It's round-up time! Here are some of our most recent dev blog posts.
A Very Merry 2015 Round-Up
This post was a long summary of stuff we did last year! Click
here for the full post.
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5th January - It Belongs in a Museum!
Starbound 1.0 draws nearer and nearer! Remember fossils? Pretty soon you should be able to dig em up in the nightly. Fossil assets have been in the game for quite awhile, but players havent really been able to do anything with them.
Were also working on putting survival mode back in the game, which means that *certain features* will be making a return. But more on that later! Heres a screenshot of the fossil mini-game in action (the UI is a work in progress!).
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7th January - We Have a T-Rex
Hey everyone!
Following up on Tuesdays post, we thought wed shed a little more light on the fossil system.
The new Fossil Station lets you craft stands for fossils and tools for excavation. Lets go looking for some! Youll have to search underground if you want to find any, of course.
Looks like weve come across some skeletal remains! Use the tools from the Fossil Station to excavate them, which is done with the minigame we showed off in the last post.
We found a T-Rex skull?! How come there are T-Rexes on distant alien planets anyway? No time for questions, lets display this in our museum!
There are three different stand types for three different size categories of fossils. To complete some fossils youll need to find multiple parts. Some fossils might be familiar to you but others will be totally alien, like many things in the Starbound universe! Im sure that there are people who would be willing to pay a pretty penny for a completed skeleton, too. Better get digging, then!
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13th January - My Backpack is Augmented
Hey everyone! After some site wide maintenance, were back online. Theres lots of progress to report so lets get straight to it.
Environmental Protection Packs
Armagon has been working on a more satisfying replacement for the nano-skins, that provide protection against the range of biome hazards. Not only are these new wearable protection packs craftable, you can customise them with augmentations that bestow the player with useful buffs. They can also be used in conjunction with your Techs!
Survival Mode
As you might know, Metadept has been working hard on the reimplementation of hunger. Youll be able to enable this by selecting the new Survival Mode option at the character creation screen. Its a heavy work in progress right now, but we have a basic implementation working in-game.
A hunger bar appears beneath the players energy bar, and will slowly deplete over time. When the bar is empty, youll start suffering from a starvation status effect which will begin to drain your health. In order to keep you on your toes, and hinder those whod stock an infinite supply of food in their inventories, food will slowly rot and become inedible over time.
- Player pets are not only capturable, but youll be able to do a lot with them! (Therell be more on that soon!)
- Necotho and GeorgeV have completed work on the new Tier 6 Scorched City biome
- Work on fossils continues, with many new fossils to discover!
- A lot of work is continuing into the story content and missions (but not much can be revealed right now).
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15th January - Collar Duty: Advanced Warfur
Happy Friday!
Tccoxon has been working on a set of pet collars that work much like the EPP augmentations. When you obtain a pet collar, you can right-click on a filled capture pod to place it on that pet.
The type of collar effects range from stat-boosts to damage, health boosts, light generating and even elemental type effects. Theres also the oblivious collar which makes your pet invulnerable but non-aggressive, so you can have a completely passive pet.
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18th January - Tech Support
Hey everyone!
Metadepts work on the new hunger system continues, but hes also been spending some time overhauling techs! Heres whats happening with the new tech system:
Tech has been reduced to three tech slots (from four). Each of these slots will carry a base tech that the player is guaranteed to unlock over the course of progression. The three base techs are Double Jump, Distortion Sphere, and Dash.
Once a base tech is unlocked, youll be able to choose from three upgraded variants of it, and unlock each of them via tech card. Although youll still only be able to equip one variant at a time.
The reasoning behind this change is due to player behavior tending to sway towards a few specific techs. This is mostly down to many of the alternatives being very situational, with players not wanting to sacrifice important movement abilities in exchange for something more specialised.
The solution to this has been to take the most popular techs and give them more interesting variants, without the sacrifice of losing the functionality of the base tech.
Combined with the new augmentation system discussed last week, you can pull off some seriously powerful moves. Heres an example of two upgraded techs in action, the Sonic Sphere and Wall Jump:
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20th January - Monkey Business
Weve been working on missions for the final game! Heres a little look at the start of an upcoming mission looks kind of intense. What do you think itll be about?
This weeks community-run
Build of the Week theme is Crash Sites, and there have already been some really really cool submissions. Heres a crashed freighter from ElvenCourage!
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22nd January - Broom for Improvement
We have talked a little bit about the re-addition of hunger in Survival Mode, which is exciting! There are a lot of different difficulty parameters hunger, allowing players to beam up from underground, items dropped on death, how much it costs to revive your character, and permadeath. Regardless of how we configure Starbounds three difficulty modes some players will prefer a different set-up, so to that end Metadept has made all of the modes moddable. Heres what that looks like!
Keep in mind that what you see there now isnt necessary what the default settings will look like in the final game its just how its configured right now.
In other news, this character is wielding a broom. Why are they wielding a broom? Whats the significance of the broom? Where are they? Whats going onnnnnnnnn?