Happy Friday!

We have talked a little bit about the re-addition of hunger in Survival Mode, which is exciting! There are a lot of different difficulty parameters – hunger, allowing players to beam up from underground, items dropped on death, how much it costs to revive your character, and permadeath. Regardless of how we configure Starbound’s three difficulty modes some players will prefer a different set-up, so to that end Metadept has made all of the modes moddable. Here’s what that looks like!

Keep in mind that what you see there now isn’t necessary what the default settings will look like in the final game – it’s just how it’s configured right now.

In other news, this character is wielding a broom. Why are they wielding a broom? What’s the significance of the broom? Where are they? What’s going onnnnnnnnn?

Post your comments here!

Hey everyone!

We’ve been working on missions for the final game! Here’s a little look at the start of an upcoming mission – looks kind of intense. What do you think it’ll be about?

This week’s community-run Build of the Week theme is Crash Sites, and there have already been some really really cool submissions. Here’s a crashed freighter from ElvenCourage!

To submit your Build of the Week, check the Starbound subreddit for the current week’s theme, build something awesome, and then submit it as a link post with the prefix [BotW] or [Build of the Week]. Sometimes we post our favorites. :)

‘Til next time~

Post your comments here!

Hey everyone!

Metadept’s work on the new hunger system continues, but he’s also been spending some time overhauling techs! Here’s what’s happening with the new tech system:

Tech has been reduced to three tech slots (from four). Each of these slots will carry a base tech that the player is guaranteed to unlock over the course of progression. The three base techs are Double Jump, Distortion Sphere, and Dash.

Once a base tech is unlocked, you’ll be able to choose from three upgraded variants of it, and unlock each of them via tech card. Although you’ll still only be able to equip one variant at a time.

The reasoning behind this change is due to player behavior tending to sway towards a few specific techs. This is mostly down to many of the alternatives being very situational, with players not wanting to sacrifice important movement abilities in exchange for something more specialised.

The solution to this has been to take the most popular techs and give them more interesting variants, without the sacrifice of losing the functionality of the base tech.

Combined with the new augmentation system discussed last week, you can pull off some seriously powerful moves. Here’s an example of two upgraded techs in action, the Sonic Sphere and Wall Jump:

Mollygos is back in the office tomorrow, so you’ve all been spared a week of pun fuelled dev blog posting from me. If you’d like to comment, please post in this thread!