Aaand we’re back!

In case you missed it, we spent the last week in San Francisco for GDC! We met lots of lovely devs face-to-face that we’d previously only known via the internet, went to loads of meetings and attended some great talks.

(We also may have brought the rain with us to SF.)

As fun as it was, after a week of running around an unfamiliar city and two 11-hour flights, we’re definitely glad to be back in our cozy office in chilly London finishing up Starbound.

While in San Francisco, we met up with two of our partners who have both just launched shiny new Starbound merch in their shops.

We’ve got a pretty new Starbound shirt at The Yetee:

And a gorgeous Matter Manipulator and two sets of pins at Sanshee:

Both The Yetee and Sanshee have been absolutely lovely to work with and we couldn’t be happier with the cool stuff they’ve made, so go check it out!

Dev blogs may still be a bit slow-going this week as we get back into the swing of things, but we wanted to let everyone know that we’re alive and working.

Leave your comments here. ‘Til next time!

Happy Friday!

In your travels, you may encounter NPCs who are looking for a particular type of pet. They’ll even trade you the pet they’ve already got! The ethics of this are somewhat questionable.

We’re off to GDC tomorrow, so expect sparse blog updates from us over the next week. Follow @ChucklefishLTD on Twitter if you wanna see what we’re up to! :)

Post your comments here!

Hello everyone! I dunno how it could possibly be Thursday already, but here we are. Let’s talk about rails!

The rail system is something Metadept started over the Christmas holiday, and we’ve since taken a little bit of time to polish it up so that it’s ready in time for 1.0. We’ve tried to include the key elements of the Skyrails mod by Apjjm as well as craftable elevators in order to create something that’s more in line with Starbound’s design: general purpose, flexible and creative!

The core of the system are rail materials, which are non-colliding blocks that players place in the world. These materials will automatically connect to each other and to adjacent rail objects, so it should be easy to create anything from simple elevators to large rail networks!

Players can currently make use of the rails in two different ways: by placing self-propelled moving platforms, or by sliding along rails using a special rail hook item driven by gravity.

In addition to basic rail tiles, there are also several objects to make more complex rail networks possible: a rail bumper that caps rail endpoints and sends riders back in the opposite direction, a rail stop that stops and starts riders based on a wire input, a rail switch that connects and disconnects rails based on wire input, and a rail sensor that triggers a wire output whenever a rail rider crosses it.

We’d like to expend the system in the future with more types of rails, objects, and things that travel along them!

Let us know what you think in the comments!