of shit who exploited the work of others to make money, then ran away once (I presume) the list of easy victims dried up.
Jesus christ i hope that lead dev slips on a banana peel while crossing the street
> Plus, the Florans were specifically designed to combat something, and the Tentacomet of the time (later rebranded as the Ruin) was implied to be Greenfinger's creation as well that had slipped out of their grasp and destroyed Earth. Which, if I recall right, was implied to not have been completely destroyed but only partially consumed and even had survivors who would have long since been driven to madness if/when you ever managed to get to it.
...Huh, so that explains the Eyeball cultists if you squint hard enough.
@@gratuitouslurking8610 Yeah, there was so much stuff we lost over time thanks to the lead dev and I hate it. Especially since it's unlikely that there'd be an overhaul mod ambitious enough to bring any of those untapped concepts back.
mine 1 block of sand that had stuff in it, it all fell down and mined at once, my favorite mechanic in the game.
i heard Tiy was kind of a dick, but got anywhere i can read something more indepth? Terarria's Redigit recently did something similar with the Luck and torches, that was a big shitshow
I do find it funny how the 6 different races have unique backgrounds to them and different ways you can interact with them in the story while the novakids are kind of just "Yeah we are space cowboys"
gay af
Best Race tho. I love them. Really fits my problem with being forgetful lmao
"Starbound is a well-optimized game." -Biggest inside joke among both the modding and roleplay communities.
In comparison to the other moddable games it is very stable, and very easy to mod.
Or I should say, it is extremely stable under immense modding load, but not optimized very well.
@@klo1679 its not a modding heaven, my friend. I believe it can be modding Empyrean....
...considering how even Terraria is independent from that garbage mode, which is truly a Calamity for a community
I wish starbound stayed more in line with it's original vision.
Then we got a story mode.
I actually really like that it TRIED to add an actual quest hub and story instead of the barebones survival game it started out as. It could have gone a long way toward separating it from Terraria. But the WAY they implemented it was truly awful, and the story itself was incredibly generic garbage even if it weren't implemented awfully.
@@Ventorath And really, they could have avoided the whole "let's force everyone to go through the quests" thing. Even if the story and the quests weren't plain bad, they'd still be something you don't want to play around with and explore - it'd be one run through the game and goodbye.
A game like this can have quests. But they need to be in line with the game - freeform, optional, spontaneous, procedural... Think Star Wars: Galaxies' encounters. You fly to a planet, and while exploring, find a village that's being attacked by monsters. With a few clues, you find a dungeon, fight through it, collect loot, solve the quest, yay. Or you get a quest to find a lost person - and as you fly around planets on your normal exploration runs, you can ask people about them. Quests that ask you to build a bridge, tunnel through a mountain, help rebuild a village after a flood, deliver food to refugees. Quests that change the world - the way you do them, or don't. That's what sandboxes are about. Not a premade list of quests (or worse, a _linear_ railroad of quests, like we got) that you are expected to finish. Of course, the _variety_ of quests will always be limited - but noone is forcing you to do yet another fetch quest; if you want to help, gather the leather for the villagers. If you don't... don't. Fixed quests feel a lot more like you're expected to finish all of them; and it's a lot harder to make them feel like a part of the (changing!) world. In a sandbox like Starbound allows - you didn't help the villagers. They're all dead. No more trading on this planet. Not a game breaker - but real, lasting change.
A linear mainline quest you need to do to progress through the game... that's always been for themeparks, not sandboxes. Not a bad thing, but certainly not a good fit for a sandbox.
Yeah the story mode is shit. I understand wanting to give your sandbox game an ultimate goal, like the Ender dragon, for people who need that sort of thing. But the pre-story progression was more fun and open-ended.
Remember how they promised that they'd allow you to progress however you want - through combat, trading, farming, mining, or anything else? That sure changed. Now, you not only MUST do combat to progress, but you also need to run through these setpieces that are the same every time and that you can't mine through. So a sandbox crafting and mining game gets turned into a side-scrolling arcade with a tacked-on story and no alternate progression paths.
What's even the point of having the procedural world if everything important happens in set levels and the resources you need to survive those levels can be purchased?
A story mode... that ripped out all the really damn cool lore and backstory that had been put in and had been teasing early access players, leaving it forever unresolved. Adding a story... killed the story. Amazing work.
@@wolfieinu "So and so is missing and there's a band of raiders to the east" iteration 9,687. ugh the random quests are ALL THE SAME and KEEP HAPPENING ON TOP OF EACH OTHER. can't even walk through a village.
Terraria Overhaul is a nice way of re-imagining the game, but the base game is good.
Starbound Overhaul would be a straight improvement.
FU is basically a complete overhaul
The problem with starbound is that you need a complete project before you can overhaul it...
@@Loderyod FU is really fucking annoying and difficult to get used to, along with locking off large swaths of content with an artificial “””tech tree”””
Minecraft and Terraria tackle this issue of progression by just making everything available from the start, or in terraria’s case, make the player not even aware of the content until it’s available to them
FU doesn’t follow this premise, instead, it just plops you down with a lengthy tech-tree and tutorial, saying “I dunno just figure it out”, with XP limits and quests you *have* to do before you’re allowed to have any fun.
@@Loderyod FU?
@@nigachad4031 frackin universe
@@GhooseGhoose its a mod, right?
I remember in the early life of Starbound, when it had interesting temperature mechanics. That said, I still prefer the physics of Starbound over Terraria. But I think the biggest problem with the game is that that gameplay cycle was broken, kind of like FO4 oddly enough. Interacting with the colony system and other settlements should have been the core of the gameplay loop, but instead it was just there as a loot grab and quest hubs for the main story. You can play the entire game without touching the colony system at all, and I think that's sad. Throw in like you said, the simplification of mechanics and empty updates. I also found mods just made overly complex tech trees.
I think it would be nice, coupled with more survival and progression mods, if Colonies could produce resources that you yourself can't.
Specialist blacksmiths forging advanced alloys, chefs automatically creating food, farmers to deal with land nearby, weaponsmiths or researchers working to help you get better stuff, maybe determined by the quality of lab they have.
A colony should be a safe place, a home to come back to and enjoy, instead of... whatever it is now.
I still prefer SB over Terraria now, mostly because i always seem to have a lot more fun with just how sandboxy the game can be
whats FO4?
@ Fallout 4
Honestly I wish they hadn't bothered putting the colonial system into Starbound since, like the rest of the random stuff added as stretch goals (besides the Peacekeepers), it took away from the core experience of jet setting across the galaxy. You're a member of a kind of intergalactic FEMA meets USAF, not Bob the Builder. On ship sustainability and services should've been a big part of the design mechanics for the same reason the Protectorate used modified cargo ships, it keeps you mobile so you can spend more time on the ground saving lives and fighting disasters.
I still remember the first "death" of Terraria. We fans were truly sad because that meant no more updates, so when Starbound was announced, it was the first time that I remember truly felling hype for a project.
After the major disappointed that was the release of the alpha, I stopped feeling for hype traps. That is the reason why I was already ready for the disappointing No Man Sky Release: I still remembered Starbound.
At least Terraria came back from the death and gave us some amazing content updates until it's definitive but happy development death (even when it was already awesome back then), and even No Man Sky managed to pull one of the best 180 in game development history.
Just leaving this here because it seems like you might not have heard yet; Terraria is actually getting another update soon, a cross-over one with another game calls Don't Starve. Maybe you meant another Terraria update like 1.5 though, the creator already said he wouldn't go past 1.4.1 though and now we are headed for 1.4.3 lol.
@@jjay2771In a few years:
*Terraria 1.9 This time it's really the end guys i'm serious*
I feel you. I was pretty active in SB forum, was part of fan-made weekly "newspaper". Oh, I was so hyped. TBH, I never was so dissapointed in game (devs) as I was during my few first attempts to play this game.
@@Feuerhamster
Like my mom buying me Minecraft 8 years ago.
"They won't keep developing this past 1.7"
1.18 and still being developed.
