Starbound Dev Blog Round-Up! 22/01/2016

It's round-up time! Here are some of our most recent dev blog posts. :)

A Very Merry 2015 Round-Up

This post was a long summary of stuff we did last year! Click here for the full post.

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5th January - It Belongs in a Museum!

Happy Tuesday!Starbound 1.0 draws nearer and nearer! Remember fossils? Pretty soon you should be able to dig ’em up in the nightly. Fossil assets have been in the game for quite awhile, but players haven’t really been able to do anything with them.We’re also working on putting survival mode back in the game, which means that *certain features* will be making a return. But more on that later! Here’s a screenshot of the fossil mini-game in action (the UI is a work in progress!).

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7th January - We Have a T-Rex

Hey everyone!Following up on Tuesday’s post, we thought we’d shed a little more light on the fossil system. :)The new Fossil Station lets you craft stands for fossils and tools for excavation. Let’s go looking for some! You’ll have to search underground if you want to find any, of course.Looks like we’ve come across some skeletal remains! Use the tools from the Fossil Station to excavate them, which is done with the minigame we showed off in the last post.We found a T-Rex skull?! How come there are T-Rexes on distant alien planets anyway? No time for questions, lets display this in our museum!There are three different stand types for three different size categories of fossils. To complete some fossils you’ll need to find multiple parts. Some fossils might be familiar to you but others will be totally alien, like many things in the Starbound universe! I’m sure that there are people who would be willing to pay a pretty penny for a completed skeleton, too. Better get digging, then!

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13th January - My Backpack is Augmented

Hey everyone! After some site wide maintenance, we’re back online. There’s lots of progress to report so let’s get straight to it.Environmental Protection PacksArmagon has been working on a more satisfying replacement for the nano-skins, that provide protection against the range of biome hazards. Not only are these new wearable protection packs craftable, you can customise them with augmentations that bestow the player with useful buffs. They can also be used in conjunction with your Techs!Survival ModeAs you might know, Metadept has been working hard on the reimplementation of hunger. You’ll be able to enable this by selecting the new Survival Mode option at the character creation screen. It’s a heavy work in progress right now, but we have a basic implementation working in-game.A hunger bar appears beneath the player’s energy bar, and will slowly deplete over time. When the bar is empty, you’ll start suffering from a starvation status effect which will begin to drain your health. In order to keep you on your toes, and hinder those who’d stock an infinite supply of food in their inventories, food will slowly rot and become inedible over time.

Player pets are not only capturable, but you’ll be able to do a lot with them! (There’ll be more on that soon!)

Necotho and GeorgeV have completed work on the new Tier 6 Scorched City biome

Work on fossils continues, with many new fossils to discover!

A lot of work is continuing into the story content and missions (but not much can be revealed right now).

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15th January - Collar Duty: Advanced Warfur

Happy Friday!Tccoxon has been working on a set of pet collars that work much like the EPP augmentations. When you obtain a pet collar, you can right-click on a filled capture pod to place it on that pet.The type of collar effects range from stat-boosts to damage, health boosts, light generating and even elemental type effects. There’s also the ‘oblivious collar’ which makes your pet invulnerable but non-aggressive, so you can have a completely passive pet.

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18th January - Tech Support

Hey everyone!Metadept’s work on the new hunger system continues, but he’s also been spending some time overhauling techs! Here’s what’s happening with the new tech system:[ Read the full post! Steam has silly character limits! ]Combined with the new augmentation system discussed last week, you can pull off some seriously powerful moves. Here’s an example of two upgraded techs in action, the Sonic Sphere and Wall Jump:

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20th January - Monkey Business

We’ve been working on missions for the final game! Here’s a little look at the start of an upcoming mission – looks kind of intense. What do you think it’ll be about?This week’s community-run Build of the Week theme is Crash Sites, and there have already been some really really cool submissions. Here’s a crashed freighter from ElvenCourage!

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22nd January - Broom for Improvement

We have talked a little bit about the re-addition of hunger in Survival Mode, which is exciting! There are a lot of different difficulty parameters – hunger, allowing players to beam up from underground, items dropped on death, how much it costs to revive your character, and permadeath. Regardless of how we configure Starbound’s three difficulty modes some players will prefer a different set-up, so to that end Metadept has made all of the modes moddable. Here’s what that looks like!Keep in mind that what you see there now isn’t necessary what the default settings will look like in the final game – it’s just how it’s configured right now.In other news, this character is wielding a broom. Why are they wielding a broom? What’s the significance of the broom? Where are they? What’s going onnnnnnnnn?