Starbound is a game about escaping from your homeworld on a spaceship and starting your life anew. We want to allow players as much creative freedom as possible in shaping their own stories and characters while still providing them with a bit of history.

Now when you create a new character in Starbound, you'll get a short comic-style cinematic that should give you some insight as to why people of each of our seven races might want to pack up and leave home!

Legris has been working on the art for these scenes, and we'll try to keep showing you sneak peeks as things progress!

A lot of you have been sending us voice clips to audition to narrate these opening cinematics, too, and so many of them have been awesome, so thanks!

We maaay or may not have landed someone for the role...more on that later! ;)

Another thing we've been working on recently is our cooking mechanic. Each race will start out with its own lore-friendly menu of recipes-- entrees, side dishes, desserts, snacks, drinks-- but eventually you'll be able to learn to cook other races' food too! Not sure why you'd want to swap a burrito for a Glitch's automato soup, but the option is there! Can't guarantee Avian food will agree with Human stomachs, either...

You'll craft food at culinary tables, from produce, meat and other ingredients that you can harvest yourself, buy in a shop, or trade for. The more rare and expensive the ingredients, the bigger the benefits.

On top of health and status effects, food can also be placed around the world as decorative objects. Set a table fit for a king!

We've got some awesome fan art submissions this month. This one above, called Race to the Bars, was submitted by community member Bietol. And it's conveniently 1920x1080! You can find more of Bietol's work here!

We've also got this lovely, barbaric Floran submission from Shardival, called The Great Race! You can find more of Shardival's work here. Thanks for the submissions, guys!