Anyone else playing the Starbound beta? The game is basically Terraria across multiple planets, where players start on one planet, exhaust it, and then move onto the next. Once rented servers area available, it might be fun to get a SDMB server going…
Are the graphics really like 80s Atari games? I like the premise, but those screenshots on the “About” page are…not inspiring.
Yes, the graphics are like that, similar to Terraria. The simple 2D sprites allows them concentrate resources on gameplay, so there’s a lot more depth than, say, Minecraft.
Interesting. I like Terraria but have grown tired of it, will pick this up later.
I’ll do the same - not a big fan of playing betas. I got tired of Terraria already in version 1.0 and when they added tons of stuff in 1.1 and 1.2 I could never bother to play all the way to the new things. It does look good on the Let’s Play videos I’ve watched.
I’ve been watching it for about a year now waiting for it to go through development. But I just discovered Terraria’s patch 1.2, so I’m playing through that, and will wait to get Starbound until I get bored with Terraria again.
I played it a bit last night. I died quite a bit, which wasn’t a big deal, but I got the quest to find iron and kind of tuckered out after looking forever. I know, I know, dig deeper. The problem is digging feels so goddamn slow in this compared to Terraria. It’s somewhat made up for by the fact that you can break 4 blocks at once, but not nearly enough.
Same problem here with the iron. The devs posted on r/starbound last night that iron wasn’t spawning at the correct rate. The latest patch should fix that.
Couldn’t resist and bought it, since it’s pretty much the exact kind of game I would enjoy. I loved Terraria, but mostly for the exploration. After a few hours, Starbound seems pretty solid, but the pacing isn’t great and the planets feel like they should have more stuff happening on them. The crafting doesn’t feel like it’s all there yet, either, and I’ve only run across one new blueprint.
It feels like it’s going to be a great game, and I will certainly be putting more time into it in the coming days. If you’re not craving Terraria-alike right now though, I would suggest holding off for awhile or until full release.
Agreed. I wanted to jump in on early to help test and influence the development process, but for people just looking for a great time, it’s not quite there yet. Starbound has a lot of potential but the balance is off right now and not all mechanics are fully fleshed out. It’s playable, certainly, but not ideal. A few months more work would make it much better.
If you haven’t played through Terraria’s 1.2 patch yet, do that first 
Well, since Terraria is basically a 2-D version of Minecraft, I suppose this game must be 2-D Minecraft in spaaaace.
Based on the YT vids I’ve watched, I concur that mining & stuff appears to be really farkin’ slow. The “matter manipulator” tool also seems awkward and counter-intuitive. But in other respects it does look fun, so I’ll keep an eye on it.
Exactly what it is, except with bosses and mechs and lasers.
They have just begun balancing and already mining is easier to find things now. And it goes a lot faster once you make your first pickaxe (10 to 15 minutes into the game). The matter manipulator isn’t really used after the first half hour of gameplay except as a lore mechanism to say “How is that you can float this random block of dirt over your head and place it there?! Oh, you have this fancy gadget that can manipulate matter in its beam.”
Yeah, I saw that it was still in beta. In fact, the main thing that keeps me from buying it right now is the likelihood of future updates erasing all your characters & worlds…according to Zisteau’s Let’s Play, that is.
There are still a few things that make me go 
– like, you can only get meat from animals by killing them with a bow, instead of a sword? I don’t get the logic behind that.
I note that according to the devs, the next patch in a few days will probably “require a character reset”.
Me neither, but it doesn’t have a big impact on gameplay one way or the other. Also, beta is the time to let them know about these things. They’re already making huge changes to the game based on user feedback. This isn’t some big-name MMO that charges you for a “beta” and then just ignores all the feedback. It’s a small team that’s been EXTREMELY responsive, so much so that I wish all other development groups would learn from them. They’re listening to forum posts and producing patches with asked-for changes in a day or two. That alone makes me feel like they’re worth supporting, whatever state the game may be in now.
Yep. And it’ll probably keep happening. It’s an old-school kind of beta, one where you’re actually testing a game in development and helping to improve it, not just paying for an early play. Character wipes will probably happen and keep happening, at least until a later stage of testing.
I don’t understand, why would character wipes even be necessary? It’s merely a case of keeping intact your character stats and inventory, which I’d assume would be easy to do even if the code gets completely reworked. I still play my original Minecraft world from way back in early alpha.
What worries me is if they announce character wipes are over, then later suddenly say, “Oops! We found a problem, gotta start from scratch again.” That’s probably gonna put me off buying the game for quite some time.
There are tons of reasons character wipes may or may not be necessary. One potential big reason is that it seems (from my testing) that your character may be tied to your world in single player, and forcing a character wipe forces beta testers to use the new world generation mechanics. Same things for things like stats and the like, it may be better to force players to play with the new rules than devise a scheme to convert old characters to the new rules.
There are other reasons too, and a lot of it depends on how they do their serialization. If they change the representation of an item, or how stats are computed, they may just want to devote their time to fixing content rather than writing a tool that converts old data into new data. (It kind of depends how it’s represented and saved internally, though).
Minecraft didn’t have any wipes after alpha was relatively stable, but that’s largely because Notch didn’t want to. Even when Notch converted his save format, he made sure to write a tool that converted old saves into the new format. But it’s really a matter of preference, I commend Notch for doing that, but I also don’t hold it against the Starbound devs for deciding there are better uses of their time.
I’ve been watching a few videos online, and this game makes absolutely no sense to me. So you have spaceships, but you have to teleport down to a planet surface to personally mine it for iron? And you have matter manipulators but you have to craft a bow and arrow to hunt? And pickaxes to dig faster?
Clearly you’ve never enjoyed the pleasure of beating down a tree with your fist. 
From what I’ve gathered, the character you play is some sort of exile who stole the ship. When you enter the first system you run out of fuel. So you have to survive with what you got instead of going to a SpaceMart and buying whatever hi-tech marvels you want.