Something went wrong. Very wrong.
During the development of Starbound, it was a fairly amazing and varied game. But during the crunch to 1.0 because they just suddenly decided, "screw it", and the game became a massive shell of its former self. This game wasn't neutered. It was castrated.
Individual stories and reasons for escaping/going into space? Replaced with the biggest sci-fi cliche; you're all now protectors of the galaxy in a generic federation. Yes, even the Florans (who happily eat other sapients) and the medieval Glitch.
Randomized monsters of which you would expect to find many have been largely replaced with set monsters that just somehow spread into the deep corners of the galaxy.
The main line of the game all runs on set pieces and scanning now, and these set pieces range from "okay sized" to "insultingly small", getting smaller as it becomes obvious that they threw things together at the last moment and threw a tarp over the details.
Many promised features and mechanics exist in the game, but have been commented out for...reasons? It isn't entirely clear why things like the racial AI or unique starting weapons were removed, especially seeing as the unique ships are kept, in spite of being part of the Generic Federation of Peace, Love, and Friends.
You can recruit crew unto your ship, and (for some reason) this is required to upgrade your ship (unless you'd rather dump pixels into a fake licence), but the big problem with the crew is that they don't scale or advance with you. If you pick up a someone from a level 1 planet, they remain as they were.
The options to tweak this game are threadbare at best. You can change the sound, the resolution, the keybinds, and if you want to adjust anything else you can go suck lemons.
Oh, and this game doesn't have controller support. Enjoy!
In conclusion: How this game went from something amazing to "Terraria but in space but somehow worse" is utterly baffling.
Addendum: There's also the matter of the child labor that was "employed" at Chucklefish. Hence why this game had an additional star removed. Be it known that the management of Chucklefish used trickery and crooked contracts to steal from students without recompense.
How they escaped having to contribute restitution is simple: There was an incredible amount of international contract work applied, and when you're so young and excited to be working on a project, a retainer is among last of thoughts.
Footer: The Starbound engine is not performant, it lags even in simple singleplayer. Due to the effect of having far too many cooks, the code is a veritable garden of spaghetti code, and the engine has failed to undergo any major retrofit. This can be solved by using OpenStarbound which aims to wrangle the worst code.
However, the OpenStarbound engine has yet to resolve issues that were a result of bad design implementations, so you will still need to use mods to fix mechanical issues such as how terrible mechs are in game.
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