Hello everyone!

We’ve got some exciting news! Starbound will be releasing December 8th on Xbox Games Pass for PC!! This version is PC only, and identical to other PC versions with the new additions of Xbox achievements, and the ability to invite and join friends through your Xbox Live network.

This is a great chance to try Starbound if you’re an Xbox Games Pass subscriber – and we’re so pleased to have it join the great collection of titles available! It’s a fantastic value at only $9.99 a month and you’ll also gain access to over 100+ wonderful games (aside from our very own Wargroove, we also recommend checking out Carto, Ape Out and Frostpunk).

Last year we shared a number of updates about Starbound’s Xbox console version, which we’d been showing at public events and felt was nearly ready. Our last update was that the console version was suffering from serious performance issues with 3-4 players together in some scenarios and we felt it couldn’t be released to the public in that state. We’ve worked with a number of different developers to try and address this, and have made some progress – but we’re still not confident enough to say when it might be ready. We’ve seen all the requests for an update on console development, and we understand this isn’t the news everyone’s looking for – but we want to address it and reassure we are still working on it with our partners!

We’re also supporting Jingle Jam by Yogscast again this holiday season, where you can grab a bundle with Starbound and some other great titles to support charity! In the meantime, if you want to see what else we at Chucklefish are up to, you can follow us on Twitter here and chat to us in Discord here. Until next time, peacekeepers!

We’re excited to announce the release of Starbound 1.4 – the ‘Bounty Hunter’ update!

In this update players can become bounty hunters, seeking out criminal gangs through missions and climb the ranks as they rebuild the Peacekeepers and restore law and order to the universe. There’s also new elemental variants of many monsters, which have a rare chance to be encountered – if you see one be sure to capture it! In addition there’s a ton of new furniture, objects, weapons, and fun new stuff – including drones, password keypad locks, a laser mining tool, and a sports car!

We’ve been working on this update for a long time, thanks so much for being patient while we took the time to get it just right! Here’s an outline of all the changes;
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Hello everyone!

A few years ago we’d announced we planned to bring Starbound to consoles, and dedicated a lot of our studio resources into re-designing the UI for consoles and optimizing the game resources to work on consoles – working closely with Blitworks, who did a fantastic job helping us with the porting.

Starbound was playable to the public at a number of Xbox events in 2018, and had very positive feedback – it played very well on Xbox One and we’d publically announced our intention to finish and release soon!

Late in development while evaluating the game we identified performance issues when playing with four or more players together, but still felt confident we could address them to have it release ready. We worked to optimize and redesign a number of systems specifically to optimize the performance in multiplayer, but ultimately after months of work it still wasn’t enough to get the game up to our standards. With four or more players together we’d still encounter some stuttering and frame drops.

We don’t want to limit the number of players or remove features to address the problem – that would mean releasing the game in a ‘less complete’ state and wasn’t a solution we were comfortable with.

So what’s the plan?
We’ve spent the past few months working with some new outside porting partners to try and further optimize the game performance. We’ve got some very experienced programmers who think it’s achievable and are working on it – but we don’t want to give any assurances until we’ve tested it. Outside that the game is ready, but it’s a make or break issue and we can’t introduce Starbound to consoles with current performance.

We’d hoped to have better news to share in this update – and we’re sorry we’d waited so long to deliver it. For right now a console version is delayed while we continue to work on technical solutions to optimize large groups in multiplayer, and we’ll keep supporting the PC version (1.4 is available to beta test right now on Steam).