Hey Guys!

We’ve spent some time today updating the Starbound font amongst other things.

Hopefully this font should be easier to read, contains some fun symbols and also contains a huge amount more special characters.

It’ll also be useful in the upcoming custom controls GUI.

Still have the buttons to update, but here’s how SAIL looks now..

As Tiy mentioned in his last post, we’re now back in the office after a refreshing holiday and back to work preparing for a stable update. Hooray!

There are a few things that we need to address before the update will be ready. One is, of course, bug fixes. We’ve been looking at your feedback and bug reports over the break, and this week I’m focusing on working through as many of these miscellaneous issues as possible while we get up to speed. Today I cleaned up a number of annoying things with staves and bows, such as: players being forced to walk/stand when cycling weapons, right click charging but not firing, being able to charge (and being forced to walk) without energy, etc. I’m hoping to get through most of this rapidly shrinking issue list by the end of the week.

After that we’ve got a few large-ish but clear tasks. We need to balance the effectiveness of armor against very high and low rate of fire weapons. Kyren will be doing everything she can to improve performance for both servers and clients. Omni will be fixing the parallax transitions between layers. Artists are adding more micro dungeons and miscellaneous content to improve variety of exploration, particularly underground. If we have time, we’d also like to add a key binding GUI and possibly some form of planet bookmarking or teleportation. Once all that’s done, we can finally update the stable branch, and move on to more new and exciting features!

Hi guys,

Happy 2015! We’re back in the office now and we’re hard at work on moving the unstable update to stable and fixing a few issues.

In the mean time I wanted to address some of the current problems we’re aware of and explain how we’re going to deal with those problems for 1.0

Guns do too little damage

Currently guns do too little damage, particularly guns with a high rate of fire. This is a known problem and it’s largely down to the way protection works currently. Guns that shoot a small amount of damage rapidly for an overall high DPS are unfairly mitigated due to how protection functions. We’re looking at fixing the way protection handles small damage values for the stable release.

Mining is a little dull

Mining at the moment is a little uneventful and a bit of a grind. We plan to remedy this by vastly increasing the number of underground encounters, dungeons and microdungeons you’ll encounter whilst mining. Many of these dungeons will contain some of the loot you’re looking for whilst mining and save you from simply tinking away at blocks for hours on end. We’re also going to increase the range of monsters underground to mix up the experience and look into benefits for sustaining existing mines.

There’s no reason to build on a planet

Currently there’s very little reason to settle on a planet, given the utility of the ship and the amount of space it has available to it on upgrading. We plan to remedy this in a number of different ways. Firstly, we’re going to add a planet bookmark/teleportation system. This will allow you to get directly from your ship to a base you’ve set up on a planet instantly and without travelling to that planet first. Next there will be utilities and crafting resources that won’t function on your ship and will require an on planet base. Finally there will be alternative progression paths that directly require buildings of various kinds. The nomadic nature of settling in your ship is directly in support of the combat/adventure progression path.

Monster path finding is bad

We’ve made so many changes to monsters and their abilities that their path finding has suffered a lot. We’re going to be working on it and retooling it for the next stable release. Hopefully by then the monsters should be substantially smarter.

Hunger and/or temperature is gone

We made the decision to remove hunger and temperature as stats because we weren’t happy with their current implementation. They’ll be back in some form for harder difficulty levels

There’s only one path through the game

Right now adventuring and combat is more or less a requirement if you want to progress. We intend to change that with farming and building progression paths. We’d like you to be able to progress through the game with barely any combat or questing required. These paths will likely be distinct from one another so you’re able to progress through all of them individually over time.

Quests are too fetchy/there aren’t enough quests

The current quests are fetchy because we needed to create a quest line with the engine features we currently have available to us. We’re going to be expanding quests in a big way and many of the quests currently available are placeholder. With more quest triggers we can massively expand the kind of quests available to us and we’re going to be adding some form of procedurally generated quests too.