Starbound Beta

“It’s a bit like Terraria in space.” When UK-based indie development studio Chucklefish Games announced their ambitious project Starbound just over eighteen months ago, that statement would have been enough to guarantee the sales needed to fund to rest of development. And indeed, from the pre-order numbers alone, that’s proven to be the case; Starbound raised more than $2,000,000 on its own web-site through word of mouth before it even hit Steam’s Early Access service, where it has consistently been the number one seller for the last week. Needless to say, it’s off to a good start.

So what exactly is Starbound? Well, it’s an open-world crafting/building/action-platformer, set in the farthest-reaches of the universe, and sports a 16-bit pixel-art aesthetic not dissimilar from other popular indie titles. After booting up single-player, you’ll be treated to a character creator where you can customise your avatar, from their clothing through to their skin colour and (most importantly) their race.

Your choices include the Humans, your bog-standard human race; the Apex, a Planet Of The Apes-like species of scientifically-minded monkeys; the Avian, a bird-like tribe of religious (and not-so-religious) sky people; the Floran, a race of cannibalistic plant monsters; the Hylotl, humanoid fish with a penchant for real-world Eastern culture; and the Glitch, a community of Futurama-esque robots perpetually stuck on the “medieval” setting. From there, you get a short codex explaining the background of your race, along with an over-view of your ship, and then it’s off to the planet’s surface to start hunting, gathering and crafting.

But where Terraria focuses on a single world, Starbound’s big show-piece is the way it generates entire planets full of content.

It’s here that comparisons to Terraria (and, more ostensibly, Minecraft) are their most obvious. You’ll chop down wood, you’ll make a crafting table, you’ll mine ore and then you’ll upgrade all of your equipment. But where Terraria focuses on a single world, Starbound’s big show-piece is the way it generates entire planets full of content. Everything you see is created from a procedural-generation algorithm: from the plant and Pokemon-esque animal types; to the frequency of chests and ore; to the unique structures littering the landscape, such as an entire village full of Glitch merchants, just living and trading. This can lead to some wonderful and truly bizarre combinations. Trees that grow brains? Sand dunes surrounded by poisonous lakes? A planet made of eyeballs? It’s all here.

Considering the nature of procedural generation, not all of the locations you visit are going to be winners. You should never end up stranded somewhere you hate, though. Despite some dodgy wording in the tutorial quests suggesting that more advanced materials are required, you can FTL jump to any planet in your galactic sector by simply dumping raw wood or coal into your ship’s fuel compartment. From there, you can consult your ship’s navigation scanner to determine the terrain of nearby planets – Mass Effect 2-style – and also the danger presented by the local flora and fauna, classified as a “threat-level”. In an inspired move, the “seed” value that generates and populates planets is actually the X and Y co-ordinates shown on the galaxy map. So if you should happen upon a random planet with a particularly cool prisoner colony, or an Avian sky pirate ship, you can share the location with your friends.

In an inspired move, the “seed” value that generates and populates planets is actually the X and Y co-ordinates shown on the galaxy map.

Of course, the game supports full server-based multiplayer, too. Though they’re a little tricky to set up for those unfamiliar with port-forwarding and IP addresses, servers appear stable at the moment, and also offer good modding potential. As world generation is stored on the server, players can carry their ship and inventory between servers, just like Terraria. While this breaks the single-player progression somewhat, it facilitates community building projects – like, say, a massive human castle inside a volcano – and also means that your mates can give you a helping hand if you can’t quite take down that tricky UFO boss.

Speaking of combat, it’s a mostly-simple affair at this point, controlled mostly through mouse aiming and clicking. Handily, however, there is a short-cut command on the keyboard which lets players switch between items equipped in their left and right hands, allowing combinations of one-handed weapons, shields and guns. Effective use of a shield can block incoming attacks or at least mitigate damage, though personally I found the knock-back offered by two-handed swords more useful long-term. Experimentation will probably be valuable to players in the coming months – the developers are constantly tweaking weapon strength, and guns are likely due for a buff with the next patch.

The loss of character progress is, sadly, a necessary evil, and one that may continue throughout the duration of the beta.

Everything we’ve discussed so far was reason enough for me to invest in Starbound, but I would warn other starfarers to be more cautious. Although the game is further along than many other titles on Steam offered through Early Access, Chucklefish have been adamant that Starbound is very much in a testing phase. Though “beta” usually infers that a game is feature-complete and just going through stability testing, Starbound is so massive in scope that the developers are incrementally switching functionality on for public testing. With the core data structure changing radically between patches, the loss of character progress is, sadly, a necessary evil, and one that may continue throughout the duration of the beta.

That said, the effort that the developers have put into post-launch content is commendable. In the last week alone, we’ve seen a major rebalancing of the game’s difficulty curve, a fundamental change to how item levels work, the introduction of multiple new crafting schematics and a major compatibility issue with Windows XP corrected. Immediately following the beta’s 4th December launch, one coder pulled a 19-hour stint of programming to get a vital patch out so players could get back to playing. And he even streamed the entire process! Contrast this experience against the support we’ve seen for CubeWorld – where Wollay has been mostly-silent since release, distributing only one patch since July – and the difference is night and day. A shame, because like Starbound, CubeWorld has incredible potential.

The true challenge Chucklefish faces moving forward is finding the right balance between their much-lauded procedural generation techniques and more traditional, linear game-design.

And that’s what you’re buying into right now with Starbound: potential. While most players will easily get dozens of hours of value out of the £11.99/$14.99 asking price, others may take issue with what’s clearly missing. The true challenge Chucklefish faces moving forward is finding the right balance between their much-lauded procedural generation techniques and more traditional, linear game-design. As things stand, titles like Terraria and Don’t Starve have the upper-hand here; where the discovery of every hand-crafted item felt like a true event with those games, pilfering yet another generic two-handed axe can start to feel a little soulless in Starbound.

But it’s early days yet. If Chucklefish can continue to give development the attention it has – not to mention the respect and support it has shown to its massive and growing community, through dedicated modding repositories and other initiatives – Starbound could easily evolve into one of the true highlights of the coming year.