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Starbound Beta Thread - Begins December 4th!

They said the game would come out in 2013 initially, so no, its not really your fault.

Well, it's more my fault for believing them.

Catching up on the thread and I'm sad to see hunger gone. May have to wait even after launch for mods and whatnot before I start playing. But I'll be damned if I don't get excited every time I see this thread bumped.
 
Wow the new stuff is great! Just finished the beginning part and it's much smoother and a better tutorial than before. The quest system was really needed. Hope there's more quests out there.

The unbreakable blocks/bases are pretty cool. Prevents cheating. I had to go through an Apex course legit and barely made it out using a lot of bandages.

Also, do Novakids not eat? Never had to eat the whole time.
 
i know i shouldn't hold my breath waiting for a vita port anytime soon but honestly, the vita was the only way i enjoyed terraria
I'm there with ya. I recently bought it for the PS4...but have yet to try it out there. Still, the Vita was perfect for it, and I couldn't get enough of it. If only we Vitapeeps could get Starbound, it would be *so* good :(
:O
 
So is the game lag free again? When it first released I could play it fine on os x and windows. But when I tried to play it last month I would get lots of frame rate drops on both systems. Especially in full screen (windowed works a bit better for some reason). I really enjoyed the game but I can't stand the drops. So I'd be very happy if those where gone.

I even reinstalled windows the last time because I thought my setup killed itself somehow.
 
Wait wait, they removed hunger?! If so, THANK GOD! That shit was so annoying, especially since I was playing as the glitch, why the hell would a robot need to eat
 
When I played along with a friend, hunger was more of an annoyance (having to remember to stock up on a ton of cooked meat or whatever) and exploring/building/collecting/working together was the fun part.

Some people probably do like a difficult hunger/survival mechanism, and maybe a specific survival difficulty mode is the best option so both kinds of players can be happy.
 
So is the game lag free again? When it first released I could play it fine on os x and windows. But when I tried to play it last month I would get lots of frame rate drops on both systems. Especially in full screen (windowed works a bit better for some reason). I really enjoyed the game but I can't stand the drops. So I'd be very happy if those where gone.

I even reinstalled windows the last time because I thought my setup killed itself somehow.
They haven't optimized yet, and probably won't until stable, I'd guess.

I am confused watching a stream is the update stuff (or most of it) on unstable or nightly?
It's on both. The nightly is still happening. Unstable is just probably a bit more stable than the nightly.
 
According to the AMA on Reddit, unstable saves should work with the stable update. Tiy recommends starting from fresh though, so I think I'll wait a few more weeks.

Hopefully early January we get stable.
 
Wow the new stuff is great! Just finished the beginning part and it's much smoother and a better tutorial than before. The quest system was really needed. Hope there's more quests out there.

The unbreakable blocks/bases are pretty cool. Prevents cheating. I had to go through an Apex course legit and barely made it out using a lot of bandages.

Also, do Novakids not eat? Never had to eat the whole time.

Yes, there are more quests.

Novakids aren't the only one; hunger was removed as a mechanic, food is now exclusively used for buffs.

Wait, the survival elements and deadly planets were removed? Those were some of the best things about the game :(

There are still deadly planets, ones that are too hot, too cold, radioactive, etc.

Even if I think there were ways to implement it so as to avoid being annoying, I will at least concede that hunger could be a bit boring after a certain point.
 
Yes, there are more quests.

Novakids aren't the only one; hunger was removed as a mechanic, food is now exclusively used for buffs.



There are still deadly planets, ones that are too hot, too cold, radioactive, etc.

Even if I think there were ways to implement it so as to avoid being annoying, I will at least concede that hunger could be a bit boring after a certain point.
Oh, I thought I had read comment on another page that those had been removed or at least diminished?

But the removal of survival elements like hunger is annoying
 
I won't retread my post because I feel like I've said the same thing like 6 times already in various forums, but having a way to "automate" the hunger system so that it starts out as a persistent concern but eventually becomes a non-issue when you become established in the game. In the same way that primitive humans had to devote hours to finding food just to survive but modern humans just microwave frozen burritos. The next logical step would be ultra-nutritious pills or drinks, followed by a technological solution where the need to eat simply no longer exists.

/shrug. I feel like food being just for buffs is a bit boring and takes the agricultural progression system out at the knees, but we'll see what happens. Still early in the game.
 
Yes, there are more quests.

Novakids aren't the only one; hunger was removed as a mechanic, food is now exclusively used for buffs.

There are still deadly planets, ones that are too hot, too cold, radioactive, etc.

Even if I think there were ways to implement it so as to avoid being annoying, I will at least concede that hunger could be a bit boring after a certain point.

I thought hunger was quite annoying when I just wanted to hang out and play music.

I would say this is a good thing, but they could easily make it a mode.
 
Do they still erase your character's data? I've went into hibernation for the past year for hoping for the game to be stable when I came out (which is just now)
 
Unstable is my first time playing the game since last December and I'm really impressed with the changes so far. I'm not far enough in yet to see anything too dramatic, but the combat already feels more substantial than it did a year ago. I'm going to check it out some more.
 