Terraria has had like 3 final updates, i know 1.4 is the final update but at the same time I would not be suprised if ReLogic launches terraria 1.5
I remember the good old days when I could spend hours crafting all the different parts to a robot, only to find out it's a boss and die. Genuinely one of the sickest bosses I've ever seen.
i din't knew there was a *make a ennemy to beat your own marbles* moment!
terraria moment
I used to talk to Demanrisu on the Chucklefish chat, a chat where the Devs hung out often. At some point I asked them how to get into the Starbound development, and (I now realize) I was basically told not to.
Only now I can understand why.
Former Chucklefish community moderator here. Can confirm, you dodged a bullet.
@@swishfish8858 How bad was it?
@@swishfish8858
_Curious as to any specifics that you can give, too_
@@palecaptainwolfkayls8499 I posted a big thing but it looks like UA-cam automod deleted it. Big Google doesn't want you to know the real secrets I guess lmao
@@swishfish8858 repost them might have thought you were a bot if it contained links
This video finally answers my longstanding question of "what is the game missing?". The answer was a consistent and well paid dev team all along
As somebody who bought Starbound during alpha, a lot of changes made it feel like a bait-and-switch. I put money on a sandbox game with survival mechanics and the promise of a procedural universe too big for a single person to explore. Animals being made with a random mix of parts made combat on each planet feel unique, regardless of whether the player went to a similar planet before. The dungeon variety was a bit limited (as should be expected of an alpha), but what the game had was fun to explore. Each race had unique weapons that functioned completely differently and unique traits to make race choice feel relevant while also strengthening the narrative. I spent money in hopes of updates adding more procedural dungeons and planet biomes, maybe even diversifying planets more by making some have multiple biomes. The game only got boring so fast because it needed more variety and fleshing out in the areas where it excelled. What I ended up getting after updates is a linear RPG that doesn't feel like a sandbox anymore where the features that attracted me were neglected and removed.
What made me lose all interest in Starbound is how you teleport to every boss fight and mission.
In - for example - Terraria, you can prepare an arena for the fight to make it easier, but it takes work and planning and effort and there's so many ways to go about it, it's fun and makes the whole fight all the more satisfying.
Starbound? You teleport in front of a big robot and shoot it until it dies. A boss fight becomes a gear check and you cannot do anything about it. It sucks.
All the "campaign" is out of place especially when you are able to fight the same bad guy over and over
starbound used to have these strange underground flesh biomes, i was so sure they would put some sort of summoning altar in there for a boss...
And it would always be annoying to have to go run through those missions over and over again if you wanted to get the figurine/boss weapon from each boss. It just isn't fun after the first time.
Honestly what i would love is like
You teleport somewhere
Go through the dungeon
Then you get to a big open spot and are given some time to build a arena
The catch is that whatever you build is saved bwetween trys, and though the build time gets shorter, you can keep adding on to your arena
I remember that stage of the alpha where bosses were like that. And pretty much everyone who was vocal on the forums was, at the time, lamenting about how Starbound was just becoming "Terraria but worse". With that kind of feedback during development, how is it a surprise and a disappointment that the devs started focusing on ways to make Starbound fundamentally different from Terraria?
Starbound, I feel, is entering an era of modding where people are breaking new ground and surpassing these percieved 'limits'. Lua, as a coding language, is incredibly versatile and has kept games like Roblox alive for 15 years. That said, since everything in Starbound's modding is coded in Lua, it's more than possible to recode a complete overhaul with the help of a large team. Exhibit A being Frackin' Universe. Additionally, a competitor to FU has recently entered the limelight, under the name Arcana. By implementing a few new mechanics, as well as integrating magic into a sci-fi setting in a convincing way, Arcana flips the entire game on it's head and implements brand new possibilities for play: Such as a Wizard playthrough, restricting yourself to staves, wands, or other energy-hungry weapons that don't resemble guns.
I play with both Arcana and FU on, as well as a bunch of other mods (mostly QOL). I haven't played vanilla Starbound in years.
I think Futara's Dragon Mod (Playable feral dragon race with an entire custom gameplay system with alot of depth and fancy visuals) and Feast of Fire and Smoke (extremely remarkable gun-play mod with really well made animations and presentation) are the 2 mods I can think of that pushed that boundary.
This is why I think moddability is such an important quality for games. It can extend playtime by magnitudes
This, except for the large amounts of porn mods
@@10kwithzerobitches20 Let's face it we can't escape the horny
This is wild. I'm 22 now, and basically had starbound buzzing in the background of my entire teenage years. I have 900 hours in it, not because I was a hardcore fan, but just because I would boot it up, play a few dozen hours every few months, and then move on for a while, and it all added up. Looking back I noticed all sorts of weird stuff that I didn't manage to understand, "Where did Rho go" was a question I asked quite a few times. Now it all makes sense.
From what I've seen, Rho was a real one. You should check out Outworlder, it's Rho's newest game.
Thanks for the update, Outworld looks fantastic at first glance. I'll keep an eye on it.
@@TheGoodTrash Didn't age well. They ended up launching the game in a beyond broken state.
@@TheSkrylar That was TinyBuild's fault. Never let the people who spam-tweeted Matpat begging for more Hello Neighbor content "help" you with your game.
@@spyr0guyhm. I remember the yandev interaction with tinybuild. This kinda adds a side to that
been following starbound since beta and one thing i DEARLY MISS is random starting planets. i had instances of starting with planets with tentacle biomes (a since retired biome i dearly miss), and the acid rains made for a fun challenge.
i also miss quadrants too. they were honestly pretty cool.
I swear, starbound was a beautiful game and going in a great direction, and then it just did a full 180 and gave up on everything that made it good
The sector system was really neat, wish they’d expanded on it and the spawned bosses instead of star types with EPPs and repetitive missions
the fact that 1.0 basically gutted a lot of the infinitely-more-interesting lore from the alpha builds annoyed me so much that i spent weeks making a mod that re-incorporated the alpha lorebooks into the current game. complete with minor tweaks to make the old lore "fit" into the current game.
even then, there's absolutely no way you could make the story we ended up getting in current starbound good. every sense of mystique and intrigue was basically neutered in favor of making the protag a "chosen one" figure of the protectorate and it pisses me off to no end.
i love starbound as a sandbox to goof around in, both as a game and as a grounds for modding, but the amount of wasted potential and horrible treatment done by tiy really pisses me off. starbound really should've just been a sandbox from the very start. period. but it's also the shit that happened behind the scenes that riles me up even more.
someone in the comments said this already, but i really hope at some point we get an open source reimplementation of starbound like what we have with morrowind and openMW. solid vid, glad the algorithm did good for once.
If someday Starbound becomes open sourced or modders/game devs crack open this game, I'd want to be a part of that community every step, I would want to see Starbound be reborn and fixed. I've played the game for a long time, and even with my potato of a pc, I for some reason still enjoyed the 5fps I'd have just trying to walk across my house. And it was all because of the imaginative freedom, I could do practically anything, and mods just expanded on that idea, some of them linear but still fun. I say again... I hope one day this game is opened up, and reborn.
Bro that already happened
@@citricdemon not really, not in an intuitive way at least
If Starbound or even Minecraft goes open source, that will be the day modders actually start making tons of money for their hard work.
@@The-Singularity-X01 do you know what open source means?
@@citricdemon Yeah, I'm not an idiot.
Starbound's soundtrack is so good, I go back to it frequently. It captures something so deep about the beauty and wonder of space exploration. It pains me whenever I think about the actual game
Incredible video! I wasn't expecting a 50 minute deep dive into the history and potential of Starbound in *2021* but I'm glad you made one! This game's community may be small and tired at this point, but it's surprisingly active. I'll definitely help share this video around, hopefully we can get more people to check it out!
@Stella Hoenheim Wanna get weirder?
I've been an OG starbound player for years, since alpha and early access, and fell in love with this game. The soundtrack, atmosphere, visuals, and potential was so captivating and beautiful. I really hope this game comes back more than ever.
Every time I see Starbound my heart BREAKS in HALF because I love the game so much and now look at it now.
@@Bacony_Cakes Videos of pelicans eating other birds.
