Starbound’s 1.2 Update Makes You Feel Like a God

Indie developer Chucklefish released today their 1.2 Vault Update for their title Starbound. The update features an array of new content including ancient vaults, terraforming, weapon upgrades, elemental damage and Space Santa for the holidays. As if that wasn’t enough there are a ton of minor changes, bug fixes, performance improvements and modding API changes.

Enter the Ancient Gateways

Players who have completed the main story line will be able to visit a mysterious trader on the Outpost who will send them on a mission to activate and enter the Ancient Gateways found floating in some systems. The gateways lead to ancient vaults that are challenging, procedurally generated dungeons left by the ancients.

The vaults contain all new dangers in the form of guardians, including procedural bosses and new lost technologies. At the end of each ancient vault lays an ancient anvil where you can spend Essence to upgrade your outdated legendary weapons. This upgrade system allows for many new options for endgame combat styles. 

As if that wasn’t enough, the ancient vaults hold more surprises for those brave or foolish enough to enter. You can find a new device called a Terraformer within the vaults along with a new essence currency. Together you can use these items to terraform planets, allowing you to transform regions or whole planets into different biomes.

Terraformers can be used to expand a region across a planet’s surface, replacing natural blocks, objects and plant life, and eventually changing the type of the planet itself. You can also find microformers are consumable single-use terraformers which provide even more region types to further customize your worlds.

Don’t think that gaining all of this new technology will be easy, however. With the ability to gain great power comes the disadvantage of a greater challenge. Now enemies have elemental resistance and weakness, resulting in your choice of weapon being more important than ever before.

Of course, Chucklefish hasn’t forgotten about bringing the spirit of Christmas to the universe of Starbound. To celebrate the holidays, they have brought Space Santa to the Outpost where you will be able to buy a variety of festive items.

The new update is the perfect Christmas gift from the developer to the fans of Starbound. With so much new content the game is bound to keep players busy for the holiday season and beyond.

Minor Changes and Performance Improvements

As if the new content wasn’t enough, there is a list of minor changes and performance improvements for the game. The changes and performance improvements are as follows: 

Minor Changes

• Holding the activation key while in a distortion sphere tech will force deactivation, to avoid being permanently stuck in small spaces
• Contain tooltips within the game window when they’re near the edge
• Fix a bug with monster kill sounds not playing correctly
• Several bug fixes to monster/NPC behaviours and pathfinding
• Various typo and asset fixes
• Add appropriate “bushes” to the Rust biome
• Update SDL2 to 2.0.5, should fix some fullscreen issues
• Fix some security vulnerabilities in server packet handling
• Fixed an issue where crew would duplicate
• Fix a player inventory networking issue

Performance Improvements

• Improve generation time of older, image-based dungeons
• Other minor improvements to dungeon and world generation
• Use larger texture atlases on graphics cards that support them
• Various optimisations to monster/NPC scripts
• Improve loading speed for dungeon worlds

Not only have Chucklefish given players a ton of new content but also made changes to improve their overall experience with the game. What more could a Starbound fan ask for?

Changes for Modders

With the ability to freely create mods for Starbound the developer made sure to not leave the modders out with this massive update. A huge amount of changes were made to the Modding API and they are as follows:

• Behavior Tree system moved to the engine for performance reasons, now accessible with the root.behavior lua binding. (Check lua documentation)
  • Cleanup node removed
  • Decorator node lua implementation changed
  • Action node arguments moved around, now (args, output, nodeId, dt).
• Generic currency support.
  • Additional currencies can be added and consumed without requiring configuration
  • To associate a currency with a currency item, to be used in crafting, it needs to be configured in /currencies.config
  • .coinitem files changed to .currency

• Object changes for terraforming support
  • Objects can have a new boolean key, “biomePlaced” which if true will cause them to be placed and removed by terraforming.
  • Objects can have a new boolean key, “rooting” which if true will mark all of their anchor spaces as roots and prevent those tiles from being broken until the object is broken (identical to how trees and vines work).
• Player inventory can now be configured in the player.config, allowing changes to:
  • Number of bags
  • Inventory size of each bag
  • Number of action bars
  • Action bar size
  • NOTE: modifications to player inventory size need to be applied both server side and client side, and will invalidate existing characters

• Damage sources, requests, and notifications
  • Introduced new hit types; WeakHit, StrongHit and Killed.
  • Removed killed boolean from damage notifications, replaced with Killed hit type.
  • Damage effects (sounds, particles) can be configured for each hit type (Hit, WeakHit, StrongHit, ShieldHit, Killed) in damage type configurations (.damage files).
  • Added support for elemental types to damage types. Elemental types can be configured in /damage/elementaltypes.config and can be set for each damage type using the “elementalType” key, which defaults to the “default” elemental type. Each elemental type has a unique set of damage number particles for each hit type.

• Monsters
  • Added support for client-side rendering scripts
  • Allow overriding randomly selected monster parts by setting “selectedParts” in parameters
  • Add support for direct palette swaps with the “colorSwap” parameter
  • Allow overriding “shortdescription“ in parameters
  • Allow overriding “dropPools” in parameters
  • Allow setting animation parameters directly in monster parameters with the “animationCustom” parameter. This is merged into the animator configuration.
• Lua API changes:
  • ActiveItemAnimation
    • Removed activeItemAnimation.animationParameter (replaced with animationConfig.animationParameter)
  • Animator
    • Added animator.partProperty
  • Item
    • Replaced item.is with item.matches
  • Monster
    • Added monster.setDamageParts
    • Added monster.setAnimationParameter
  • Npc
    • Added npc.loungingIn
  • ObjectAnimator
    • Removed objectAnimator.animationParameter (replaced with animationConfig.animationParameter)

• • Player
    • Added player.currency
    • Added player.addCurrency
    • Added player.consumeCurrency
    • Modified player.hasItem to allow exact parameter matching
    • Modified player.hasCountOfItem to allow exact parameter matching
    • Modified player.consumeItem to allow exact parameter matching
    • Added player.id
    • Added player.uniqueId
  • Root
    • Added root.behavior
  • Added animationConfig table for use in client side rendering scripts
  • ScriptPane
    • Added pane.playSound
  • Widget
    • Added widget.setSliderValue
    • Added widget.getSliderRange
    • Added widget.setSliderEnabled
    • Added widget.setItemSlotItem
  • World
    • Modify world.spawnItem to allow optionally setting a velocity and an intangibleTime
    • Added world.size
    • Added world.inSurfaceLayer
    • Added world.terrestrial
    • Changed world.entityMoney to world.entityCurrency
    • Added world.universeFlagSet
    • Modified world.entityHasCountOfItem to allow exact parameter matching
    • Added world.lineTileCollisionPoint
    • Added world.addBiomeRegion
    • Added world.expandBiomeRegion
    • Added world.pregenerateAddBiome
    • Added world.pregenerateExpandBiome
    • Added world.setLayerEnvironmentBiome
    • Added world.setPlanetType

Phew! So, yes there are a massive amount of changes made for the many community modders out there which is very much a Christmas present to them.

What are you waiting for? It’s available right now!

There is no need to wait. The 1.2 Vault Update is out right now and available to download for free. So what are you waiting for? If you have completed the main story line, get vault hunting and if not, get that story line complete and then get yourself into a vault.

With so many changes, new content and ever more possibilities for modders, this update is bound to keep the community very busy for a very long time. Now if you will excuse me, I have some vault hunting to attend to.

What are your thoughts on the update? What have you experienced within the depths of the vaults? Let me know in the comments below!