Happy almost-October, readers!

September was exciting! With the team all revved up from August's convention, we went into the month with pretty fresh perspectives and the obvious goal of getting everything ready for beta as efficiently as we possibly can.

Members of the team have been focusing on different areas of the game. Some of us are focusing on producing content for all the biomes, mini-biomes (biomes within biomes!), dungeons and villages that we want to make it into the beta! Others have been focusing on monster and villager AI,

balancing combat, and some new features like the grappling hook shown above!

A big, big part of getting Starbound beta-ready is finishing implementing tier progression. We need to get our tiers in proper working order! That means balancing combat and monsters, implementing tier-based objects, armors, weapons and tools, tech and dungeons! It's been like a huge jigsaw puzzle trying to put all those pieces together.

We know the end of 2013 is drawing near, and lots of you are getting anxious. Let's talk about that a little!

This month brought a lot of controversy about the release date of the beta versus Starbound's "full release"-- among other things, like sewage-based monsters! Let's clear some things up. :)

When we began pre-orders back in April, the idea of not completing the entire game by the end of the year seemed absurd! So we set our official "release date estimate" for 2013 and elsewhere stated that the game would definitely be out this year.

Game development is fairly unpredictable, though, especially on games as large as Starbound, and things often take much longer than we could have thought possible. Given that, we'd taken the stance that it's the beta that will definitely be available this year, not the full game. While we're always actively talking to people in IRC and the forums, we only recently updated our website's info to reflect these changes! Sorry about that.

We continue to work on the game every single day and we're making loads of progress! We're confident we'll have this thing ready for you guys to play before the end of the year. We really want to thank you guys for your continued support and patience, and for having faith in our project. :) You're all awesome.

It's been a couple months since we did a community art feature! We're getting awesome, awesome fan art all the time. This month I wanted to show off daemonstar and WakeskaterX's fan art! The threads have been around a little while, but deserve a feature nonetheless!

Daemonstar made some characters using our online character generator and drew them, and look at how amazing they turned out! Ahhhh! WakeskaterX practiced his pixel art skills and produced some cool art of the Novakids, Florans and Hylotl.

Well done, guys! <3 As always, we love checking out fan art, fan fiction and videos posted here. :D