Update Night is a fortnightly column in which Rich McCormick revisits games to find out whether they’ve been changed for better or worse.
I’ve got a robot chicken in the shed that parps out batteries. Do you want to have a look? No, seriously, she’s next to the electrical sheep, and she’s a proper money maker. Every day I teleport down to my little farm, collect all the wheat and cotton and kiwi fruits that have grown overnight, and fill my pockets with double-As.
The penguins at the spaceport pay loads for batteries, you see. They love electrical wool, too, but it’s the metal chicken that’s allowed me to give my bipedal mech a better drill arm, as well as giving me the funds to buy a few bars of tungsten and add another wing to my starship. A wing that I’m planning to fill with chickens, of course.At launch, Starbound offered a huge web of possibilities, from humble farming to exploring the galaxy. In the two years since the 2D craft-’em-up’s official release – and a full five years after it first hit early access — developer Chucklefish has only added more, putting out three significant updates that have introduced beefy new features like the chance to terraform planets, to upgrade weapons, and — crucially — to go fishing.
The sheer amount of stuff you can do is staggering. It’s overwhelming at first, too.
In other craft-heavy games, I tend to set a specific item as a target, and build toward it, saving cash and hoarding materials in order to get there. I tried that with Starbound, but my plans to overhaul my starter mech and launch my own space station (both features introduced in the most recent 1.3 update) felt impossibly far off. I didn’t have the money I’d need to buy the requisite deeds, so I needed to build up a basic farm to kickstart some cash flow. I didn’t have the ore I’d need for parts, either, so I’d have to go spelunking to dig out copper, iron, tungsten, and the rest. I didn’t even have the fuel I needed to get myself out of the star system and into one with a wider array of metals for the taking, forcing me to hop around on airless moons, picking up gooey FTL fuel while being chased by a beak-mouthed space ghost.
This space ghost is a unique opponent, but most of Starbound’s worlds are infested with monsters. Some of these will wander, flap, or burble by without incident, but the majority of these critters will go straight for the player, their fangs, claws, or tentacles bared. Their erratic combat patterns can make exploration frustrating: combing a new world, it’s never quite clear whether that blue bird dog thing or that ball of flying fluff is going to object to your presence, and if so, how much of your health bar they’re going to chunk off with one attack.
Being forced to act as intergalactic game warden was by far my least favourite part of Starbound, and I kept finding ways to avoid combat. On desert worlds, I’d end up leading a trail of ornery wildlife, while on ocean worlds, I started swimming under islands just to avoid the menagerie of creatures that waited above, even though the slow pace of underwater made my journey twice as long as it should’ve been.
There’s a wide range of close-range weapons — from daggers, to broadswords, to two-handed hammers — but I found them all a bit finickity to use, especially when a lot of enemies close the distance between you with frightening speed. I had more luck with ranged weapons: Starbound’s pistols, rifles, and bows. I defaulted to using a legendary poison bow for much of my time in its pixellated galaxy, both for the fun in judging the arrow’s arc, and for the fact I could fire and forget, letting the green goop whittle down enemy health bars.
Speech to text adobe audition. Space combat, introduced as part of the 1.3 update, is generally more enjoyable. Players can choose to investigate anomalies while flitting through solar systems, dumping their customisable mech out into zero-gravity and dodging Space Invader-y aliens and swarms of living rock blobs. At their most intense, these sessions make Starbound like a quasi-bullet hell shooter, both more manic and more predictable than its standard ground-based combat. The weapons are snazzier too, a combination of laser cannons, power drills, and mecha swords, meaning that I would seek out space-based fights way more often than other kinds of combat.
If you want to progress the story though, you’ll have to fight on the land: some of the better items and upgrades are tied to your quest progress. Starbound’s fiction is complex and incoherent, full of warlike plant people, wisecracking penguin mechanics, and bears who run shops, but its story is simple — Earth has been attacked by a load of tentacles. Its story missions are even simpler, tasking the player with scanning specific items on various flavours of planet (desert, ocean, etc.), before delving into ready-made caverns and beating a boss.
Fortunately, there’s no real time pressure to actually save the Earth. It’s absolutely fine to sack off our homeworld and spend your life as an intergalactic trader, or devote yourself to building the perfect four-bed detached house out of skulls, or — my choice — start a new life as a literal battery farmer. There are so many items, so many ways to get ahead, so many avenues to pursue, and so many ways to play that minor frustrations can usually be forgotten.
Where Chucklefish hasn’t added more stuff, it’s smoothed off some of Starbound’s spikier edges. The act of traveling between worlds and stars is simplified: navigation is now done by clicking on 2D map, sending your ship to planets, moons, anomalies, and even other ships in “real” time. With the upgrade system, your favourite weapons can stay with you for longer, and with terraforming, your favourite planets can be made even better. The result is that there’s now so much to do in Starbound that new players will likely find themselves paralysed by choice, but there’s no need to cover all the bases. Instead, pick one general thing: set yourself a quest to start an intergalactic colony or kill a penguin crime boss. Allow yourself to be distracted along the way, and see how many hours later you come up for air.
