Even your crafting tables themselves can be upgraded to allow you access to newer and better gear. Craft better armor, improve your mining tool’s range and power, unlock new tech that allows you to double-jump or turn yourself into a spiked rolling ball, and create protective suit modules that let you visit planets cloaked in radiation and deadly temperatures, which give you access to new resources you can use to build and upgrade even more.
Not every planet is interesting, but enough of them are to make exploration worthwhile and fun, and occasionally surprising.Īs you travel, explore, and gather, you begin to upgrade just about everything in the game. There’s plenty to discover: colonies of friendly aliens living on the surface, forgotten civilizations hidden underground, flying pirate ships, indestructible ghosts, even tiny neighborhoods of gnomes guarded by patrolling robots. There’s a massive and sprawling universe out there filled with planets to visit: some green and leafy, some arid and sandy, some mostly covered in ocean, some radioactive, swimming in lava, or covered in ice. Like Minecraft or Terraria, the pixelated sandbox of Starbound involves plenty of mining, gathering of resources, inventory management, buying, selling, farming, stealing, and crafting.
