Happy Monday! Today is an especially happy Monday, because it’s Unstable Update Day … which means Stable Update Day isn’t too far off! Are you excited? I’m excited.
Confused? Unstable updates work like this:
- We automatically upload everything we’ve changed in-game to the opt-in Nightly branch each night.
- When we’ve completed the update we’re working toward, we push the update to the Unstable branch. You can learn more about opting in to the Unstable branch here.
- When we’re sure that the update isn’t causing crashes or terrible bugs, we push the update to the Stable branch.
We’ve changed and added a lot this update, so I’m going to get right to it. Read below for patch notes!
First off, in case you’re worried, we are not wiping characters or universes this patch and have no plans to do so. You can continue playing your existing characters and worlds from previous stable versions of Starbound, but there are a few things that will have changed.
The biggest change is that this patch brings the first part of a major rebalance to weapons. Any randomly generated melee or ranged weapons you have will be regenerated to a weapon of the same type and level (and keep their name), but will have different appearances and rebalanced stats. This includes weapons modded with custom drawables, so for those of you who care about this, make sure to keep a copy of your drawable data to recreate the weapon later. Most non-generated weapons will have altered stats, but otherwise keep similar abilities and appearances.
While we’ve done our best to add conversion scripts for all of the things we’ve changed, it’s been awhile since the last patch and there may be some that we’ve missed. If you’re playing Unstable with your characters from a previous (vanilla) Stable version, please let us know if you’ve lost items or have trouble loading existing worlds so we can sort it out before the Stable release!
If you’re the kind of player that doesn’t mind starting over and wants to see all the newest changes, you will probably want to start a new universe for this patch since we’ve made a lot of big improvements to terrain generation and biomes that you might not get to see otherwise!
- Since we’ve changed the combat balance so much, we’re still in the process of tuning the monsters, NPCs and mission bosses. If you find things that are way too hard or too easy, let us know!
- We’ve done a lot to improve performance but there’s still a lot more we plan to do before the game’s released. Hopefully you’ll see things running smoother, but don’t panic if some areas are still slow.
- Liquids in and around microdungeons sometimes aren’t placed in a correctly settled manner and will settle after the world is first loaded
- NPCs occasionally get stuck rotated after getting out of bed, which is hilarious but unintended
- Some NPCs in biomes aren’t well equipped to fight monsters
- If you’re running Windows 7, make sure you have service pack 1 installed. Seriously – install those service packs!
- Steam may leave dbghelp.dll in the win32 or win64 folders by mistake, which will cause Starbound not to launch. You can fix this by getting rid of the file or deleting and re-installing Starbound.
- Colony System
- Colonize your worlds! Create a home, decorate it nicely, then place a Colony Deed to attract a tenant!
- The type of NPC who moves in will depend on the type and quality of the home’s furniture and decorations. Decorating a room with several objects from the same theme (such as a biome or material tier) will attract a tenant themed to match!
- Keep your tenants happy and they’ll periodically offer you gifts, some cosmetic and some very useful
- New Outpost Store: Frögg Furnishings
- Sells Colony Deeds as well as a variety of furniture in many themes
- The set of specialty furniture available will rotate each (out of game) day, so make sure you keep coming back to see the full selection
- Each furniture set can be used to attract a particular tenant that fits its theme
- Improvements to NPCs
- NPCs will now interact with each other and with many different objects in the world. Depending on their personalities they might get sad, excited, fall in love or do all kinds of different things in different situations!
- Added many unique NPC dialogue options and updated some old ones
- Further improved NPC movement and pathfinding
- NPCs now switch between ranged and melee weapons in combat depending on their available energy, range, and whether they can reach the player
- Groups of NPCs now coordinate in combat to attack from different positions and divide themselves between ranged and melee
- Surface Biomes and Sub-Biomes (Tiers 1 – 4)
- Major visual improvements to background parallaxes
- All biomes have several types of unique critters (60+)
- Added a huge number of biome-specific microdungeons (450+)
- Added many new biome-specific cosmetic armors and other items
- Randomly generated monsters will now have color palettes that generally match the biome they spawn in
- Universe and Planet Generation
- Redesigned terrain to be more interesting and varied across all world types
- Reduced the number of open caves on the surface, improved cave blending
- Greatly increased the number of dungeons that can spawn on worlds and prevented dungeons from overlapping each other
- Added ores in the background layer
- Improved the appearance of planets in the navigation screen to better indicate the biome and surface liquid, added some visual variety to gas giants
- Challenge Rooms
- You can now find portals underground that lead to small instanced challenges. Defeat enemies, navigate dangerous traps or solve puzzles to earn great rewards!
