We’re excited to announce the release of Starbound 1.4 – the ‘Bounty Hunter’ update!

In this update players can become bounty hunters, seeking out criminal gangs through missions and climb the ranks as they rebuild the Peacekeepers and restore law and order to the universe. There’s also new elemental variants of many monsters, which have a rare chance to be encountered – if you see one be sure to capture it! In addition there’s a ton of new furniture, objects, weapons, and fun new stuff – including drones, password keypad locks, a laser mining tool, and a sports car!

We’ve been working on this update for a long time, thanks so much for being patient while we took the time to get it just right! Here’s an outline of all the changes;

Bounty Hunting

• New procedurally-generated quests that see the player travel to worlds and into space, hunting down criminal gangs
• New Peacekeeper stations for bounty hunters – work your way through promotions and restore law in the universe
• Take the fight...

Hello everyone!

A few years ago we’d announced we planned to bring Starbound to consoles, and dedicated a lot of our studio resources into re-designing the UI for consoles and optimizing the game resources to work on consoles – working closely with Blitworks, who did a fantastic job helping us with the porting.

Starbound was playable to the public at a number of Xbox events in 2018, and had very positive feedback – it played very well on Xbox One and we’d publically announced our intention to finish and release soon!

Late in development while evaluating the game we identified performance issues when playing with four or more players together, but still felt confident we could address them to have it release ready. We worked to optimize and redesign a number of systems specifically to optimize the performance in multiplayer, but ultimately after months of work it still wasn’t enough to get the game up to our standards. With four or more players together we’d still encounter some stut...

Hi everyone!

This week we surprise dropped an unstable release of Starbound 1.4 – the ‘Bounty Hunter’ update!

Since we last wrote about 1.4 on the Dev Blog we took some time to revisit our content plans and how they worked within the main game, and now we’re at a point where we we’d like to invite players to see where we’ve got it!

The themes of the update are the same we’d originally shared! In Starbound 1.4 you’ll become a bounty hunter, taking on new quests to track down wanted criminal gangs, rise up through the Peacekeeper ranks and ultimately restore law and order in the universe! Additionally there’s lots of other content including new dungeons, monster variants, new items, furniture pieces and more to discover.

 
We’re looking to get some feedback from players, if you’d like to preview the update and share your thoughts with us the best place is the ‘beta feedback’ channel of the Starbound Discord. It’s still in development, so things now are not necessarily representative o...

Hi everyone,

Starbound is launching on the new Discord store! As you might have seen from our last post, we’ve added some updates to the PC version for Discord integration. Those changes are going live to the stable version today on all platforms, we didn’t think it made sense to update Discord but leave the other branches a version behind.

We’re really excited about this new integration and the Discord store! Discord has quickly become a really great community space, and having Starbound available right inside the app and better integrated is something we are very excited about. We’ve got a number of active discord channels for our games, and we’ve setup a new one specifically for all things Chucklefish! It’s sometimes difficult for us to monitor all our servers, we’re hoping this will centralize things a bit and make it easier to interact with devs and have a place to ask questions about all our games!

Here’s a link to the Chucklefish Group server, feel free to pop in and say h...

Hi all!

I’m Katy (aka Superconsole), a newish member of the Marketing & Community team here at Chucklefish. Some of you may have seen me lurking in the forums or posting over at the Wargroove Dev Blog, but this is my first Starbound entry!

Lately Healthire, Katzeus, SamuriFerret and Kyren have been working closely with the Discord team to integrate Starbound functionality into the app, making the game more accessible for players. Some of this stuff doesn’t sound too sexy, but in action it’s really cool!

The features include rich presence, which means that you’ll be able to see on Discord whether you’re in menu or in game, and also how many people you’re currently playing with. You’ll also be able to invite players to join your game directly through the Discord app, as well as asking to join other people’s games too.

You may have also heard that Starbound will also be one of the very first games available in the brand new Discord Store! This is super exciting for us, as it means Discor...

Hi everyone!

Today is a special day for the team here, as it marks Starbound’s (official) 2 Year Anniversary since 1.0 and the game’s full release on Steam.

Since then we’ve had a few major updates (woo Mechs!) and are looking ahead to the future of Starbound, including the upcoming Xbox One release. It’s coming along really well, and is currently in the final QA process after the team has made a few performance fixes, and all being well the next step will be sending off for Microsoft certification before it’s ready to go live! We’ll keep you posted once we’re 99.9% sure on an exact launch date.

But special occasions like this are also a great time to look back on the game’s development, launch and amazing community response! A few developers have offered to share some stories, thoughts, and memories about Starbound for this anniversary!

