We Love It's Guide to…
After fleeing a destroyed home, beam down to alien planets to gather, craft, build, and repair your ship for galactic exploration.
Released 22 Jul 2016
Explore Procedural Planets
Build Planet Colonies
Upgrade Your Starship
You’ve fled your home, only to find yourself lost in space with a damaged ship. Your only option is to beam down to the planet below, repair your ship and set off to explore the universe...
Developed by Chucklefish · Published by Chucklefish
You create a character from one of seven playable races and take the role of a spacefarer whose ship is damaged after fleeing their home. Explore a procedurally generated galaxy, visit its planets, and follow a story campaign with quests, characters, dungeons, and bosses.
On planets, gather resources, mine, craft equipment, fight creatures, and discover settlements and other locations. You can also farm, build homes or colonies, collect creatures, and recruit residents or companions for your ship.
Crafting and equipment upgrades help you handle new hazards, while expanding and improving your starship opens up further travel. Choose Casual, Survival, or Hardcore rules, play online co-op, and use mod support to customize the experience.
Players who enjoy Starbound often point to the freedom of traveling between planets, building and customizing homes or ships, and discovering different biomes and settlements. Reviews also repeatedly praise the atmosphere and music, and many say mods add substantial variety and depth. Opinions on the unmodded game are mixed: some find its quests and progression repetitive or shallow, while others enjoy its relaxed exploration and sandbox activities. Many reviews also express frustration about development stopping and raise ethical concerns about unpaid contributors.
In Starbound, you create your own story - there’s no wrong way to play! You may choose to save the universe from the forces that destroyed your home, uncovering greater galactic mysteries in the process, or you may wish to forego a heroic journey entirely in favor of colonizing uncharted planets.
Settle down and farm the land, become an intergalactic landlord, hop from planet to planet collecting rare creatures, or delve into dangerous dungeons and lay claim to extraordinary treasures.
Discover ancient temples and modern metropolises, trees with eyes, and mischievous penguins. Make use of hundreds of materials and over two thousand objects to build a sleepy secluded cabin in the woods, a medieval castle, underwater arcade, or even a space station.
Starbound has been built from the ground up to be multiplayer and easily moddable. You have the tools to make the universe your own and modify the game to suit your play style - add new items, races, planet types, dungeons, and quests - the possibilities are limitless.
Choose from one of 7 playable races and customize your character
Save the universe in an epic story campaign featuring colorful characters, bosses, dungeons, and quests!
You're the captain of your very own starship! Decorate it, expand it, and use it to explore a procedurally generated universe
Colonize uncharted planets and collect gifts from your tenants - if they like you, they may even ask to join your ship crew!
Three game modes - Casual (no need to eat), Survival (eat to survive/drop items on death) and Hardcore (permadeath)
Craft thousands of objects - building materials, armor, weapons, furniture and more
Capture unique monsters to fight alongside you
All content is available in online drop-in/drop-out co-op
Built from the ground up to be easily moddable. You have the tools to make the universe however you'd like it
| Platforms | Windows, macOS, Linux |
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| Achievements | 51 |
| Age ratings |
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| Players | From 1 (maximum not specified) |
| Play modes |
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| Other modes |
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| Multiplayer | Starbound supports single-player and multiplayer. Official store information confirms online co-op, online PvP, cross-platform multiplayer, and online drop-in/drop-out co-op, with all content available in co-op. Reviews also report dedicated servers, private servers, LAN play, and joining friends directly, but no official player-count limit is stated in the provided store text. |
| Multiplayer & mods | The game is officially described as easily moddable and supports Steam Workshop. Reviews indicate mods can substantially expand multiplayer play, but compatibility and updates can affect multiplayer sessions, and players generally need matching setups for modded play. |
| Controller required | No |
| DLC / extras | 1 listed on Steam |
| DRM / EULA |
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| Content notices |
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| Metacritic | 81/100 View on Metacritic |
| Website | Official website |
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