@@SephirothRyu nah
ua-cam.com/video/m6U9T3R3EQg/v-deo.html
My actual favorite part of this game is the inspect lines different races have. I played with the avali mod and really enjoyed the dialogue my character gave when inspecting stuff
The Avali inspect dialogue sold me on their species. My favorite parts are when they encounter incredibly primitive technology like copy machines and just break down into Angrish, and when they discover the Gnome Villages and immediately begin Roleplaying as a Rampaging Kaiju.
*Some thoughts on modding:* It's not really about Pertience or Fun, it involves people looking at moons like a blank canvas and working on them since nobody has yet _(Less Dead Moons is an example)_ , or deciding that yes, the crewmember AI is stupid, so they work on rewriting the AI, or work arounds to solve the AI problem
Also you can optimize Starbound, some mods reprogram the entire way the game handles spriting or lighting, you can actually go crazy with Starbound mods and it's probably why people still bother to mod this game to hell, because they *can*
And you can add new mechanics, it's how Racial perks are made possible in the first place, we wouldn't be able to add new mechanics to races if you could only "edit" what the races have, is it hard to overhaul the entirety of how Mechs are handled and add new mechanics and behaviors? yes. Does that stop people? of course not
I play modded almost full time and I still love this game, Starbound is a malfunctional masterpiece that people love to death because of how much the community is just grown to this idea that the universe is incomplete and someone's outta fix it, whether it be you, me, or anyone before us
I don't support Chucklefish's unpaid labor "tactic", but Starbound was the incidental result of that, and the result is this concept that was built from ground zero with hopes and the ability to fulfill these hopes ourselves, and this ironically feeds into the idea that this game is about a vast universe full of potential and has creations that were made long before you stepped into it, where you'll find your own way to contribute to this universe
I don't think relying on mods is a bad thing because relying on mods to survive is actually great, and it's what enables games like Super Mario 64 to still have active lively communities, 20 years later
I don't know where did the "mods shouldn't fix it" comes from cause honestly the entire concept of modding is to add something more to the game, improving the final product, be it a good game or a bad game, and thus obviously providing more longevity to a game, it was literally never a bad thing, you can say Super Mario 64 is on "modding life-support" and you'd be right and that literally doesn't mean anything, it doesn't devalue the game and it's a very positive point to have, it's far from negative
"mods shouldn't fix it" because big mods rarely work together and small mods are... small. the content void is too big to properly fill it with mods. would be better if Chucklefish just sold it away.
@@heliumscrape7078 I don't agree with this, Small mods fill in those voids because they work with big mods.
I completely agree with this comment, I like it when I find people like this
I still come back from time to time and even play on your server. FU content especially has made me sleep at 5am several times.
@@durakeno5575 do you mean it makes you sleep at 5am because it's fun so you stay up late? I really really enjoy FU
Speaking of fuel, you don't even need to buy it. Last time I played, crewmembers could upgrade fuel efficiency for your ship indefinitely, until your space flights are free and your game crashes when you open your fuel tank due to your fuel cap number not being processable.
I never bought fuel, but I only ever needed like, one moon to gather enough liquid fuel to last the entire campaign.
As for the ghost, it’s oftentimes relatively easy to avoid and the “Rush to make it to the surface” that OP mentioned in the vid doesn’t apply since, well, you can beam back up from wherever.
@@sqentontheslime1967 You can only beam back from wherever on casual mode
@@dudu28r81 I seem to have outed myself here as a casual only player.
Since it isn’t mentioned anywhere as far as I know, I didn’t know about that being the case.
@@sqentontheslime1967 It's actually where most of the difficulty comes from, not dying(and therefore not losing your items) is easy enough if you have played the game through like once before.
They fixed this unfortunately. Crewmembers now improve fly speed or add capacity, a fixed amount per crew member and diminishing with more crewmembers of that type.
It is possible to do mech encounters until you have enough though, or one of the bounty hunting quests leads you to a stash of erchius fuel that is hard to run down.
Man, what a great video. I found it out of nowhere and wasn't expecting such an in-depth review.
Starbound was the first game (besides minecraft) that I've played 100+ hours, and for years was my favorite one. It had all I, as a kid, wanted to experience. It had exploration, customization, spaceships, survival, construction. I've spent hours playing with my best friend of the time doing nothing but exploring, searching for documents and trying to understand a bit more of the story of such interesting universe.
And then... 1.0 came. There was some great stuff, I have to admit. Some features just brought more life to Starbound, but some... just felt weird. The game became so linear, so... stiff. It didn't feel like Starbound anymore. And now that I listened to your video and found out about all the unpaid labor stuff, I just cannot recommend this game anymore, and I say that with a sinking heart.
It's so sad to see so much wasted potential. It could've been one of the best sandboxes ever, but ended up as a big chunk of unfinished features and linear gameplay. And, as you said, mods have a limit. Moreover, I think mods are not supposed to fulfill an incomplete game, but to boil over it. Devs' moves to throw the responsibility to keep the game alive to modders, despite of working to a certain extent, is just... wrong.
Seeing one of my favorite games being abandoned and having so much s**t involved behind the scenes is really heartbreaking, but life goes on. I just wish starbound's dev had actually learned something from Terraria.
Thanks for the comment, man. This really hit. Starbound was a game with great potential (it still is!). Even with the history behind it, I wish Chucklefish had made a formal apology and kept on with the project. It could have rivaled Terraria in the Sandbox market!
You are a great UA-camr, keep up the good work man!
@@TheGoodTrash Rip all techs from Angry Koala, I miss the Butterfly one, being able to move wherever you wanted was a blessing for building. Or at least I think it was that one... I'm a bit surprised that you didn't go into detail about features added and taken away and changes to the loose narrative, Boss summoning and moving advancing to different systems by moving onto a different Star map. Same coords but had the newer planets and resources and all that.
That said its hard to be mention it all in adequate detail and you would have to be brief. Out of curiosity, when did you first pick it up? I got it when it was in... Alpha and we waited a long time before we got the station and new content. A bit sad it had to wipe everything.
The worst part is No Mans Sky did what Star bound couldn't: Fix their game
correction, no mans sky finished their game, not fixed it, you literally can't play starbound on its minimum pc requirements. hell, I have a computer FAR more powerful then its recommended and the game is still a mess, mods only make it worse and I consider mods to be required for play.
@@alidanyeah plus pretty sure it can only use one core so you need a cpu with good one core performance
The issue is procedural generation vs curated experience. Curated experiences are limited, but being hand-crafted have the potential to be something deep and engaging. Procedural generation is leaving most of the experience up to your imagination; the idea that 1,000 monkeys on type writers will eventually create Shakespearian works, if you squint hard enough.
Combining both processes is tough. In Starbound's case, you have 7 races across multiple worlds with differing biomes. Trying to sprinkle curated experiences randomly across those worlds is going to leave most people disappointed. You are going to come across repeats. This cheapens the experience and makes it dull. Dungeons are a good example. If you have seen one Glitch Dungeon, you have seen them all. Quests are the same. Arguably, the best Starbound experience, is your first one, when everything is fresh and new.
Moving on to mods, those are something of a mixed bag. Frackin Universe, probably the biggest and well known, succeeds in doubling down the best AND worst parts of Starbound. More planets, more dungeons, more crafting junk, more mindless grind. Frackin Universe almost requires you to play with the wiki open, as many of it's systems are obtuse and grindy. FU is brilliant, frustrating and disappointing with it's end game devolving into a Terraria-style "murder hundreds of creatures in specific sub-biomes to unlock recipes and unique crafting junk" that reminds me of post-Plantera dungeon cranked up to 1,000. On the other hand, the RPG Growth Mod allows you to slowly level up and improve your character's movement drastically. I find it is more "essential" than FU simply because I can FEEL the improvement of my character more than just increasing damage, health, and energy. It feels good, man.
