What Did We Play Yesterday?

I usually don't look through the Starbound mods at the Nexus because Steam Workshop is so convenient. Well, I needed to research some farming mods and I wanted to be thorough. Naturally, I anticipated the Nexus would have a lot of nude mods since they can't be hosted on the Steam Workshop or the Chucklefish forum. I'm sure you all know where this is going.

Yes, Undare strikes again.

Gaybound Juice Dudes, Gaybound Mermaid Lords, and Gaybound Fast Food offer a variety of dude dispensers and extremely well-endowed NPCs.

So anyway.

A list of useful Steam Workshop mods for an improved vanilla experience. These are all lore friendly and primarily affect user experience and efficiency.

Quality of Life I: Vanilla Necessities

These are all things that should be part of the vanilla game. Install before playing.

• Better Matter Manipulator (also essential for any type of building IMO)
• Food Rot Dots
• Extended GUI
• Automatic Doors (Trust me)
• Container UI Tweak
• Extra Zoom Levels
• Bug Spawn Fix (because you wanna go for that 42-bug achievement riiiiight)

Quality of Life II: Vanilla Enhancements

QOL that marginally affects gameplay, making tasks more efficient (reduces time or clicks or having to consult the wiki). You will appreciate these after playing a bit.

• Improved Containers - Searchable, nameable containers that can be moved without dropping all items
• Instant Crafting
• Improved Food Descriptions
• Searchable Tenant Tags

Quality of Life III: Space and Beyond

QOE that streamlines gameplay after you've left the starter planet and mechanics that were previously part of the challenge/survival experience become a nuisance to the more advanced player.

• Slower Hunger
• Efficient Watering
• Job Offers - Hire non-penguin crew members for a fee instead of running a dozen quests.
• Food Stack
• Larger Lockers and Larger Lockers Improved - Updates to 256 slots, plus label, sort, and quickstacking.

Quality of Life IV: Build a Better Starbound

Still lore-friendly, but these make significant changes.

• True Space - Overhauls the planetary spread to be temperature based and color-codes planets on the travel map. The arbitrary placement of planets annoy the hell out of me, as did clicking on every single planet in a system to see what it is.

Quality of Life V: Achievements

Some of the achievements in Starbound are tied to incredibly low drop or spawn rates. As I encounter achievement helpers I consider fair I will add them here.

• Reasonable Figurine Drop Rates - Gives monsters a 2%, rare monsters a 5%, and bosses a 15% chance to drop a rare figurine.

Filed Under: questin away, MMMMMMMah Ship Tho, you don’t care trust me

I have recently become moderately obsessed with upgrading my ship.

A few things need to happen. You need a license to upgrade and the upgrade modules to do so (30 by the end). The license can be purchased on the black market or you can recruit crew (2 crew per upgrade level). For crew, either you run ridiculous quests for villagers until one of them asks to come along or you hire penguin mercenaries for 3 diamonds each.

Starbound really exemplifies how dumb quests can be. You’ve got a few core quests that always pop up in games.

1. Go to a place [+ do something]
2. Go to a place [+ do something] and return.
3. Craft an item

Starbound makes all of these available for your gaming pleasure!

The supposed story on this, and I have no idea how true it is, is that quests weren’t really a thing, but players kept coming into early access asking if they could do quests, or where the quests were. And people said listen this is a sandbox you can do whatever you want and they were like yeah but where are the questssss??? So the developers implemented quests. They are randomly generated. The templates are:

Go to X place and destroy X baddie
Go to X place and find and escort a friend back (these are a total PITA btw)
Take X item to Y and return.

And crafting quest lines:
A. 1) Take these seeds and grow crops. 2) Combine those ingredients into dish. 3) Give that dish to X.

B. 1) Bring X crafting materials. 2) Craft X. 3) Give X to Y person.

The loot is not great. The cooking quests do occasionally provide useful seeds or new recipes but I’m a chef boss so yeah nah. Suffice to say, now that I have diamonds coming out of my ass I hired penguins for my remaining 2 upgrades. I love penguins. That’s another post.

Upgrade modules are classified as rare loot, you cannot buy or craft them. The easiest way to get them is to surface loot a planet, which is one of my favorite things to do anyway. I somehow netted 5 on the last forest planet I visited, 2 on the surface and 3 in an abandoned glitch dungeon.

ANYWAY I had all these big building plans but once you’re staring at a huge expanse of flat dirt it’s like… uh where do I start? I think, like Terraria, I’ll probably wait until I’m finished with the game part, then use mods to get all my materials in order. The ship provides interesting layout challenges, the final version is HUGE, and it’s more convenient than having a base on a planet. I’m currently focusing on attracting tenant vendors from interesting biomes, so far giant flower, spring, and luminescent. I want to bring in a mushroom guy next. I need some mushroom furniture and those mini-biomes are actually a little hard to find. I think I’ve only found two and of course I didn’t bookmark them.

Filed under: oregasm, BOOKMARK BOOKMARK BOOKMARK, Steam Workshop Mods

Just a few play notes.

