Starbound Dev Blog Round-Up! 03/06/2016

Hello all! It's been a little while since our last dev blog round-up, so here we go!

10th May - Cool Space Wizards

Do you like space? Do you like wizards, also? Wow! You’re in luck!Look out for staves and wands in your travels and become the cool space wizard* you were always destined to be! Staves are two-handed and come with secondary abilities, whereas wands are one-handed and can be dual-wielded!They come pre-enchanted (or pre-SCIENCED?) with a variety of useful abilities. Heal your friends! Cast fire and brimstone and electric purple rain down upon your enemies! … or your friends. We’re not here to judge.*Robe and Wizard Hat not included.

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13th May - Merch of the Penguins

If you find that your weapon really needs an upgrade but you’re struggling to find anything conveniently in a chest at the end of a dungeon, there’s a shop for that now!
Seek out this shady salesman if you’re in the market for rare and powerful weapons! You’ll want to bring lots of pixels, though.We’re firmly in the polishing-up phase now! This week we’ve added some more useful codexes to start of the game, and we’re making a lot of improvements to the UI.Looking forward to showing you more shiny new stuff next week.‘Til then, have a nice weekend! <3

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17th May - Technically...

There’s an Apex scientist in the Outpost developing techs, and he needs your help to test them out! If you can beat his obstacle courses, he’ll give you techs to take with you on your adventures.You can also drop by his lab to upgrade techs if you have any tech cards handy, and later on you may be able to purchase portable tech stations so you can swap out your techs on the go!

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19th May - Making Connections

Since Starbound’s launch in Early Access, everyone’s been asking us to implement an easier way to play Starbound with their friends. A huge portion of our emails are from people sort of mystified by the process of forwarding their ports and inviting people to join via their IP (for those reading this who are still mystified, there’s a guide on our wiki!).In version 1.0, you will finally be able to join multiplayer Starbound servers via your Steam friends list. Hooray!You’ll be able to choose whether or not your Steam friends can join your game via a check box in your Options menu. You can also choose whether to allow people to connect via your IP!In this screenshot, ‘Multiplayer via Steam Friends’ is grayed out because I’m playing a dev build, but this feature should already work in the Nightly build. All of the usual caveats about Nightly apply.‘Til next time!<3

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23rd May - Squishing Bugs

Happy Monday everyone!This week (and for the latter bit of last week) we’re focusing on testing our internal build of Starbound! A handful of us have started playing through the whole game, and the remaining handful have gone to work fixing bugs we encounter along the way, tweaking whatever needs tweaking.An important thing we’ve noticed is that we’re legitimately still having fun playing this game that we’ve spent several years of our lives working on! More fun than we’ve ever had playing it before, I’d say, which is a good sign.We’ve also been catching and correcting plenty of bugs, which is encouraging! We are still adding things to Starbound here and there, but we expect testing and bug-fixing to be our main focus for the next few weeks. :)‘Til next time! <3

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27th May - Stop Right There

Happy Friday, everyone!It’s been a really productive week for finding and smashing bugs! We’ve also got a few people completing small-but-important pre-1.0 tweaks and features. Like this one!It’s never made sense for NPCs to be cool with you stealing their furniture and smashing their pots – you’re not the Hero of Time, and those pots were expensive!So now, if you’re caught stealing from an NPC, they’ll call the guards. Better work on your stealth!Bonus interior design tip:In our play testing sessions this week, Harriet and I discovered that a smoke machine placed in a shallow pool makes for a super awesome sauna. :D

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1st June - Do Glitch Dream of Electric Fluffalo?

Hello! GeorgeV here.Today we’re showing you two things. The first is the Fluffalo!
Fluffalo are livestock that can be raised to produce various materials that can be used to craft useful items. They start out as eggs, which hatch into Baby Fluffalos. If you give your Baby Fluffalo specific foods, they’ll grow into one of these five variants of Fluffalo!
The second is a pair of detectors. The Cave Detector and the Ore Detector. These are both craftable fairly late in the game and will help with exploration and mining.
The Cave detector will help you find cave formations!
And the ore detector will help you find those pesky ores. There’s more around you than you realize!That’s it for today. Until next time…-GeorgeV

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3rd June - A Reading Rainbow

The books you find in Starbound aren’t essential to enjoying the game, but they do provide an interesting look at some of the characters, monsters and cultures you encounter! We’d love for people to enjoy reading them as much as we’ve enjoyed writing them, so we’ve been working on making the experience of reading them easier and prettier.We posted about making more unique book covers a little while back, but the codex UI itself still made reading and sorting through your library difficult. So we’ve fixed it!This is one of the more visual changes we’ve made this week, but we’ve been doing loads. We’ve completed another week of playtesting, fixing lots of bugs and making lots of quality-of-life fixes along the way. It’s been fun, but more importantly it feels like we’re making a lot of tangible progress each day. :)‘Til next week! <3