We’re super excited to be welcoming Metadept to the Starbound team.

Here’s what Metadept has to say..

Hey there, everyone, I’m metadept! I’ve been looking forward to Starbound since it was first announced and modding since the beta release, creating mods such as Sparkz and Starfoundry and helping new modders to learn about the game’s inner workings. Now, I’m very excited to be joining the Chucklefish team, where I can put my experience to use making Starbound better for everyone!

My first major task will be overhauling the monster AI system and helping Tiy and the others to add new monster attacks and behaviors, new unique monsters, and of course new bosses. The new “partparameters” configuration format that I added last week was the first step, making it easier for us to give monsters special attacks and skills that fit their visual appearance. Now, I’m changing the way that monsters select attacks to use, allowing them to have a variety of abilities for different situations. The Starbound universe is going to get a lot more dangerous in all the right ways!

In addition to general AI improvements, I’ve read through all the great suggestions for attacks and behaviors you’ve posted, and have a TON of ideas that I can’t wait to implement. I’ll also be helping to expand the Lua API and improve documentation for modders, adding more interactive objects, and hopefully even fulfilling a few of my own wishes for the game.

The future of Starbound is bright. Let’s explore it together!

Today we’ve been working on a new method of defining which skills monsters have access to.

We now have master lists that tie skills to monster body parts. Rather than configuring the skills on a per body part basis.

This makes it far easier for us to test individual skills and we’re going to use it to begin building lots of new monster attacks for increased variety.

We’ve also been working on the new Psi-staff weapon type we mentioned in previous posts and adding secondary attacks to weaponry.

We loved reading through everyone’s feedback on the weapons yesterday, there was lots of useful information in there. So today I’m going to ask specifically for suggestions for monster skills/attacks.

So for our first combat change push (coming to unstable today/tomorrow most likely). Here are the following changes for discussion.

– Axes, shortswords, daggers, spears and some miscellaneous weapons are now aimable

– Broadswords and Hammers remain non directional but have long range and a big swing arc

– The swoosh speed is faster, meaning greater timing required (Need to test this with latency online)

– Monsters have been made 50% slower across the board. Monsters still have different speeds based on their legs however, so spider legged monsters still run much faster than the others.

– Monster jump height has been reduced

– Monsters feel heavier and knockback has been tweaked

Here are some known issues

– The rotational arm sprite breaks when it’s behind the player

– The spear is now far too good, it has always had greater damage than other weapons given how hard it has been to hit monsters with it.

– There is a small delay ( a couple miliseconds) between hitting a monster and the monster reacting with knockback we need to look at removing

Here are some planned additions

– Two handed weapons will get secondary attacks

– Broadswords will have a short (you can’t hold it indefinitely) timed block

– Hammers will have a new swipe that does lower damage for increased knockback

– Spears are open to discussion

– A new weapon class the psi-staff is coming. A device that amplifies psychic ability to produce magic like effects. Gameplay wise this will spawn various projectiles at your mouse cursor, you’ll need to click and hold down the attack button to charge the staff before a projectile appears and moving will cancel the charge.

– Making common guns more common and legendary guns more rare

– Increasing the differences between different guns