For advanced ores, frozen planets with little life offer a good place to dig undisturbed.

I have now learned that certain mini-biome combinations can be hard to find, and ruing the fact that I did not bookmark the candy biome (forest, spring mini-biome). I found two that are close, but I have yet to find that specific site. A good system for spring biomes is Skat Basin (967631407, -322660756).

I tried out Steam Workshop, which is a painless way to add mods. You simply subscribe to the mod you want and Steam takes care of the rest. There’s a huge overhaul mod called Frackin’ Universe that I’d like to try after finishing my first run, but for now I’m sticking to quality-of-life mods.
* Container UI Tweak (moves container windows to the side of the screen) * Matter Manipulator Manipulator (can control block depth for removing matter, essential for fine-detail building) * Improved Containers (can name containers, auto-fill, and most importantly, move containers without dropping the entire contents) * Food Rot Dots (a colored dot indicates how old the food is so you don’t have to manually check each one) * Improved Food Descriptions (no more guessing what buff a dish has) * Food Stack (makes food stackable in inventory) * Automatic Doors (there is a god)

Also, I want to justify Food Stack, because while it’s true I’m a filthy casual it’s also true I carefully maintain a spiritually-vanilla first-run experience. In survival mode you figure out early on that if you carry a bag of rice, you’ll always be able to cook up a bowl of rice whenever you’re hungry. So I don’t consider this a cheat for anyone who has serious interest in farming and doesn’t want to make multiple trips to harvest.

Also +, just to give an idea of the range of mods in the community, there is a Viera of Ivalice mod.

And finally, a note on voxels. I compressed my pixels to voxels not realizing there’s a 40% loss when they’re decompressed. D: I’ll take my chances with fall death, thanks.

So Starbound is really great and I'm sure I'll never shut up about it.

It's a 2D space exploratory sandbox. I actually prefer a 2D environment for building and farming, and Starbound's looser agricultural system (no seasonal limitations, no strict day schedule, things grow faster, completely custom layout) works better for me than a more specialized (and by necessity rigid) farming sim like Stardew Valley.

The big selling point of this game is you can do whatever the hell you want. This is mostly true. There is a main storyline that involves completing quests (so far, exploratory and fetch quests), but the player can also mine, craft, and farm from the outset, and is later able to establish colonies with tenants, upgrade and staff their ship, and raise animals (and probably other things I don't know about yet). The only issue I have is you need to get to a certain point in the main questline to truly open the game up. The starter planet does not have any higher-grade ore, so you will hit a wall where you cannot make or discover new things until you advance the main quest. Repairing your ship allows you to travel to other planets and check out all the different cool biomes.

I have a problem with this because the first dungeon is actually pretty darn hard, it's certainly harder than any of the areas I've explored since. Combat in Starbound is kinda wonky IMO and it's not the thing I signed up for. I was reading a post by a player who said she'd put 100+ hours into the game but could not get past the first dungeon. This player mostly wanted to farm and was unable to master the combat system well enough to complete this dungeon, but she needed to do this to be able to find new seeds or open the Terramart.

The quest progression makes good design sense in that it gives the player a solid overview and allows them to become familiar with how planets are structured before they venture off into the unknown. I don't necessarily think the dungeon should be nerfed. The developers are committed to the sandbox philosophy, so there is always a way to do whatever the hell you want to do, it just might take a little extra effort. The console commands are readily available and the aforementioned player was ecstatic to learn /admin would make her character invincible, allowing her to complete the dungeon.

The console commands definitely help circumvent tedium. /warp OwnShip is a godsend for me, because I really like exploring deep underground but the hike back to the surface is a slog. I'm currently playing vanilla, but modding looks accessible and intuitive. If you just want to build things there are barren planets specifically for that purpose, as well as mods that improve barren planets by adding weather and other elements.

It's difficult for me to tell how easily the game is picked up because between 100+ hours in Terraria and 40 hours of Starbound early access I already knew my way around. I can offer a few non-spoilery tips to send new spacefarers on their way.
1. If you circumnavigate the surface of the starter planet you will learn what you need to do to progress. 2. If you're playing on survival or hardcore mode you'll need to eat. Explore the surface to find food and seeds. You can cook at a camp fire. 3. More monsters come out at night, but unlike Terraria, you don't need to immediately build a base to protect yourself from zombie hoards. 4. Not all monsters/critters are hostile, and not all humanoids are friendly. If they're hostile they'll usually make a move toward you as you approach. Friendly humanoids will turn hostile if you take decorations and furniture from their houses, but not if you loot items from containers (without taking the container itself). 5. In the beginning you will primarily need iron and copper to build things and these can be found close to or on the surface, but you will eventually have to dig down deep to get core fragments. Take plenty of rope, salves, torches. There is a food source underground, mushrooms. You cannot find tungsten on the first planet. 6. If you don't like digging, once you get past the starter planet you probably won't have to. Just cruising the surface looting containers will net you a bit of ore, and you can purchase bars from Ursa Miner. Fuel is better purchased than mined, unless you just like walking around on creepy moons.