The lack of solid direction neutered Starbound. Either through a lack of talent or drive, the game withered on the vine. Core features are not properly fleshed out resulting in a lackluster exercise in tedium. Additional content, such as mech suits are an interesting idea, but the implementation is uninspired and crude. They feel more like a tacked-on mod then a properly integrated part of the core gameplay experience. Even worse, it's another strike against the concept of Early Access games, adding it's name to the pile of half-finished could-have-beens that drive potential customers away from future promising titles. A solemn reminder that, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably will be.
They can do similar to nemesis system which randomize if an event can repeat procede in different ways or lock. But this needs a whole lot of contents.
frackin universe is actually pretty fun if you ynow
download that one hack mod to easily get items....
im not even joking its literally unplayable otherwise
The Problem with FU is actually a fairly simple one... It's a Modpack, not a mod.
It's a fairly crude mashing together of at least dozens of different mods and general content, similar to a modpack that's just pushed together and ran.
It isnt really reorganized or tweaked to run better, like say, Feed the Beast Modpacks, with tweaked recipes and general rebalancing, a Quest Book to give a simple goal to work towards, and overall streamlined. It's just kinda... t h e r e.
Frakin' is such a monolithic mod, but it def feels like unless you're specifically wired to like everything with it, that you basically should skip it. I eventually got tired of playing the game 'what mods don't work with FU this time' about the sixth or seventh time I didn't play Starbound for a bit, came back on a whim, and spent the next 30 minutes digging to the Frakin' wiki to see what new mod was added to contributions and/or incomatibilities.
Procedural generation is i feel like a hard topic on 2d games. On 3d games like deep rock galactic, you know the kind of caves you'll get but its always random (with some exceptional hand made cave parts) but you enjoy it in a way.
Here its just big layers, random balls, small and annoying corridors, little to no ores and tada.
If there was at least biome themed generations, like ice had more vertical caves or fire had more horizontal, underground forests had bigger open areas,... it wouldnt be this annoying everytime. Probably.
Not just the cave, the surface could really use some more biome specific generation.
Also yes, replying to a 8 month old comment. Hello there.
Really wish that, in the (long?) future Chucklefish would not copyright their races because it's by far maybe their most unique thing, above everything else. I'd undoubtely add in another scifi setting and sell as a game or animated series or whatever, just because they are charismatic. We can only dream for, I guess.
You could just do what i call a "Backslide-Zakuzov" manoeuvre.
1: Steal It (No one will ever know)
2: Airlift It (Into SPORE)
3: Bop It (Hit it with a big stick until it looks less like either)
Starbound was so good during the beta, but the drop in content and fun of 1.0 really killed it for me. Kind of wish they'd release the source code for the beta versions so that someone can improve them without adding a cheap story or removing 75% of the amazing content...
Former Starbound dev here. This write up is surprisingly accurate and well researched, the few inaccuracies there were was conjecture from lack of info. Starbound was a game that had massive potential that was let down by inexperienced, poor management and a creator that let power and fame go to his head. It's a textbook example of what happens when you have a team made entirely of people who don't understand nor like each other and each have differing visions of what the game should be. There ended up being no real unified vision, and Tiy was unable or unwilling to be decisive in forging one outside whatever he felt like at the time. He would commit to things far outside of our scope and casually introduce work multipliers which was why he ended up having to bring in his slave labor, because it was way more than us 3 artists were able to handle.
I got out as soon as I was able to post release and took a few years off to reflect and learn from the experience. I started my own game with my own company that I'm hoping to right the wrongs that Starbound did.
hello. may I ask what kind of game you are making?
@@adarax86 Farworld Pioneers. It's on Steam and there's early gameplay video's on UA-cam. It's like a cross between Starbound and Rimworld, and it's basically my vision for Starbound that I wasn't allowed to do.
@@Rhopunzel oh that game, I have that already on my wishlist :D
@@Rhopunzel Following, looks neat. Any idea on eta for early access?
hey i remember you, i think i saw you on the SB forums a few times/dev accessories in SB. hope all is doing well, farworld looks dope good luck homie
I was hooked on starbound, i remember skipping school to play it instead when it was all new and it was incredible.
But it devolved into:
-fly to planet
-sprint and do horizontal rocket jumps until you circle said planet
-find nothing of interest
-move onto next planet
rather quickly and got boring, then they added a bunch of stuff but i was already too burnt out.
Its now stuck in this state for me where i consider it one of my favorite games but not because its fun to play anymore but because its like a legacy kinda good game.
The great times had were so great that its still memorable despite a relatively quick decline.
30:35 Holy shit, that's a terrible jungle biome. No surface, and with a crimson chasm that generated inside it. It won't survive Hardmode at all.
true
nerd
You overestimate the Crimson's ability to consume the Jungle. Between having to convert mud to dirt and not being able to spread through that dirt itself, the Jungle will barely be touched by the time the rest of your world is consumed, if you allow it to go unchecked at least.
@@DimentiosLoyalest naa mate the crimson took over my jungle in literally 5 hours.
@@DimentiosLoyalest Nah, crimson/corruption just devours the jungle if you get unlucky with the spawn. Especially if you don't contain it.
Minor nitpick: when you say alpha, you mean beta. Alpha was never released to the public. Very good video!
The first early access release was effectively an alpha because it hardly resembles the end product.
@@mystic-malevolence no it was a beta.
@@mystic-malevolence the alpha was never releasd.
@@mystic-malevolence Oof. That cuts right down to the bone.
I loved the erchius fuel harvesting on the moons too! It was such a tense and exciting moment. Having good tech, rope, and an escape plan to escape the clutches of the ghosts with 3000 fuel always felt so satisfying.
I feel the "100 fuel per trip" ruined it for me.
You can go anywhere you want for only 100 fuel now. I miss when a trip to a far away system would empty my tank so I'd have reason to go harvest some more.
Let's not forget how easy and linear armor and pack progression are either. I got tier 6 armor and the final pack upgrade off 2 full tanks of fuel, and beat the game in 20 hours going in blind. The experience was so shallow, with most of the time spent being just trying to find the settlements I needed, that I was left to wonder why the game was so old but still so basic and unpolished, and found this video
Starbound...the only game I ever put more than 1000 hours on, bought for four people, and have literally sat back and fallen asleep to the soundtrack. I love it.
It's heartbreaking to see starbound go like this; I tried to play terraria but it wasn't a good replacement for it. I really love when games allows me to interact with NPCs and these NPCs can interact with the world themselves, not just talk, and for me it was super fun building a colony with lots of NPCs moving around, playing with the arcades I built, and even going into the western barn I built, one would play the piano and another would dance; I once decided to build a base with a lot of glass on a lava planet (in the lava) and while experimenting I decided to build a trap door that would trigger some hidden doors that locked you in while another opened to spill lava inside, and an NPC decided to go in and push the switch while I was still building it, and opened the trap door letting in all the lava and killing us both (and filling my half assed base with lava)... I guess it was not smart building the part that lets the lava in first, but that was fun and unexpected.
Crewmates and pets were disappointing because of how stupid and useless they are, but since I really like having an NPC traveling with me, and helping me along my journey I kept them. Also, the exploration and space theming was super fun while it lasted, and I really loved every moment of building and decorating my ship, while also having my crew and the two NPC tenants I had there interact with all the things I built (for instance, flick the lights off on a room, and turning on an hologram of a planet on the table in the middle... all that with a single switch).
I've not found any other game that makes me this happy (and yet sad and angry at it's many, MANY flaws); I'd say fallout 4 got close but the NPCs were not that fun and even felt lifeless (though I really liked companions).
I like Terraria, but I've always preferred Starbound's aesthetic and combat systems greatly over Terraria. Problem is, Starbound boss encounters are a total joke (what's the point in better combat if I don't have to play well with it, ever?), the story is literally just wandering aimlessly until you find a dungeon in which you spam 'Scan' on things, which is worse to me than just not having a story (though I'd love it if they actually implemented a good story in a good way -- its just not what happened). And I guess that's mostly it. Starbound could have been a real competitor and with the base look and mechanics, I would have greatly preferred it. But it didn't pan out in a way that felt good.