- Challenge portals disappear shortly after you enter, so you won’t be able to enter through the same portal twice.
- Inventory and Merchants
- You can now sell items to most merchants for a portion of their value
- Added an ore merchant to the Outpost where you can purchase raw materials at an inflated price
- Added a third inventory tab for objects (similar to the materials tab)
- Added a sort button to the inventory window to sort items into their appropriate tabs
- Items will not be automatically picked up into the hotbar and materials and objects won’t be automatically picked up when their respective tabs are full
- Added an indicator to inventory tabs when they contain new items
- Added an animation to highlight newly picked up items when switching to a tab
- Tools and Interface
- Wire and Paint tools are now unlockable modes for the Matter Manipulator and have clearer icons to indicate their functions
- Inspection tool can now examine liquids, indicates when something is too dark to inspect, and doesn’t try to describe entities (such as monsters) that have no description set
- Targeting will now prioritize monsters and NPCs at the cursor position, and won’t target passive monsters such as critters
- Combat Changes (WIP)
- Rebalanced all damage and armor values for players, NPCs and monsters
- Reduced the damage per level increase of weapons and added a bonus damage stat on all tiered armors, allowing weapons to stay viable for longer
- All randomly generated melee weapons have fancy new sprites
- Reworked monster skills and added a windup animation. These will be further expanded and rebalanced in the next update.
- Reworked weapon projectiles, increased bullet speed, added elemental damage types. These will be further expanded in the next update.
- Progression Changes
- Reworked the materials used for crafting progression, greatly reducing the total amount of ore required to advance through the game
- Added various upgrade items which can be found throughout the world or acquired from quests, either whole or in pieces
- Tech Card – can be crafted from Tech Chips, used to unlock new tech
- Manipulator Module – can be crafted from Matter Module Components, used to improve your Matter Manipulator
- Upgrade Module – used to improve utility items such as light packs
- Improved many progression quests, but these will change much more in the future
- Farming Changes
- Crops now require water to grow! Tilled soil will initially be dry and needs to be moistened by a watering can, rain, or by dropping water on it
- At each stage of a crop’s growth, it will consume the soil’s moisture and need to be watered again to progress further
- Keeping crops under too much water for too long will cause them to be washed away, so be gentle!
- And More!
- 200+ new objects and materials that can be bought, crafted or found in the world
- Many changes to the Floran mission – Including a new boss
- Improved chest loot and added improved graphics for standard and weapon chests
- Added multiple upgrades for the lantern stick back item to improve its brightness
- Racial flags can now be bookmarked as teleport destinations (but won’t enable you to teleport from underground)
- Added particles and sounds to smashable objects and made many more objects (such as bushes and spikes) smashable
- Reworked Status Pods to have more interesting and useful effects, including a chance to spawn ore or pixels
- New characters will once again start on randomized worlds instead of sharing a single starter world!
- Weather effects deposit snow and sand on tiles where appropriate
- Ocean liquids become finite when enclosed by background blocks, and removing background blocks under the ocean will let the liquid in
- Codexes will be automatically opened when learned
- Environmental protection techs include protection from lower tier hazards and will be automatically equipped when learned
- Flash breath bar when drowning
- Sort recipes in crafting interface
- Various performance improvements
- Renamed ‘moon’ biome to ‘airless’ to avoid confusion among the astronomically knowledgeable
- Added a shipyard to the Outpost, which will be used to purchase additional ship upgrades in the future
- Fixed a bug causing monsters to spawn in player-built structures underground
- Fixed several bugs related to weapons and monster attacks across the world wrap line
- Fixed a bug causing NPC weapons to be rerolled when unequipped
- Fixed a bug causing dungeon NPCs to spawn partially underground
- Fixed a bug causing players to be stuck firing after respawn
- Fixed a bug causing pets to eat whole stacks of food on the ground
- Fixed a bug causing UI sound volume to be reduced too far by SFX slider
- Lots of other balance and bug fixes