Combat definitely favours shields, but you could go 2hand and chug bandages.

I got to the 5th tier of ore and I'm not really sure if the three types of work tables have much difference (Seperator's, Manipulator's...).

I do like the mission level idea. Terraria and pre-update Starbound just let you build blocks to beat bosses. It's better if you can't cheat like that. I guess like Terraria's hell boss.
 
So I caved and started playing this again. I even got a server set up for friends to play on at gameservers.com. My question is, if I want to go to the nightly build, is there a tutorial somewhere on how to set that up on a hosted server?
 
So I played Elite Dangerous all weekend and didn't play anything else at all, lol. I Didn't even realize the unstable for Starbound had patched up until this morning or I might have divided my game time up.

Guess I'll need to update my game tonight and try it out!
 
So I played Elite Dangerous all weekend and didn't play anything else at all, lol. I Didn't even realize the unstable for Starbound had patched up until this morning or I might have divided my game time up.

Guess I'll need to update my game tonight and try it out!

SO JEALOUSSSSS!!111
 
I played this like a year ago (when it came out in early access) and played for about a week and stopped .
All I can say is WOW game is so much better the progression quest the tools the graphics the weather actually everything is so much better and nicer !

This with Elite:Dangerous my scifi needs is gonna be ok for a while :P
 
So I'm having an issue trying to get onto the unstable branch. I can't get past the "requires update" stage. The update shows 784.9MB/784.9MB downloaded, but I still can not play. It just shows Update Required with the only option being to move it to the top of the queue and then it downloads again and still shows it needs an update. I've tried restarting steam/ my pc, deleting and re-downloading, deleting files and validating cache, just nothing seems to work. If I launch using starbound.exe it just loads up the last stable build. When I delete everything and try to just download the unstable branch I don't even get a starbound.exe. Has anyone run into this and found a solution?

Edit: I'm not sure if it is related or if something else happened one of the times I've restarted my machine, but it is working now. I'm on my development machine and had switched to Java 8 trying to get my project to work in that. I just switched back to Java 7 for another project and starbound is now working on the unstable branch.
 
I played this a few times over the holidays and I'm heavily disappointed. I don't really feel they've fixed any of the issues I had with the original game. It just feels like bad/sloppy game design relying on procedural generation for the content.

Firstly, I was under the impression that the combat system had been remade. Maybe it's partly because I haven't played it since February but to me it plays exactly the same as before. Combat in this game never gets interesting, it's just a meaningless chore. What's even worse is the risk/reward, which I thought they'd tune but no.. still get pennies for fighting while risking large amounts of your money. The only game play driving function it actually serves is as a means to get food.. which is another awful system. It's annoying and it detracts from the experience of playing the game.

Planets while a bit more varied are still boring. I'm never excited by anything I see in this game. In contrast when starting up minecraft which I've had since 2010 I still feel that awe and amazement when discovering impressive landscapes and vistas. I don't know if it's a limitation of 2D, but I feel that in a game about exploring space and planets the planets have to be really interesting for it to work.

The progression system of getting to "higher level" planets to mine better minerals is repetitive and lazy.

Building stuff is never satisfying because you're always looking to leave relatively soon anyway. We've played 4-5 on a server and we've never been able to keep a developed home planet because the game design works against it.

Performance is still horrible(worse?). Since it's still in beta, I can kinda understand this, but it's still an annoyance.

I get the feeling people are fooled by stuff like cute and cozy pixel graphics, endless procedural worlds and "space" when in reality the core game mechanics are poorly designed and doesn't make for a good game.

I said almost exactly the same things one year ago when reflecting on my experience with the game and I'm disappointed that after a year of waiting nothing noteworthy has changed/improved.

Sorry for the long rant, but this game angers me. It did teach me a valuable lesson on buying early access though.
 
I played this a few times over the holidays and I'm heavily disappointed. I don't really feel they've fixed any of the issues I had with the original game. It just feels like bad/sloppy game design relying on procedural generation for the content.

Firstly, I was under the impression that the combat system had been remade. Maybe it's partly because I haven't played it since February but to me it plays exactly the same as before. Combat in this game never gets interesting, it's just a meaningless chore. What's even worse is the risk/reward, which I thought they'd tune but no.. still get pennies for fighting while risking large amounts of your money. The only game play driving function it actually serves is as a means to get food.. which is another awful system. It's just annoying, it only detracts from the experience of playing the game.
I'm confused by this. I thought others said that the food system had been removed, and is going to only be used for buffs in the future? Is that what you are talking about?
 