I still boot it up from time to time (modded to hell and back -- but mods in Starbound don't really change the core gameplay much anyway), but realistically I end up putting in like 12-16 hours then I just stop, because mods don't really fix that there's no real progress to be made. You're just progressing to the same lame, undertuned bosses and generic story... but slower. The systems that make it slower are interesting, but not interesting enough to actually bother finishing the game with them. RPG Growth is neat I guess, but you're just getting stronger than intended for content that was already insanely easy.
I'm gonna be honest, I saw that this video is 40+ minutes long and figured that I'll just take a quick look at what this video is continue to search for more vids.
Stuck for the whole thing and genuinely enjoyed the video. Thanks a lot.
so ummm the thing about the "strict physics update" being the solution to the player not moving twice as much (as illustrated with the player's speed being doubled) is incorrect.
the difference between strict and adaptive updates is that adaptive means "run as fast as possible (optionally up to a cap, like 120 or 240 fps)", meaning it is as smooth, and allows for as precise player input as the machine can handle. Strict means you run updates at a specific rate religiously. It just so happens that often it's good to use adaptive, except in the case of the physics updates, because of a quirk of our highly optimized physics engines that makes them work better with a constant delta time between updates. For this reason sometimes you see engines implementing callbacks for both adaptive updates and strict updates. But nothing is stopping you from building an engine that runs everything in strict mode, or even running the physics in an adaptive regimen for that matter. It would work, and the character would move at the same speed regardless.
Not having a strict mode physics update is not what causes the lag, nor the speed difference. What causes this is bad optimization, and the code not multiplying the speed by the dt (or in other words, a very very gross and rookie bug), respectively.
Thank you for the comment! Most of my work has been in Unity and Godot, so I haven't dealt with adaptive updates as much. I'll keep that in mind in the future!
And you make a great point. If they just multiplied movement by dt, it would've worked either way. Since Starbound uses a custom engine, I think the dt wasn't added in at all, causing the oversight to go unnoticed. So in the video, separating the update functions is a clean way to fix the Starbound Engine without having to go back and multiply every movement function by dt.
i was a huge fan of starbound when it was 2017, i played that game religiously and fed into my obsession of space/sci-fi media. i loved the game a whole lot since i never seen it in its alpha or really paid attention to its criticism- just liked the funny space game. i was esp obsessed with novakids and made lots of art n characters of them [hell my 2nd internet alias is literally just based off of the name] but yeah the game had a heavy influence on me.
stopped playing it after awhile and i tried coming back to it when the update came out, only to find out all my mods were incompatible and nothing worked. pretty much two years of gaming down the drain. tried it vanilla and realized how dry the game was without the heart of the mods. and now watching this video and getting a full picture of how badly the game had it going, a piece of love for the game mmmaybe kind of died a little bit for starbound- but it still sits as one of my favorite games.
very cool video tho
this is scarily accurate to how my 2017 went. i was obsessed with the game, i even had a novo kid obsession too with me implementing my character in stories, ect. but i stopped playing on a dime just because it felt repetitive. its so hard for me to get into it again, but its still one of my favorite games, def top 3. prob just because of all the good memories ive had playing it when it felt new and expansive.
The thing i liked the most about starbound was the wire and logic system. You could make some insane automation with that.
i picked the game up after everything, including the 1.4 apocalypse, and actually had a similar experience - i just liked the funny space game - and now i'm terrified for the future, thanks
You know, this actually got me thinking about what my ideal Starbound would be like.
1. NO FUCKING OUTPOST: Instead you get a message from Esther Bright broadcasted as a distress signal. which leads you to the ancient gate thing where she is, and she gives you the quest. In fact, if multiple main quests are implemented for different species than it should be like this for all main quests. Instead of going to the outpost (which no longer exists), or having to stumble upon it in a basically infinite galaxy you have a far reaching communicator, and even then you still have to get in range.
2. More interesting underground and moons: I feel this one is self-explanatory.
3. Shops still exist, but because they're restricted to settlements and colonies, because they're not at the outpost they're not as common: People buy and sell things, it's simple fact. Surely not everyone mines their own Erchius.
4. Get rid off fossils: Fuck fossils. Okay, so not entirely. But fossils only serve to waste the player's time compared to everything else so put it on the back of the shelf and work on things that actually serve a purpose.
5. Races have different advantages: Of course you have to pick a planet type for the player character they have an advantage in to start on.
6. Frackin' Universe content: Frackin' Universe is amazing, my only problem is it's content is all locked behind a really fucking dense tech tree. The biomes added by FU in particular all work well with the "space adventure" theme. Some of Frackin' Universe's content can go the back shelf while we're at it too if only because the tech tree is so dense, at very least it should still be in front of fossils since it's a hell of a lot more interesting.
7. I want to be able to select my ship at the beginning, or buy new ones: This is mainly for mod ships.
8. Player-made Space stations should be capable of acting as colonies: Not only would this mean another place you can put colonies, but this time your colony is mobile. Speaking of which...
9. I want to be able to buy, find or steal massive megaships. You compared your ideal Starbound to Doctor Who, but I think a more fitting comparison is Star Trek (if only because of the space theme). The "megaship" would have multiple doors you can enter, customizable rooms and other features that make it a mobile base, all the advantages of a colony while taking the middle man out of having to build a teleporter in your base.
Buying a megaship would be extremely expensive, finding one would be a rare stroke of luck and stealing one would require immense skill and effort. And all three options make a good story while the megaship in your possession is proof. It's also good for large multiplayer servers. It would also probably be one of, if not the hardest feature to implement.
10. Spaceship battles: This is more a problem than of the others as unlike the rest it doesn't just require alterations to existing mechanics, but entirely new ones. But it's a logical progression from megaships.
Yes, there's stuff that won't please everyone such as still being able to buy Erchius from shops. But not everyone wants to have to mine a moon every time they want Erchius.
I think BYOS from FU (and other mods , maybe) kind of achieves points 8 - 9
the devs had been promising spaceship battles as a stretch goal since before 1.0, le sigh
Jesus christ, watched the whole thing then was expecting to see millions of views... welp, nevermind, but i gotta say that was a great video and you 100% deserve all that support
Thanks! That means a lot to me!
Give it a time, nostalgia will kick in or algorithm will shine its' light on this video.
Probably second one, because it recommended this video to me already.
Apex: "Oh, you are a Floran! That must mean that you kill people on sight and that you are completely incapable of speech!"
Floran: _I should probably resent that, but I could really go for some monkey steak right now..._
Thank you so much for this in-depth description of Starbound. Having played since its very beginning, I definitely agree with your critical review. This game has insane potential, sadly it remained hindered by bad decisions. FU, Shellguard and others are some of the biggest mods I've seen on steam in terms of work that was put into it and they exactly tap into this potential. I deeply wish that these mods continues and keep on bringing back this lost potential. Hell, I would love (and pay) for people like you to take all that's good from this game and the mods and put it into a game that would give us the REAL Starbound.
Starbound was and always will be one of the games of my childhood. Me and my best friend would play for hours upon hours in high school, sharing coordinates to areas we thought were cool, starting new characters once we got all the armor sets of others. I still remember the hype when he found a rainbow cape.
I hope one daay another game comes along like it.
For me, a person who put 500+ hours in the game, mods are the only reason it's alive today, but no matter what happened, I still enjoy it. The modding community are still out there, releasing mods daily if not weekly.
I miss this game with every ounce of my being. I miss being infatuated by the lore of Kluex in particular, only to discover.. well.. it never went anywhere. Only leading to loose ends. All that hunting for effectively nothing hurt pretty damn bad. :(
Wow, this video does a great job at explaining the game's... unfinishedness. The way you explained all of it was incredible too! You, my friend, have earned a subscriber.
Unpopular opinion:
Hiring space penguin mercenaries is better than doing quests to get crewmates, because:
1. They're penguins;
2. They're cool;
3. It's fun to storm a planet with an army of heavily armed penguins;
4. They're penguins.
Don't forget 5: List Entry Duplication Error
As someone who's been a member of the community for the last 8 years, thanks for making this
Part 6 really speaks to me as a modder. I'm the creator of the Inu race mod, which was a project i created in response to Gonjamoon's neko race mod. I had a lot to do in my road map while i was still actively creating assets for my mod. One of the biggest problem i had was finding a reliable template for every new versions of Starbound to keep my mod playable and so that i could test out the assets.
