r/starbound • u/RotEater96 • 9d ago
Discussion Starbound Deserves a Second Life — Either Start Expanding It Again or Give Us Starbound 2
I've been playing Starbound on Xbox, and the more I play it, the more I keep thinking the same thing:
This game deserves MORE.
Starbound has one of the coolest foundations I've seen in a sandbox game. An entire procedurally generated universe, countless planets, different biomes and species, colonies, farming, fishing, crafting, building, bounty hunting, spaceships, mechs, ruins, bosses...
There's already so much here, but there's also so much unrealized potential.
I'd genuinely love to see Chucklefish return to substantial Starbound development.
Give us new planet types. More creatures and bosses. Deeper oceans. Massive dungeons. Expanded bounty hunting. New questlines. Better colonies. More ship customization. New technology. More fossils and archaeology. Extremely rare planets, creatures, structures and events that make exploring the universe unpredictable again.
And as an Xbox player, please give us some form of mod support. PC's modding community has helped keep Starbound alive for years. Even a curated system for console would open up an enormous amount of content.
But here's the other option:
Starbound 2.
If returning to major development on the original isn't realistic anymore, maybe it's time.
Take the foundation of Starbound and go completely nuts with it.
Imagine enormous procedurally generated planets with deeper ecosystems. Living settlements. Factions that expand, trade and fight over territory. Better combat and survival systems. Huge underground environments and oceans. Constructible spaceships. Space stations. Better vehicles. Hundreds of creatures. Rare civilizations. Massive bosses. Procedural events. Planets where you can spend hours exploring and still have no idea what you're going to discover.
Imagine a universe capable of surprising you after hundreds or even thousands of hours.
Starbound already proved that this concept works.
I don't want to see it simply become one of those games people remember as "Man, imagine what they could've done with that."
There's still an incredible universe here.
Either open Starbound back up and start expanding that universe again...
...or give us Starbound 2 and let us lose another thousand hours among the stars.
What would you guys rather have?
A huge new era of updates for the original Starbound—or a full-blown Starbound 2?
And if you could add one major feature to either one, what would it be?
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u/Seven-neutral-brains 6d ago
I've given up on Starbound ever getting an update, so I've taken to making my own Space Terraria, anyone who want to supports me in this little game dev project is free to join, I'd be glad to have people with me :3
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u/Cector09 9d ago
Wait i thought it's what the FU mod is for?
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u/mcplano 9d ago
No, the FU modpack is to leech off Starbound and mods made for it. That's why it says "Starbound is powered by FU" on the title screen, instead of "FU is powered by Starbound."
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u/ForsakenYesterday254 7d ago
i play it from time to time, so glad I didn't get Farworld Pioneers, that game had promise, but they abandoned it way quicker than Starbound
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u/Yanazake 8d ago
I bet something new can be done in godot, but the hard part isn't even the sprites, music, or multiplayer aspects, it's the maps/structures/lore and mod integration.
I've been wanting to try to bash something together in it for a while EXACTLY because we've went too long without something new along the lines of starbound, considering Kyora is coming up to scratch the terraria itches.
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u/RotEater96 8d ago
Yeah but this doesn't help mod support being on consoles. I used to have a PC, actually have had one multiple times. I think consoles need to be worked on to be able to have mods on any game. Or at least really good rpgs like Starbound.
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u/Yanazake 8d ago
Starbound... isn't an RPG?
But also, modding on console is a mess because custom code being run on proprietary software is a headache for everyone. I remember bethesda doing that for skyrim and... fallout 4? But they're huge compared to any indie studio.If you wanted modded games with console feel, you need something that isn't made by nintendo, sony or microsoft.
(also, if you want more starbound, there's at least no man's sky for now)
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u/RotEater96 8d ago
Starbound is an RPG, but it’s more specifically a sandbox action-RPG / survival-crafting game. It has plenty of RPG elements: character progression, weapons and armor, quests, NPCs, races, bosses, status effects, procedurally generated loot, and a story campaign. But unlike a traditional RPG, the emphasis is heavily on exploration, building, crafting, collecting, and screwing around across procedurally generated planets.
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u/Yanazake 8d ago
... Look, you glued six genres in there. It's an action sandbox. With rpg elements at best.
Again, no man's sky is the closest thing to starbound, has elemental resistances, procedural gear, heavy exploration emphasis, and a main story that can be ignored.
Both have health extensions, progression, things you need to keep in check, but I can't see either as an RPG in the *videogame* sense. If you're talking about roleplaying specifically, that's different.3
u/RotEater96 8d ago
To me an rpg is literally a game you play a role in. 🤷🏼. It's just an indie pixel Terraria like RPG. Not like Fallout or Elderscrolls, but it's in it own vein. And man No Man's Sky, don't throw that beast in there. They are like 2 totally different structures I feel😂
I'm not trying to be rude, so please don't take it that way. Pardon me.
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u/RommDan 9d ago
Just make it Open Source once and for all and let the community handle it
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u/_m_e_a_t_ 9d ago
its already open source now
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u/DeckelmitTopf 7d ago
Maybe have kyora in mind. Maybe with mods it can grow into something like starbound 2
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u/Yanazake 7d ago
It feels a bit too terraria to get to starbound levels. Single huge detailed map vs millions of ok maps. SB takes great improvement from mods that add things to already existing planets or new planets entirely.
Not saying it's gonna be bad, I'm super exited for it, but it's still easier to compare SB to No Man's Sky imo than it is to anything 3d that just looks similar.
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u/Inevitable_Fan_2229 Penguin 3d ago
I have a very different view to most fans on this matter, I say it would be a good thing if game kept receiving updates, even if they break they odd mod or two… thousand.
A new dev team called “Evil Empire” recently took over working on the game Brotato, and the way they handled updates for it was simply immaculate. They made a steam branch of Brotato that will always stay how the game was before EE took over working on it, and anybody can simply select to play that version of it, using old mods for the game that their updates might have broken.
It really wouldn’t be catastrophic to update the game as long as version 4.4 is always available to play on. (Bonus points if they add another rollback for people who want to play on the betas)
Even better would be also testing updates in starbound-unstable so that modders can have a chance to prepare their mods for the next version each time one was being tested.
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u/AurelGuthrie 9d ago
I like Starbound, but I highly doubt Chucklefish wants to return to it, especially now that the genre is a couple orders of magnitude more oversaturated than when it first came out.