Starbound is a new Sci-Fi themed space exploration game being developed by Chucklefish, featured through Steam.

It follows in the wake of Terraria's success with some similarities and I believe some of the same people. The game is a 2-dimensional side-scrolling procedurally generated Universe, with virtually unlimited worlds to explore and exploit. The game features a bit of mining and crafting and of course combat, including several boss fights which drop resources needed to advance in the game. Currently the Universe is being generated by Chucklefish and downloaded to all the beta testers, this makes it very easy to spoil the game for other players by publishing discoveries. Hopefully it will be possible to generate a unique Universe with a random seed, although I suspect that the generation process could take a long time. There are five playable alien races as well as Humans (of course); each race with its own craftable armor and weapon sets. There is supposed to be well over 1000 craftable schematics at release and it's possible for any character to learn the other race's recipes. Various merchants sell schematics and some can be looted from chests. The game currency is called pixels and the only death penalty is a 20% loss of currency and a respawn back in your spaceship; pixels are required in many of the crafting recipes. The spaceship is your mobile base, but you need to exploit the planets to acquire fuel for your ship, currently your ship can be fueled with coal, uranium, plutonium or solarium. The Universe is divided into tiered sectors, there are 5 sectors and all but the first requires to be unlocked through game-play. The Alpha sector where everyone starts has these ores available; coal, copper, iron, silver, gold, platinum and diamond. Trees can be harvested for wood but once you clear cut a planet's surface these don't grow back, wood can be converted into coal in a furnace at 10:1 ratio. It's a bit of a challenge to survive the first few hours after character creation as you will suffer from hunger and exposure to cold during the night hours; you need to build a basic shelter and campfire pretty quickly and the high-tech tool that you start with is poor at gathering resources. But of course you can always retreat to the safety of your ship, and the game mechanic is such that sleeping in bed will recover your heath and not increase your hunger. You will utilize low-tech stone tools in the form of an axe, hoe and pickaxe as your first upgrade to gathering efficiency. The planets that you will be exploring and exploiting come in about 7 different sizes from Tiny to Huge, and there are numerous types of Biomes to be found, it will start the player on a forest type planet of medium size.

I've already spent well over 100 hours playing the beta versions of Starbound, and I've been able to progress one character to the highest tier gear in that much time. However its clear that the beta version is setup to make progress in higher-tiers very easy, it could easily take many more hours once the final version of the game is released. This game is well designed to support large multi-player servers and I've play-tested multi-player on our LAN with my brother who also bought the game. We have great expectations for Starbound and so far it's looking pretty good. There's a few notable bugs at this point and a lot of things which just aren't finished, but the game is still in a playable condition.

Starbound Guide that I created on STEAM, recreated here.

Discoveries in version Offended Koala.