So as it was the coding method was kept the same way for a very long time until they changed it one day. It infuriated me, because everything i did and tried did not work for my mod and since i couldn't test the assets i ended up not being able to do anything which kept me from working on the mod til this day. Not that i have much in it to finish the mod now that i have heard of this debacle.
RIP, that fucking stinks. All that hard work gone to waste.
@@carnage0685 I haven't exactly given up. I just don't feel inclined to do the work right now, because theres too many things i have to figure out before i even try to reboot the mod and given the time i don't have i don't see it happening anytime soon. Honestly i don't feel like contributing to a developer that exploits people to earn profits either. Had enough of that from EA already, but i do want to finish this project for my own fufillment and enjoyment. So theres that.
@@HFANTOM You can also just leave starbound and invest your time, energy and resources into your own indie game.
@@lifesymbiont5769 I had a thought about that and given what i have i could indeed make a game with the ideas i planned for this mod.
@@HFANTOM Some modding ideas I had as a kid also went into my own indie games I'll make in the future and already made. I wish you the best of luck.
I still am reeling from when the early versions had survival, and randomized content, but later versions changed survival to a tech on/ off switch. Rather it be a timed enabling (vs always on enabling) with looped grind for custom play experiences. Ex. Old versions required a constant need to make safe areas and base camps for warmth, and issues like acid rain or oxygen tanks were a timed resilience from some researched tech and farmed material instead of develop some tier then ignore everything before it with always on breath-everywhere-optimal-heat suits. Worlds then felt redundant because all risks were stripped away and new potential risks to see kept dwindling smaller and smaller. Was just window dressing and gameplay off/ on loops. THATS (imo) what removed pertinence for anything a mod could address.
Also miss when races weren’t bound to tech upgrades, and you knew what you’d see on a planet solely because that race was unlocked along with that tech.
I do love the npc quest system (with potential crew hires) because of the looped grind. Sorta re-created the looped grind for survival per planet. It was just incredibly shallow, which was exacerbated by the glass ceiling of possibilities allowed from limited quest trees; as well as the redundancy of structured quest form.
the removal of survival, and the addition of surface ores killed the game for me.
mining was so fun in alpha, then they added tons of ores to the surface and a guaranteed tech upgrade on the opposite side of the planet and there was no longer a need to go underground. just run around the planet, pick up ores, take the upgrade and repeat the same thing on another planet.
Yeah what I liked about early starbound was that the game felt like it was about surviving increasingly harsh environments and the random generation could throw any intersection of a thousand dangerous elements at you potentially all at once. They got rid of all that and then it’s like ok. What’s the point
It shows how much you care about this game while still understanding exactly where it fails. So great.
I remember that there were handcrafed outpost sidequests that they later removed for some reason. They were far more fun than all of that randomly generated junk we have now
randomly generated quests... you mean one of 3 quests which just pop up randomly from like 10 different NPCs in each village, and never end...
apparently villagers of all races across the universe need to learn not to hang out with bands of raiders to the east
My biggest problem with Starbound was that almost nothing feels special after the first time. There is no area or dungeon (besides the story missions) where you think, "oh, there must be some significance to this place, because it's in the game!" No, it's there because random generation, just like everything inside of it. It constantly reminds me that if I were to leave the planet and never return, I could find exactly everything in that dungeon, on some other planet, somewhere else. While I feel Terraria has a similar problem, it's feels less of an issue. Maybe because it feels more like a sandbox than a story? I dunno.
I feel like its because in terraria, despite all worlds having the "same" content, you spend much more time exploring and building and fighting and so you grow attached to it. In starbound, nothing gives you a real reason to spend time in one planet besides colonies (but even then the planet doesnt rreally matter). Heck, you probably spend more time in your ship and your starting planet is your warehouse for the random garbage and npcs you gathered, just like me.
Its this lack of actual value to a planet that makes it feel bland and expandable.
If at least some plznets had one resource in much higher quantities than the others on it, it would be somewhat worth to set mining outposts up.
In terraria, you have the context "this is *the* planet", while Starbound is "this is *one of thousands* of planets"
the procedural environments were better and more diverse in the beta than currently =\
I put a good bit into Starbound, I've seen all the generations and such a billion times. It's gotten to the point that I can go into certain generations and know where and what content is in a chest around 80 blocks away, at least in a few instances. I really wanted that cape that leaves rainbow sparkle particles everywhere you go because I thought the sparkles actually being an object on the ground was dope. You can find it on deserts with 6 rainbow wood trees in a mostly horizontal line that goes slightly uphill as you go to the right. Dig straight down between the first 2 trees until the 3rd cave (it's thin) and look left. :3 If you search online you can actually find specific coordinates for a planet with that generation on it, though it may be a bit hard to find the coordinates online since previous versions are shown as well. And apparently the entire universe that is the map is a static generation. The only thing that changes is your starting point. If you go to the GlaDOS cluster in one game or 500 games it's going to be 100% the same. Not seemingly 100%, ACTUALLY 100%. Which I'm fine with because I can know exactly where the Gucci loot is.
Tangent aside, I really like the game still. Vanilla or modded. Yeah it's got problems, unkept promises, a lot of beloved content that got removed, etc. Multiplayer is essentially broken most of the time too. Yet I still love it. On a conceptual level, this is perhaps my most favorite game ever, but I still shut people down from buying it because of that whole "not paying the staff" bs. I would absolutely love to have more people to play it with but if that is how you feel you can treat staff then I'd rather tell my friends to pirate the game than hand over their money to a cause like that.
I really wish I could help the game. Like honestly I do. I'll probably still be playing Starbound every once in a while 20 years from now. But one thing I have learned is I am not good at coding, at all. I can read it and understand it but me trying to write it is like trying to put out a grease fire by drowning the fire in more grease. Best use I could be is finding bugs and pointing them out to someone else, Sprite work, or conceptual design. On top of that there is another issue. Seeing as soon many people have contributed, and also left the development of the game, there's more than likely a lot of questions about "why did you do it this way instead of this way" that couldn't be answered and a lot of experiences that couldn't be shared along the development process. Trying to clean up what feels like spaghetti code, whether it is or isn't, can create even more problems than solutions too.
All in all, I hope that the past devs get rightful compensation, and not just from sympathetic people, but from their would-be employer. I feel like if he stepped down from the project and the previous team members came back then perhaps Starbound could become a wonderful thing again, but by now Starbound is probably just a terrible memory to most of the past team.
Maybe they could all come together and make Space-bound, the unofficial remake of it's legally distant ancestor. Maybe a group of fans that work in data mining and programming could make a clone that is simply better. Maybe I'm too optimistic. One things for sure: I love Poptops and I want Starbound to be done right.
I adore Starbound to no end and it hurt seeing the game and its community turn into a desolate wasteland. Starbound has just about my favorite world in all of fiction and they made a lifeless husk with it. I miss this game so much. No game will ever make me feel the way Starbound does. I can’t even go back and play it anymore because it hurts to do so.
Thank you for documenting all of this, it's still one of my favorite games despite everything going against it now. I've played and supported this game since the literal day it was open to their supporters on kickstarter (or wherever they funded it), and vividly remember all of the quirks and honestly lack of content alpha had.
I've used mods since they came out so I've tailored my playstyle and enjoyment from them, and honestly I'm scared to go back to vanilla and accept that vanilla is just a completely different game. I always have an itch (that I give into more times than not) every couple months or so to start up a new save-file with a few mods added or removed and try and do something fundamentally different from my last file.
A truly sad tale, but I can't come to dislike this game despite all it's failures. You've got yourself a subscriber. (This entire comment is scatterbrained; I cannot form a cohesive thought without spending hours of my time when it comes to things I am emotionally attached to. And by golly, I am emotionally attached to this game.)
There's honestly so much I want to talk about but it'd just be repeating all of the talking points on the video and reminiscing several of my save-files. Once again, great job.
