Happy Monday!

SamuriFerret and Metadept have been working on something really cool! Here’s some insight into how Starbound’s main story questline will tie into the sandbox universe.

In the current stable build, accessing story missions is done by completing a series of quests, as well as showing the right citizens of the Outpost that you have the right tier of armour for a mission. For 1.0, the storyline missions will be entirely seperate from your progression in crafting and building. So how does it work?

Esther, unrivaled archaeologist and uncoverer of mysteries, is looking for an ancient relic. However, she doesn’t have all the information she needs to find where it is. That’s where you come in!

Using the inspect mode in villages, settlements and dungeons will show that some objects are highlighted differently – inspecting these will give Esther more information as to the location of the artifact!

As well as this, scanning certain may actually be much more informative than others. Objects like this are much rarer, though. Better get exploring!

When Esther has enough information, she’ll be able to determine the location and give you the co-ordinates. It’s entirely up to you how well equipped you are for the mission, so be prepared!

For anyone who plays on the nightly build, you can check out this feature this week. Keep in mind that it is a work in progress, so elements of it will continue to change, as usual!

Post your comments here!

Hey everyone!

We’ve got a really busy month ahead! I mean, that’s always the case, but apart from the usual dev work we’ve got all of the events coming up.

Here’s a breakdown of where we’ll be in March & April:

• 5-6 March – PC Gamer Weekender – London, UK
• 12-18 March – Game Developers Conference – San Francisco, CA
• 1-2 April – Norwich Game Festival – Norwich, UK

Hope to see some of you at PC Gamer Weekender or Norwich Game Festival! I know they’re UK-based — hopefully we’ll be able to attend more events all over the globe once 1.0 is released! Fair warning that you should expect to hear a bit less from us on the week of GDC, since we’ll be well outside of our normal work hours and running around to various talks and meetings. I’ll keep you posted via @StarboundGame and @ChucklefishLTD on Twitter. :)

This week we’ve got SamuriFerret, Healthire and GeorgeV working on various quests/missions, Necotho working on tier-specific dungeons, Rosiedeux and Lili working on polishing up the UI, Harriet is working on descriptions, Metadept working on Outpost upgrades and Supernorn and Tom working on backer rewards.

Stardew Valley by ConcernedApe is coming out on Friday, too. Here’s the latest trailer!

And here’s a little preview of an Avian village implemented by Necotho! Post your comments in this thread.

Hi guys,

We recently posted on the forums and on reddit asking for feedback on tweaks (not including new features) you’d like to see for the ever closer 1.0 release.

We’ve completed a bunch of experimental changes in response to those threads that we’d love those of you on the nightly to test out. These are only the first set of changes, and there’s a lot more we’re going to address before 1.0.

Planet Variety

We’ve made a major change to the way planets are generated. Planets now contain multiple biomes, each of which might contain a sub biome. Currently some biomes look great together and others less so, the current distribution is a little on the wacky side. We’ll be tweaking this as we go. Multiple biomes alongside the massive amount of new content we’ve recently added to each biome individually should make every planet feel far more unique. We’d love you to test this out and provide feedback. It’s still being heavily tweaked.

Inventory Management

We’ve added another tab to the inventory screen, this one contains all your crafting ingredients. We’ve also made sure that items automatically open the correct tab when picked up, and added a ‘Take All’ button to the chest interface.

Dungeon/Village content

We’re adding a huge amount of new dungeon content, including all of the missing hylotl dungeons and villages, brand new content for the other races including new towns, rebel camps, a much larger number of random encounters. We’ll also be adding quests to a lot of these before 1.0.

Performance

We’re putting out the first part of a *major* performance change in tonight’s nightly. Some of you may see dramatic improvements to framerate, and those of you already able to play the game well should now be able to run the game at a much smaller zoom level without sacrificing framerate.

There will be more changes to come in response to the feedback threads, but please try some of these out in the nightly and let us know what you think.

Warning: The nightly is only for people willing to lose their character/universe. You will need to wipe your universe/character folders to ensure the current version of the nightly works corrected. Nightly is also full of bugs as it’s uploaded automatically every night and reflects our latest in progress builds.

Leave feedback in this thread: Experimental Changes