Good evening/afternoon/morning!

The first automatic nightly build is live! If anyone is interested, you can opt-in the same way you opted into the unstable branch.

Nightly builds are there for people who really wanna track our progress– not for people who just want to play the latest version of the game. Please back up any saves or worlds you care about. No, seriously. Back up your saves. It’s always best to assume they will be destroyed and the game will be at least somewhat broken.

Tonight, for instance, because we’re working on monster spawns, monsters aren’t spawning. This is the sort of thing you should expect from nightly builds.

(Tiy note: Also, because we’re currently working on progression, the very first thing you’ll probably notice is that your ship is damaged and the fuel system doesn’t work (sparks flying out of it). The only way to currently fix the ship is through admin commands so unless you know them you’ll be stranded. This is *really* for people that want to see progress + modders. You have been warned!)

I’ve updated the support page with a guide, but I’ll paste it here too:

What is the “nightly” branch and how do I switch to it (or back)?

The “nightly” branch of the beta receives updates automatically every single day. This means that using the nightly branch will frequently destroy your saves or contain other game-breaking issues depending on what we’ve been working on that day. Only use this branch if you really really want to follow our progress and don’t care about breaking the game. 

To switch between branches (click on images to enlarge them):

• Right-click on Starbound in your Steam client’s “Library” tab and select “Properties”:
  
• In the window that appears, select the “Betas” tab and then select the branch you want to use from the first drop-down.
• You should receive a confirmation message along the lines of “Successfully opted into the ‘nightly’ content beta.” below the textbox next to the “Check Code” button (note: no beta access code is required to opt into the nightly branch).
• Click close and let Steam download the update for the new branch. If you’ve switched to the nightly branch, Starbound should now be listed as “Starbound [nightly]” in your Steam library, otherwise it will be listed as just “Starbound”.

Some examples of new large water/large flying monster gen types coming to the game some time in the not too distant future.

Roses are red
The dirt on Alpha Tau Aur 5472 IV is blue
This update is a bit late for Valentine’s Day
Oops

This update will allow us to add new biomes and make changes to worlds without the possibility of the player losing their world. There will likely be one more world wipe sometime in the future when we finalize the universe layout. This won’t include a character/ship wipe, though, and you can still back up your worlds.

A ton of work has gone into our patching system. After this update, we’ll be able to push content updates as and when they’re completed, rather than waiting for big engine updates to be completed. Updates after this patch will come at a near daily rate.
Additional goodies:

• Valentine’s Day items including swords, costumes, decorations, bow, etc
• Engine feature, tech can now be granted by armors
• Keybinding reconfiguration, minus the UI (you can reconfigure keys through a config file- check here for a tutorial)
• Server stability fixes for servers with many players
• New death animations
• Engine feature, all objects are now scriptable and interactive
• More Avian weaponry
• Projectile changes
• Dogs can now be captured (lots more pets coming soon)
• A bunch of new items and smaller pieces of content
• New (actually sounds good!) microphone instrument with sounds provided by Smooth McGroove!
• Bug where warping to magma/volcano biomes caused crashing was fixed.

Additional content has been created (new biomes, etc) but will come out just after this patch, as it needs to be adapted to the new content update system.

*Note: We did an oops and missed some of the content updates when we uploaded the patch, so we’ll be putting out another patch a bit later today that includes the missing stuff (the Valentine’s Day items, new microphone sounds, possibly some more).