Starbound Patch Adds Pause Button, Substantial Space Stuff
There’s a new update for spacefaring adventure game Starbound. It adds some cool new space toys. More importantly, it gives you the option to pause the game in singleplayer, a feature that’s inexplicably been missing since launch. You can now finally take a toilet break without fearing space zombies will devour your space colonists during space night.
Aside from the pause button, the biggest changes were made to how players interact with space. The navigation system has been overhauled – planets, moons and ships are visible from the cockpit now, and they move in real time. They’ve added NPC space stations, ships and space anomalies to explore, as well as customizable mechs to explore them in. Yes, mechs. Finally, you can build your own space stations now, using prefab modular parts.
Here’s a list of what the devs call minor changes:
- Gameplay now pauses while menu is open (single player only)
- Non-piercing projectiles (e.g.) rockets now stop at the edge of the entity they hit, correcting knockback direction from explosions
- Adjusted player and other physics to behave better in zero gravity
- Remove gravity from asteroid fields
- Asteroid fields now ring their stars and can be entered at any position
- Add rail tram vehicles and tram stop objects
- When opening inventory, first tab will be selected by default
- Auto-sorting inventory will also stack items
- Add visual novel engine
- Fix threat level of player ships to always be 1 for colonist purposes
- Cheese is now considered produce and players will be paid to launch it into space
- Made several block types permeable to liquids
- Perfect armor set now slightly weaker than tier 6 crafted armors
- Fix several issues with NPC pathfinding
- Various performance improvements
If you’re not afraid of crashing – and you should be, it’s been known to corrupt save files – you can already download the unstable version of the update. If you aren’t in a hurry, the stable one should be out in the near future.