Was a fan of this game since probably 2013 and witnessed it's decline, I've been waiting for a video like this for actual years. Thank you.
A phenomenal deconstruction of the bizarre directorial decisions that lead a game I'd backed and looked forward to for years into irrelevance, even in the face of a dedicated community.
I really want to see this game did great. It is MY favorite game after all, despite all the flaws. I really want to see someone picked up the pieces and make a better game, better development, better relationship between the player and the devs, and overall the better "Starbound" we deserve.
I honestly forget how Starbound as an unmodded game works because I've played with Frackin' Universe for the last few years and haven't looked back since
Hang on... Isn't "a game that has a lot of stuff missing but people have enough fun with it that they make mods to fix the issues they have with it" basically the idea behind Minecraft nowadays? Food for thought.
Great video! Your ideas for the game are amazing, and I would've loved if that's how the game actually was. It's funny that the "why explore when you can just buy it" thing runs so deep that I literally got a quest from an NPC to make a torch, I opened their shop GUI, bought a torch, and the quest advanced. They complimented my craftsmanship. It's the funniest thing that's happened to me in the game so far.
I love the PBG Hardcore reference (I still remember when that lag death happened, RIP Peebs), the Don't Starve reference (I've been obsessed with that game lately, wonder if it's thanks to a certain crossover, eh?), and the Diggy Diggy Hole reference when you were talking about mining!
I'm usually skeptical about anecdotes from people I don't know having issues with a more "public" figure. I've mostly learned my lesson about trusting random internet strangers. But if even Toby motherfucking Fox has issues with the developers and believes what everyone else is saying, then screw Chucklefish.
The creator of the Avali Triage mod, which adds a species called Avali to the game with a unique culture, architecture, apparel, weapons, and spaceship was asked by Chucklefish if he was willing to allow them to add the race to the base game, he asked what he will get in return and was told his name in the credits.... he turned that down immediately mod still exists btw...
That was not Avali Triage. Triage is the successor mod to the one Ryuu originally made. The reason Triage is a thing is partly because of this. Might have even caused a mass exodus of modders at the time to abandon the game if I remember correctly. It killed the modding scene for a while. By now it has finally recovered.
the problem with starbound summed by an Angry joe quote:
"As vast as an ocean, but the depth of a puddle."
A lot to explore, but all of it meaningless barring main story objectives.
damn, this is really good, you nailed a lot of the major issues I have with the game for sure.
When Starbound first came out I hated how the toolbar worked. About once a year I check out the game and ask "have they fixed the toolbar yet?" I force myself to play through the game a little farther each time. Not because it's better but because it takes longer to get to the first dungeon. I stop when I get to the boss fight. I realize that throughout this entire dungeon I've gone through, crazy space tech and all. My character has gotten nothing of value out of this place. Oh I may have gotten a pistol that does 1 point more damage and there's a Mcguffin unlock behind the boss. But it makes me miss Terraria and the artifacts you'd pull out of places that did different things, and the rare monster drops that were a happy surprise. So I go and play Terraria again with mods instead.
Obviously Starbound is AMAZING, you just havent realized it yet...
Every time you try it, you realize it sucks ass and makes you want to play the Better Version (Terraria) instead :V
Actually, there are many mods which modifies the crew and moons, just really because crew is useless and moons are boring.
Also, the economy isn't that simple: what is more sustentable? Buy fuel and ores (which are VERY expensive) or just go to the moon mine fuel and go to the underground mine the ores that you want?
But, after all, great (and underrated) video
Thanks! And yeah, the mods for crewmembers especially are great. My preferred one is Earth's Finest. Going back, I wish I had a section highlighting specific mods, since the Mod Workshop really is the game's greatest achievement.
Are there many mods for moons? In my research, I only found three (including the mod to remove the erchius ghosts).
@@TheGoodTrash Actually, there are, like less dead moons or even less dead moons (probably the ones that you found) and some other mods which the moon isn't the main point, but stills modifies it
I do wonder if, someday, the Starbound game engine could be made available for others to build their own games upon (much like with the Doom engine for example). Personally, I've always wondered what the game could've been like had the story focused more on colony management and terraforming planets over exploration (more akin to games such as Factorio), or if the game had a focus on procedurally-generated plots (more akin to Rimworld), with the player having to explore a procedurally-generated galaxy in order to complete various smaller procedurally-generated quests in order to progress through a much bigger overarching procedurally-generated storyline.
I think the best example of contextual generation is Dwarf Fortress, while it is still be developed, DF develops the context from the ground up, a cave doesn't just suddenly have some werebeast living in it, that person was born into this world and eventually got bit or invoked the ire of some god and was cursed to be like that and then they fled and ended up in that cave, there wasn't any short cut taken in making that story. I think in some sense contextual generation has to be made this way or you end up losing out on details, or at least you have to painstakingly think of them all up and code around them (Aka why does this guy have a grudge with some cult on the whole other side of the planet?).
On the topic of needing an ending, I don't think it does, it needs goals though since an ending is a goal but a goal doesn't have to be an ending. There could be plenty of personal goals for players that they choose to be their end, helped along by the game, and even if there is a main ending to the game it has to effect the world that you can continue to live in or it doesn't feel like it was worth anything. For example in a fantasy game having the Big Bad causing problems in the world that will end with that guy ends makes the story important, you didn't just get your "I saved the world" pin you see the effect, you see the town raided by the evil army can be rebuilt, the town that was occupied by that army doesn't suck to live in, and I don't know the castle of the guy is eerily quite now that all the enemies in it are gone. In a space game this might more be the theme of the galactic threat that was spreading to... stop that, no more tentacles trying to grab the planet I have my base on please.
I really trailed off on that last one, think I was just rambling to myself about stuff I feel passionate about.
I feel like with all this list, something's missing and that is what killed Starbound for me: work/reward ratio. So much stuff takes ages for so little rewards. Mining is painful because of how many ores you need for a bar and how many bars for anything (looking at you rails) and the ore detector being a high tier thing. To compare, terraria has the spelunking potion which makes it still annoying but more of a small chore. Plus you find other stuff along the way. Here its just pain pain and pain. Rarely found any "big" deposits, which could've been a nice addition tbh: planets richer in a certain resource, making you set up mines and such.
Farming doesnt feel like a viable way to get money (or at least to me) and withour mods for space or ceiling sprinklers, its just stupid. Theres cargo trading with space stations so why not do that with crops around the cosmos? To compare with terraria again, their only farming thing is plants for potion and wood. But the potions are so good, necessary on expert and higher difficulties, you need a plant farm (and fishes). But it doesnt require water or sun or a lot of space.
Another thing is space travel taking years and overall boring. Click buttons. Wow. The bounty hunter thing is ruined by that one thing, just having to spend 80% of the mission waiting in your ship.
I feel like this is one of the main issues with the game.
I wish chucklefish studio wasnt braindeadfish studio and actually took gamedev and their junior devs seriously, or the community's advices.
There's a huge rumor about a puppy the team adopted but suddenly got replaced and any talk or question about it was immediately suppressed on their forums. They said the puppy may have died because they put it's bed really close to a lot of electric cables, according to some pictures of it.
I sometimes boot up _Starbound_ just to listen to the menu music. The soundtrack to this game is absolutely phenomenal.
I still play Starbound to this day religiously; it's more fun with friends when you ignore the lore and nuances and just have mindless fun in it's sandbox and vast universe. I remember playing it a while ago with a friend back when I first heard of it's launch, it was a great experience since we had no idea what we were dipping ourselves into. It was a great time seeing cool things for the first time and having those "wow" moments.
It's really only in a playable state with mods, they're the only things keeping it from being a stale, wilted husk of a game that could have been.
I really think the main problem is that they just kinda added stuff and then never really went back to it, like their is so much to do yet no depth to any of it.
loved the video man, this game has been really fun, but I get lost in imagining what it could be with more dev time and effort. Nice presentation - keep it up!!
When I look at you i think of my репis
It's impressive to me that terraria's sandbox is effectively one world that is book-ended by oceans, and somehow each playthrough in that feels more expansive and unique than each of my Starbound playthroughs.
