I’ve been waiting to get into Starbound until its official release, even though it’s been playable for years now. I guess that’s today.
While simply digging aimlessly and building things is my favorite aspect of Terraria, I think the game is at its best when you play in a shared world. Not necessarily to team up in real-time (though that is fun to do), but just to see what other players are up to periodically and maybe share resources.
We’ve set up a few shared Terraria worlds for SB people over the years. Would anyone be interested in doing that with this game? Preferably with a start-from-scratch approach rather than filling the shared world with spoilers. That’s assuming this game is good, of course. But it probably is. Maybe someone who has played it more than I have can say.
I don’t even know how multi-player works. Do you all fly around in a ship and explore one world at a time? Or is everyone independently exploring space and you can meet up on a planet if you want to?
By my account, it’s okay. Like a lesser Terraria except in SPAAAACE. Which it shouldn’t be considering how long it’s been in early access (4-5 years??). I might show, considering I own a copy.
I guess it depends on your definition of dynamic. There’s certainly a larger variety to them and they can show up as part of neutral towns on planets or in dungeons as hostiles. But you can also build colony deeds and a room with a certain number of items (as well as the required door and light) very similarly to Terraria to get villagers and merchants to spawn and pay you rent. They’ll interact with items that can be interacted with but in a braindead manner, there’s no bias towards various things nor will they try to interact with each other.
Hosting at 68.110.92.51 on port 21025 (doesn’t support custom ports rip 58008). It’ll be up for the next 3 weeks at least, not sure if I’ll be able to host when I move back to dorm but who knows if people’s interest will last that long. It should stay up until then unless my awful setup catches fire, which really isn’t that far outside the realm of possibility
It feels more expansive than it is; the point where that illusion falls away is when you start accelerating through your gear tiers and haven’t been able to maintain the same progress with the main plot due to RNG. Then you just sort of coast through the rest. Combat still is clunky because of swing/shoot cooldown and remains so until staffs and guns start overtaking melee weapons at tier 5 and 6. Nothing is particularly explained well, even things like crafting which is necessary to progress through planets gated by global environmental effects.
And for the first week or so there was a massive memory leak in multiplayer servers; I may have crashed contentdeleted’s server because of that. I saw a test character and one other person whose name I’ve forgotten and that’s it.
Mods might push it to good, but I’ve finished what content there was in the base game and was left feeling like there should have been more to it than that.
Nah, there was a day when I saw the log had a bunch of autoboot messages but that was because the game got an update and there was version mismatch.
I only played for a little bit but combat does feel disappointing. I had fun roaming around and exploring the world but that can only last for so long. Not sure how the game progresses since I didn’t even make it past the first quest but in terms of just gamefeel its subpar. At least it looks good and runs well.
Woops no it was down, or at least my network config was wrong. Guess my internet went down while I was at work and then when it came back on it reassigned my computer’s internal ip and fucked with the portforward. Fixed now
I’ve been playing this game some over the past few days. I have not yet joined the shared server, but I did have a chance to try multi-player with a friend.
So far, I like the game a lot. I agree that combat is awkward, but I haven’t really been focusing on that. (I never even fought a lot of the bosses in Terraria, as much as I played that game.) However, I have already come across some entertaining scenarios, such as a raid on a high-tech prison. It’s also nice that you can hire NPC crew members with combat abilities.
It might get a little stale after I have seen all of the biomes and types of civilization you can come across, and it may be overshadowed to some degree by No Man’s Sky in the near future, but I’m having fun visiting different worlds, upgrading my ship, etc. The game has more to it than I’d expected, but I’d probably like it even if were nothing more than a prettier Terraria.
I stopped playing this in 2016 due to some real life goings on (a flood) and never got around to joining the SB server. But recently I was talking with a friend I hadn’t seen in years who has a server up and I decided to try the game again. I guess they have continued adding content, and people have also written mods that add a lot more content and (optional) complexity.
My favorite parts are still exploring to see all the planet and biome variety, aimless digging, and building. The other night, I came across a world that had an ocean of honey. When I swam down deep enough, I found another layer of liquid “protocite.” But the planet was also contaminated with poison gas that normal poison protection doesn’t protect me from and I couldn’t stay too long.
There are also “madness” worlds with whispering voices that give you an insanity status. And there is a tool that allows you to capture and transport non-hostile life, so I’m collecting the ones I like and constructing a little zoo and aquarium complex.
On balance, I like this a lot more than No Man’s Sky. Not that they were going for exactly the same thing. I guess the main point in No Man’s Sky’s favor is the procedurally-generated creatures. But those are ultimately too similar, even though I really like the concept.
I just saw something about a major Terraria update coming next month, and that reminded me how much I like Starbound. I have not played it in several years. The group I had played online with gradually lost interest until there were just a couple of us left, playing only occasionally. Somehow we created a spot in our hub world that would crash the server if anyone entered it, and soon after that I could no longer log in at all.
I thought it was an update conflicting with one of the many mods we were using, but it turned out that my character had become corrupted somehow. I tried a few tricks I found online to restore my character, but nothing worked.
It wasn’t that I cared that much about all the things we had built and collected, though I wouldn’t have minded taking a few screenshots. (You’ll just have to take my word for it that my beehives were impressive.) What I wanted to do was make one more visit to the home world of one of the people I’d been playing with. He was a friend I knew in person who took his life not long after my last post above this one. My character was the only other one with his home world bookmarked. I didn’t expect to find anything special there, but it was at least something.
One of my favorite Starbound memories was exploring a hazardous world with that player. We were surrounded by darkness, toxic gas, and enemies, and we were low on supplies. We were trying to reach the surface to escape, and only my character could jump due to extreme gravity or dense gas or something. I had to build stairs for him to climb, and it took a while. The whole situation struck me as oddly intimate, for lack of a better word.
Edit: Oh, it looks like I do at least have a screenshot of my (unrecoverable) character.