Or you can just choose to do nothing. Make the call to just pootle around in space and on the surfaces of new worlds and the game’s perfectly happy to accommodate that decision, even on survival mode, its delightful presentation and cute touches making the procedurally generated worlds feel lived in and loved. There’s a cargo freighter’s worth of stuff in Starbound, but it’s all to be enjoyed — or ignored — at your leisure, making a return visit recommended.
Space keeps expanding and so does Starbound. The game's developer, Chucklefish Games, recently released Starbound 1.3 which has re-implemented mechs – which were present in the beta as techs – as both space and ground vehicles.
How does one build or assemble a mech? Well, sit down and grab a pen and paper to make notes on your blueprints. Here’s a guide to help you get started.
Getting Started: Your First Steps to Building Mechs in Starbound
Maybe he'll like building space mechs too?
Before you get overzealous building mechs like Benny from Lego Movie, you can’t build a mech right off the bat. First, you need to meet with penguin scientist, Dr. Akaggy, who will give you a quest. He is located at the outpost in the mech station. If you don’t complete his quest, you will be denied access to Starbound 1.3's Mech Assembly Station.
I know most gamers don’t enjoy mandatory quests, but don’t be discouraged. His quest puts you behind the wheel of a mech, where you must complete a fun test course. Dr. Akaggy teaches players how to move around, raise a shield, and more – all the skills you need to be a mech pro. Upon completion, you get your own mech as a reward for your patience and flight training.
Time to Fly High -- Controlling Your Starbound Mech
Just believe you can!
During your flight training with Dr. Akaggy, you’ll learn how to use a mech. Let’s go through it in a step-like fashion:
Some Assembly Required -- Building Your First Mech
Once you make your way back to Dr. Akaggy following the mech training mission, he’ll allow you access to the Assembly Station where you’ll unlock several starter mech components that can be crafted with salvaged materials. Just make sure you have the right materials before crafting some of the basic components.
Mainly, these early mech components require a lot of titanium. Future mech parts and mech blueprints will require different resources.
That mech looks really stylish.
There are several components you can customize for your mech: body, left arm, right arm, booster, legs, and horn. Each component has varying defense stats and shows how much energy it has and its usage (except for the horn). There are also special crafting recipes you can unlock later on through various means, like finding a blueprint or speaking to a particular NPC. But if you talk to Dr. Akaggy again, he’ll give you more quests that will unlock more blueprints.
Starting Mech Components![]()
Here's a list of the most basic starting assembly components in Starbound 1.3 and what you'll need to craft them:
Things to Keep in Mind After Assembling a Mech
Mechs have their own energy reserves, which are shown as a blue bar above the vehicle. Using the mech depletes that energy reserve, but so does receiving damage and attempting to pilot a mech on a planet without a body resistant to that particular planet’s hazards; these will deplete energy at a more alarming rate. While weapon usage does not deplete energy due to it being accounted for by a mech’s arms, you need to be careful that your energy bar doesn’t reach 0.
Otherwise, you’ll be ejected from your mech where one of two things can happen. If the mech was brought to 0 energy through damage, the mech explodes. If not, the mech vanishes without an explosion. But either way, being trapped in space is not a good time for someone who needs oxygen.
Unless you’re a robot space core, don’t get stranded
in the vacuum that is spaaacceee! Mixing and Matching Mech Types in Starbound
Fortunately for space explorers, mechs provide a safe escape and an armored shell to help you in airless environments. Plus, different mech bodies give different resistances like:
If you don’t have these bodies while navigating those types of planets, your mech’s energy will drain at a higher rate.
Get Building!
Congratulations! You have completed the Mechs 101 Curriculum. I hope you were taking notes for your final exam!
Just kidding. Instead, let us know how your first flight and building experience went with your first mech in the comments below! And be sure to check out our other Starbound guides for even more tips.
On your adventure through space, you may find yourself requiring a little bit of extra help. Here’s how to crew members for your Starbound ship and how to get them to follow you around.
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For those completely unaware of what Crew members are, let us explain. These are specialized NPCs that will come along with you for your adventure. Not only that, but they’ll also provide some sort of bonus for either yourself or your ship (well, most will anyway). You can get crew members simply by completing quests for them or by helping them in one way or another. Once you’ve completed whatever prerequisite you needed to in order to gain their favor, they’ll request permission to join your crew. Another way to recruit crew members is to kill Dreadwing and purchase Pengwings.
Once you’ve got people happy enough to join you on your Starbound adventure, you’ll need to return to your ship and drop off a crew member. To do this, simply target them on the ship and press E. This will then leave them on the ship. Simply do this every time you want to recruit a new member, but remember you’ll need to upgrade your ship to be able to accommodate more and more crew.
How To Upgrade My Ship In Starbound Mods
To do this, you’ll need to either pay for the fake license at the outpost or get a real license by adding to your crew via SAIL. Once you’ve attained either one of these licenses, all you have to do is upgrade your ship by speaking to the NPC, and purchase the necessary upgrade modules. Once this is done, you’ll be able to keep more people on your ship.
Upgrade Module Starbound
If you want your crew members to follow you around in Starbound, it’s important to note that you can only have two following you at a time. To get a crew member to follow you, simply click on them and they will display a “Following” or “Waiting” message. Ensure that they are following and go off on your adventure. Be warned that some crew members, like a Tailor, cannot follow you as their specific ability replaces the follow option.
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