Man as a longtime Starbound player I have to say you freaking nailed it dude. So glad I stumbled across this, looking forward to what else you make ^^
This is truly one of the best videos about Starbound ever made. You have a real talent for the longform UA-cam documentary too!
I got this game pre-alpha. To the point where I'm one of the folks in the credits. It's lack of a release and delays was SO freaking disappointing... then the LONG delayed beta release itself was even more disappointing. So many promises were broken that I lost track! This was literally the first game that made me rethink preordering, even if I believe in a project.
I don't think I've played the game without modding since a few weeks after release and there is no way I'd ever go back to a non-modded play. I tried it once and I just couldn't bring myself to hit play.
Thank you so much for putting this together! You've absolutely earned a sub and a bell ring from me. I look forward to seeing what you'll make next!
It felt to me like Starbound didn't have a clear direction in mind during development. The alpha / beta saw really pivotal features being added and removed and added again. For instance, the first temperature system would cause you to slowly freeze to death or overheat based on a thermometer, but the implementation was quite frankly bollocks so they scrapped it, then later used a similar concept as one of the planet access gates.
are we just going to forget the alpha temperature system? i loved the idea of having different armors stored in my spaceship for extremely cold or extremely hot planets.
back when we still had underground biomes i found this flesh biome in many different planets and i formed my own story about why this is spread across the entire galaxy, and that we maybe could summon bosses in these flesh biomes, terraria style. this game had so much potential, but the devs didn't even understand their own game. Tiy calling himself a terraria dev and using this as advertisement for starbound should be criminal. he did nothing more than copying a few licensed weapons into terraria, and it shows. he can't design his own sprites, he can't design a game, he can't lead a team, heck he can't even PAY his team.
Which weapons.
Good video, was definitely worth staying up until 1AM for. I think Starbound is probably really fun for the first playthrough, but by the time you’ve beaten the Ruin, there’s not much else to do. Also the optimization getting someone killed like in PBG’s case isn’t even the worst that can happen, it really sucks and I’m dumbfounded on how my computer runs it better than everything else I boot up.
I’m interested in talking more about this over discord if you have the time, I should be available via the FU server.
To this day i still play modded starbound and i still love it, maybe im blinded by nostalgia but i remember staying up so late in high school listening to lofi and playing this game. It just has such a nice relaxing tone
In the term "It's funny because it's true," this is the funniest video I have ever watched
Thanks. I guess the joke's on me :T
@@TheGoodTrash Perhaps, but in all seriousness, this is a video that I really wanted someone to make: an analysis and explanation of all of Starbound's many issues and what it could have been had its wasted potential been realized. I even learned some things about the game that I didn't already know, and if anyone ever questions my opinion that Starbound is not a very good game right now, I'll definitely refer them to this video
I think that games like Starbound, ones that are kept on life-support by their active mod communities, have a duty to step back and only make changes that enable that community. You mentioned that the mod support for the game is limited to the Asset system. Instead of adding a content patch that breaks a bunch of mods, simply exposing more of the game's mechanics to modders would allow the already successful mod community to continue their work. That's what the entire thing was built on right? Free content thrown into the game by passionate fans? Instead of doing it in a shady way behind the scenes, be proud of your community and work to support their efforts by ONLY exposing more of the game's internals. The game was built on the backs of what were effectively content mods by "contributors". The least you can do is carry that forward.
egosoft does this since years
This is a wonderful video that goes really intricately into a game that totally benefits from having an explanation like this going into the depths of the process of this game! Great watch, and amazing job!
I found a bug in the game where I didn't even bother having to pay pixels at the shop for fuel. Just pick up some fuel, travel to a ocean planet, dig underneath the ocean, and then build what is essentially a giant plinko machine.
Turns out, when a liquid tries to enter a tile that already has some liquid in it, it will be blocked from entering that tile. This causes some fun stuff where you can have a layer of erchius fuel under a layer of water under a layer of erchius fuel. BUT, if you try to pour a tiny amount of liquid into a pool of erchius fuel, it just so happens that the game will combine the smaller liquid into the larger liquid. Basically, all liquids are transmutable into other liquids in Starbound, so long as you have some of the target liquid.
Erchius fuel is a liquid. Water is a liquid. What place has a lot of water? Ocean planets.
Infinite power for spaceships, unlimited erchius fuel. Just add water.
You know whats interesting about the child labor portion? Dawn Felstar (assuming female, not sure), owner of the Starbound discord, started up a porn channel which had kids in it. Claiming kids couldn't access it, but also made it so you can gain access by typing "?18" anywhere. I saw several 15 year olds in the channel. People who told me how old they were in DMs. I protested the channel, so she banned me permanently on that one singular thing claiming that was my third strike (first two strikes were one harmless joke people found funny including her at the time).
So to me, this felt like Chucklefish had a pedophile in their community running everything. Chucklefish told me Dawn was not an employee, and yet, Dawn also had me banned from Chucklefish's main discord too because I had forced Dawn, to remove the porn channel after my ban by going to discord devs about it which forced the deletion of it.
I was told later that the porn was still a thing there, in the main discord where children go to play and talk about the game. I still have a screenshot of the argument involving the porn channel and Dawn telling me it wasn't going to be removed.
I was a modder way back, but after the above, and the fact that Frackin Universe devs stole what they wanted any time they wanted and would not be punished for it in any way, I lost all faith in the game ever getting better. I lost interest in it, and stopped playing entirely years ago.
Damn that's fucked.
Never been to the Starbound discord, but I am in one for another game being "published" by Chucklefish. The same mod team, including Dawn Felstar, is present in that one as well. They always did strike me as rather odd. Thankfully I haven't seen any signs that they have a secret porn channel there, though.
Yeah, I actually really miss the Alpha version of the game a lot. The procedural generation of monsters and planets were my biggest draws to the game, seeing things that nobody had ever seen before and exploring parts unknown. Now every planet looks like every other planet of the same kind, and by the time you visit any world you'll already have the exact type of backpack you need to make the unique challenges of that planet redundant. Going to a no-oxygen planet? Here's a backpack that lets you breathe forever. Going to a cold planet? A warm pack to let you never freeze. Gone are the days of cowering beside a fire to keep warm as a swarm of blood-spewing locusts with turtle shells peck away at a two tile thick wall. Gone are the days of never knowing what type of biome you'll find when you go underground. Everything looks the same, and all the quests are so 'unique' they're boring. After your first playthrough, you're done. There's nothing more to see. It's no longer a sandbox, but an adventure game. And a pretty poor one at that, since the sandbox systems are there to let you cheese progression in a hundred different ways. Rather sad, that. When it first came out, Starbound was on track to be my favorite game. Just, ever. But bit by bit, they added and removed features that just made it more tedious, less fun. I still like the game, sure, but the progression tree is kind of a joke, and the story arc is so tedious as to be unrewarding when it's finally completed. A lot of potential, dashed against the rocks.
Plus the whole 'free labor' thing, apparently. Forgot about that for a while. Pretty shit, innit?
Starbound had so much potential it’s sad it ended :(
haven't really played starbound all that much but I love a good video essay, excited to see whats next
Maybe it was just me only discovering starbound a year ago and I would probably have a different bias if i played it during alpha but the game became my favorite pc game of all time, yet its not because of the changes that were made, but whatever thats left of the original concept of the survival/sandbox aspect, the building aspect of the game is absurdly huge that i couldnt run out of any ideas when it comes to building colonies
I've read forums, reddit posts and videos on why they dropped starbound but honestly most of them pointed towards them not liking the idea of an infinite survival sandbox game and all I've seen are comparisons on the rpg aspects between starbound and terraria, the bossfighting and the narrative of the main campaign, while i do understand that it might be important for some players, but in my personal experience, thats not the only part of the game, its a game of patience, creativity and time. The people who complained about the game were more likely to speedrun the game than to spend their time with it, maybe thats a bad thing for a game, but i've loved the endless cycle of things you can do in a game.
I leveled the top layer of a small planet. Then replaced as far as you can pan down with asphalt. It was really rewarding tbh