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).

Hi everyone!

This week we surprise dropped an unstable release of Starbound 1.4 – the ‘Bounty Hunter’ update!

Since we last wrote about 1.4 on the Dev Blog we took some time to revisit our content plans and how they worked within the main game, and now we’re at a point where we we’d like to invite players to see where we’ve got it!

The themes of the update are the same we’d originally shared! In Starbound 1.4 you’ll become a bounty hunter, taking on new quests to track down wanted criminal gangs, rise up through the Peacekeeper ranks and ultimately restore law and order in the universe! Additionally there’s lots of other content including new dungeons, monster variants, new items, furniture pieces and more to discover.

 
We’re looking to get some feedback from players, if you’d like to preview the update and share your thoughts with us the best place is the ‘beta feedback’ channel of the Starbound Discord. It’s still in development, so things now are not necessarily representative of the final implementation – and expect some bugs and incomplete content (and back up characters before playing).

We know it’s been a while in the making, so we’re excited to hear what players think! Here are the high level changes;

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