The very first time you spool up your ship's engines is a particularly special moment, as you warp through the galaxy and look to conquer the first blip on a star map that you can't help but think you will, one day, rule. Combat is a routine charge of sword flailing and bullets, and death carries the harsh penalty of losing a sizeable chunk of income, forcing you into grinding through even more foes, since fighting is also one of the main ways to make money.Д«ut that annoyance is offset by the delightful experience of venturing once more into the unknown.

This means you're forced to spend a lot of your time fighting, which is a shame because fighting isn't all that fun. Worlds are quite small, especially if you're used to Minecraft and Terraria, and many of the game's noncombat mechanics, such as farming, are still underdeveloped. If there's one unifying rule in Starbound, it's that most things want to kill you. Even in its current state, this is a vast, daunting universe that I've barely even scratched the surface of, but it's also one that should be fun to keep exploring in the months to come. I've only just assembled enough brains to create the robot boss (don't ask), but shooting down a fleet of evil penguins and their nefarious UFO (again, don't ask) feels like an age away. I've spent many hours exploring galaxies, and I am still light-years away from forging a set of valuable impervium armor. And believe me, I've experienced things: trees made of brains, barren worlds with little to offer but storms of acid rain, and one world with a nice, normal soil crust but a disturbingly squelchy, fleshy core. Right now it's a game of stories and experiences. There's something amazing out there, and it's up to you to find it. In turn, that equipment allows you to explore more dangerous terrain for more valuable items to create even better weapons, and so on. Bits and bobs gained from rummaging around the cavernous innards of these planets become the ingredients for weapons and armour. There are two main ways you can play at the moment: exploring and crafting. We're promised epic player-versus-player space wars to fight for dominance in the mysterious Sector X, but right now Starbound is a game where you make your own fun. And a Floran's.ДЄ thin progression system-that developer Chucklefish says is temporary-helps you get your bearings and weaves together many of Starbound's mechanical elements, with tiers of quests throwing up boss monsters and slowly unlocking deeper, more dangerous expanses of this broad universe to explore. There's a lot of opportunity and excitement here, even in the game's earliest days. Fashioned out of the exploratory spirit of Minecraft and Terraria, Starbound's premise is to take you (be you boy, girl, robot, weird flower thing, or any of the other races) away from a single procedurally generated world and into an entire universe of planets whose earth you can swing your pickaxe into. You're born into this 2D world with virtually nothing, bar a matter manipulator that lets you slowly chip away at pretty much anything, and in time this high-tech gadget is replaced by rustic farming equipment that allows you to chip faster.

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Starbound armor