I'm confused by this. I thought others said that the food system had been removed, and is going to only be used for buffs in the future? Is that what you are talking about?

now that I think about it yeah maybe you are right. sorta embarrassing to admit, but it's been a week since I played and I can't really remember whether it was necessary or not. I just remember eating a lot of food.

there's also a lot of minor stupid design decision which hopefully will be fixed. pick axes breaking within like 10 seconds.. why do I have to wait for so long to regain oxygen after swimming? stuff like that. I didn't bring stuff like that up in the post above because I expect them to make a polishing pass on these things before releasing the game proper.
 
now that I think about it yeah maybe you are right. sorta embarrassing to admit, but it's been a week since I played and I can't really remember whether it was necessary or not. I just remember eating a lot of food.

there's also a lot of minor stupid design decision which hopefully will be fixed. pick axes breaking within like 10 seconds.. why do I have to wait for so long to regain oxygen after swimming? stuff like that. I didn't bring stuff like that up in the post above because I expect them to make a polishing pass on these things before releasing the game proper.

Several of the problems you've mentioned were addressed in a blog post 2 days ago.

Concerning the whole food issue though, it was taken out, but as stated in the blog post, they're gonna put it back in (they're just not happy with how they had implemented it in the first place)
 
I played this a few times over the holidays and I'm heavily disappointed.

Check this out
http://playstarbound.com/were-back/

A bunch of your concerns make me feel like you haven't played Terraria. They have a lot in common obviously.

Sorry for the long rant, but this game angers me. It did teach me a valuable lesson on buying early access though.

Well yeah, the game is still in development. They put things and see if it works. They are realistically not even in late Alpha stages as they are still building big features.

If you don't buy into the concept and trust the developer, then never buy Early Access or Kickstarter. I think they are doing a fine job atm and doing good improvements.

now that I think about it yeah maybe you are right. sorta embarrassing to admit, but it's been a week since I played and I can't really remember whether it was necessary or not. I just remember eating a lot of food.

there's also a lot of minor stupid design decision which hopefully will be fixed. pick axes breaking within like 10 seconds.. why do I have to wait for so long to regain oxygen after swimming? stuff like that. I didn't bring stuff like that up in the post above because I expect them to make a polishing pass on these things before releasing the game proper.

Pickaxes are no longer the main way of mining. It's all about the matter manipulator. I'm sure pickaxes and drills will be tweaked somehow. They probably left them in until they remove them completely or find another use.
 
I played this a few times over the holidays and I'm heavily disappointed..

Can I ask what build of the game you're playing? I just want to make sure you're on the unstable branch with the changes we've made. You mentioned stuff like having to eat food, which has been removed from nightlies/unstable for quite a while now.

But yeah, you're playing a game that's actively in development. There's going to be some placeholderish stuff and some things aren't as fun as we'd like them to be. We're working on it.
 
Can I ask what build of the game you're playing? I just want to make sure you're on the unstable branch with the changes we've made. You mentioned stuff like having to eat food, which has been removed from nightlies/unstable for quite a while now.

But yeah, you're playing a game that's actively in development. There's going to be some placeholderish stuff and some things aren't as fun as we'd like them to be. We're working on it.

I'm on the unstable branch. About the food thing I think I mixed things up/didn't think about what I was writing. I think I ate a lot of food to heal and my criticism of the (now changed) food system was probably old memories playing tricks on me when writing the post.
With that said, I still feel disappointed. Not really by the bugs and incompleteness but rather in that I don't see a path for this game becoming fun for me. I hope I'm wrong, but the big patch that came out last month only reaffirmed my previous stance on starbound.

Anyway, I wish you best luck on the development side of things and hopefully you guys will be able to prove me wrong in a not too distant future.


Check this out
http://playstarbound.com/were-back/

A bunch of your concerns make me feel like you haven't played Terraria. They have a lot in common obviously.
No I haven't played it. Maybe if I had I'd be able to see some potential I've so far been oblivious about but after all this time I expect the game to stand on its own.

Well yeah, the game is still in development. They put things and see if it works. They are realistically not even in late Alpha stages as they are still building big features.

If you don't buy into the concept and trust the developer, then never buy Early Access or Kickstarter. I think they are doing a fine job atm and doing good improvements.
Yeah well, I'm not going to say that I never will buy EA again - Prison Architect for example has been an amazing EA experience to the point that I don't even care whether the game is still in alpha, beta or near complete - but I'll make sure to do proper research on the game/team in the future.
 
No I haven't played it.(Terraria) Maybe if I had I'd be able to see some potential I've so far been oblivious about but after all this time I expect the game to stand on its own.


Wow, you bought Starbound but never played Terraria?

I have over 200 hours played on Terraria, and I think Starbound is already just as good. It's not as fleshed out in some regards, but it's much better in other ways. This game is going to eat so much of my time...
 

What the hell. This dude is randomly generated?!

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Your coders and animators are wizards... O_o
 
Supernorn, does this mean Starbound is officially "released" and out of Beta then? Because if so... i have an Official Thread to put together pretty quickly here.
 
Supernorn, does this mean Starbound is officially "released" and out of Beta then? Because if so... i have an Official Thread to put together pretty quickly here.

New stable =/= 1.0

I'd imagine there's a fair amount left to do on the overall progression front before they're going to be comfortable in saying that Starbound is "released."
 
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