Jay (SamuriFerret):

Starbound is a big game and I’ve had a hand in various aspects of it (I hope you liked my mech designs!) but my favourite ...

Hello everyone,

It’s been a little bit since we gave a development update – I wanted to share the current status and our plans for Starbound over the next few months.

Update 1.4

We started working on update 1.4 and the bounty hunting system late last year. We developed our planned systems and gameplay elements, and spent a long time trying to integrate these new features into the game in a way where they didn’t feel tacked on. After a lot of discussion and experimentation, we came to the conclusion that the bounty hunting, while really fun and exciting in concept, didn’t really feel like it complemented the rest of the game and felt like more of an ‘attached feature’ instead of an enhancement. For now we’ve made the decision to put it on hold – ultimately we don’t want to release an update which doesn’t meet our standards for excitement and fun.

We are still planning to release some smaller scope content updates – and some of what we’ve developed for 1.4 may be featured in those. First...

Hello Everyone,

It’s been a few weeks since we checked in…

Content Update

The bounty update has taken a little longer then we’d planned. We’ve decided to deploy some of the content we’ve been working on in a smaller patch.

This update will primarily be some fun things players can play with while we finish up 1.4. We’ll be able to share more in the next few weeks about what’s included and when to expect this new content.

Here’s a preview of a new themed furniture set!

Wiki Facelift

I’ve been working on the Starbound Wiki for a long time (it will be 5 years old in a few months). In that time it hasn’t really changed how it looks, and has needed a visual refresh for a while.

So I’ve updated the wiki’s default theme! Feel free to give feedback on the design, it’s a wiki after all so things can be changed to best meet what’s going to work for our players. It’s also a huge wiki – so if there’s a page that doesn’t work in the new format well please report it! I expect that there will be s...

Hey, everyone!

Things are busy here as we’re still hard at work on the 1.4 update. A number of players have been encountering a crash bug when switching between weapons of the same type, so we decided to address that with a hotfix update rather than waiting for the next patch.

While we’re at it, though, we figured we’d throw in one more useful feature: category tags for Steam Workshop mods! The mod uploader tool now allows you to select one or more tags for your mod, and these can be used to filter searches in the Workshop. Hopefully this will make it a bit easier to sort through the amazing variety of available mods!

On the development side of things, we’ve been focusing on exciting events for you to encounter in pursuit of your bounty targets. You didn’t think it was going to be simple, did you?

In this example, your investigation is stymied by a code-locked door with your target tantalizingly out of reach. You’ll need to use clever social engineering to obtain the code from an u...

Hey, everyone! In our last development blog post, we talked about tackling bounty assignments. The universe has a surplus of criminals to round up, and you can take assignments to track them down via the new Bounty Board!

The Bounty Board shows you which gang you have been assigned to tackle, as well as showing you the current targets available to you. At any given time, you’ll be assigned to investigate one criminal group and their activities in and around a particular system. Once you work your way up their ranks and take down their leadership you’ll move on to a new, more challenging set of villains in a new sector.

As you turn in more and more bounties, your rank will increase which will grant you better bounties and more rewards. I wonder what kind of assignment is in store for top level bounty hunters?

Until next time!

Evening, everyone! I’m excited to announce that Poptop plushies exist now, thanks to the great folks at Game-Legends!

Poptops look harmless and generally enjoy prancing around meadows while whistling sweet-sounding melodies, but they really don’t like adventurers invading their personal space.

They were first designed by Starbound community member TomServo for the Monster Monster Contest all the way back in 2012, and have since become one of Starbound’s most recognizable monsters! We’ve had requests for plushies ever since, and we’re super glad they’re finally a thing.

These Poptop plushies are adorable and soft and whistle when you press their left paw. It’s like having a Poptop in real life, but without all of the dying!

Game-Legends has also released some nice new Starbound t-shirts. Head over to their Starbound shop to check them out. :)

Hey again, Starbounders!

We hope you’ve been enjoying the Starbound 1.3 Spacefarer update over the summer. You’ve have assembled some pretty cool mechs! Among other things, we’ve been working on our next Starbound update, and we’re excited for it as always!

Starbound 1.4 will see the player become a bounty hunter, tracking down wanted criminals for the new Peacekeeper organisation. A new bounty board will show who needs hunting down, the conditions for their arrest, and your ranking as a Peacekeeper.

Tracking down one of these criminals isn’t a straightforward affair though – you will have to follow leads across multiple planets, raiding safehouses for your next clue, or fighting off members of your target’s gang. Sometimes you’ll have to take targets alive as well, using the Peacekeeper device known as the Long Arm. This gauntlet lets you handcuff targets remotely, but requires careful aim to lock down the perp!

We’ll be showing off more over the coming weeks. Until then, happy Sta...