Your AI companion gives you a list of objects to acquire to repair your ship-in this case, core fragments-but doesn’t provide you with information about where to get those items. For example, the game begins when a horde of gargantuan tentacles (of course ) envelope earth, forcing your character to make a rapid escape on a commandeered spacecraft that quickly crash lands on a new planet. In fact, the start of the game is disorienting for the very fact that it gives you so much independence. Starbound ’s strive to give you complete freedom isn’t always a boon, though. Starbound avoids the issues of other procedurally generated games by giving the player a chance to impose their own personality and style In that way, Starbound manages to avoid the issues of other procedurally generated games-games that eschew the charm and personality of handcrafted design for random generation-by giving the player a chance to play as God and impose their own personality and style on the game. Really, there’s a race, a hair style, a weapon for everyone here, and Tiy has clearly ensured that his game would create no boundaries for self-expression. Meanwhile, my friend deeply bonded with his weapon, a giant Erchius eyeball that shot out terrifying laser beams from its blood-red pupil. I grew to become quite fond of my weird little Avian character and her two-handed rocket launcher, not because she was particularly strong, but simply because, in Starbound, I got to play as a freaking bird with a rocket launcher. My own character was an Avian, a bird-like humanoid that dwells in forests, and her armor bonus provided me the ability to glide. And each different race provides you with a characteristic armor bonus. By way of example, the Novakids: glowing cowboy-esque humanoids composed of solar gases, contained by a supercharged metal brand-usually star-shaped-smack dab on their face. And it’s there that Starbound starts to show its own personality, providing a unique spread of seven races that could only be the brainchild of someone high on sugary Lucky Charms or, I don’t know, Galactic Crunch. But you can also choose what race you are.
#STARBOUND CORE FRAGMENTS SKIN#
To this end, the character customization is uncomplicated: you can choose hair style and color, clothing style, and skin tone. And so, not only does it want you to be able to do anything you like, it wants you to be able to do it as whoever you want to be. That grand aim of Starbound ’s is ubiquitous. Which makes sense: Tiy was, in fact, the lead artist on Terraria. The game provides uncountable discoverable treasures like this, all of them contained in a sandbox that bears many similarities to the one provided in Re-Logic’s Terraria (2011). I even found a rare, playable violin worth a lot of pixels-the game’s currency-simply by exploring a fungus-filled cavern for a few minutes.
This is done, in part, by making it almost too easy, as with just a little time and effort you can stumble upon uninhabited bungalows surrounded by bizarre fauna, jungles of pink-leafed tentacle-shaped trees, or other such fascinating settings, all available just beyond the cold hunk of metal that is your spaceship. It’s a game that wants to give you a lot, maybe even everything, but above all it emphasizes and encourages classic exploration. Finn “Tiy” Brice, the project leader of the game, even called Starbound his “dream game,” one that captures the charm of 16-bit classics and throws it all into a blender with vast numbers of vivid, randomly generated worlds. It’s a game that wants to give you a lot, maybe even everythingĬhildhood wish fulfillment is the defining element of Starbound. Yes, it says, there are bazooka-wielding penguins and little gnome people up in space. It’s here, at this point, that Starbound zooms in, a game that wants to grant your wildest imaginings, science fiction without the leash. So perhaps it’s only natural that even at a young age, humans are predisposed to an inexplicable fascination with exploring and inhabiting the mysterious void that lies beyond Earth. And maybe it’s why many of us, as kids, couldn’t help but stare up at the vast, velvet expanse of the night sky, watching the stars glimmer, and wonder, “What else could possibly be up there?”
” It’s why Elon Musk’s SpaceX was able to raise over $1 billion for spaceship manufacturing from companies like Google, with rocket rides for the public booked out for years. Ancient Fragments are a crafting material dropped by the Ancient One.Socrates asserted that “man must rise above Earth to the top of the atmosphere and beyond, for only then will he fully understand the world in which he lives.” This sentiment is at least in part why NASA was established, and why investments are made in “ NASA’s grand dream.