Starbound Ultimate Survival Guide

When you start playing Starbound, you will find yourself on your ship, stranded above a random planet. The key to getting off this planet and exploring the universe beyond is to beam down and explore, but a torrent of hostile life forms, inclement weather and various other dangers await you. In order to survive, you will have to make the most out of what you have at your disposal, which at the beginning consists of the contents of your ship locker: a Matter Manipulator, a basic sword, a flashlight, 10 torches, and some seeds for food that can be eaten by your character’s race.

These tools are more than adequate to get you well and truly on your way to becoming a force to be reckoned with in the Starbound universe, if you use them wisely. Assign the items to a hotkey so that you can quickly and easily switch between them, as you never know when you may encounter a hostile alien and need to draw your sword.

Before you embark upon your journey, however, here are some essential things to remember:

- If you starve, you die. Keep a good supply of food at all times and take note if your hunger meter flashes up. Be sure to maintain a farm near your primary shelter.
- If you get too cold, you die. Your screen will begin to mist and turn a bluish-white when you are cold. Stand near a torch or camp fire to warm yourself up again.
- Take note of weather conditions. Some planets have acid rain, which depletes your health unless you’re in shelter, and others have meteor showers that can destroy surface structures. If you see craters in the ground, it may be wise to build your shelter underground to gain additional protection.
- Construct your shelter near the point where you spawn on the planet. Long walks can be dangerous early on in the game.
- At night, you will encounter more ferocious enemies in greater numbers. Be careful when venturing out at night, and keep your flashlight equipped.
- You can teleport to escape danger. If you are above ground and you are nearing death, quickly click on the teleport button to return to your ship.
- It can be useful to keep a stack of dirt blocks assigned to a hotkey. If on low health and encountering an enemy, simply wall yourself in, or wall the enemy in.

The Matter Manipulator is your basic all-purpose tool, capable of digging, chopping, cutting and mining. The first thing you should use it for is to cut down any trees in the area. You will get both unrefined wood and a sapling from each tree you cut down, and the wood can be crafted into wooden planks (press ‘C’ to access the crafting menu), which in turn can be used to produce other useful items, such as a camp fire (essential for cooking food and keeping warm) and a Wooden Crafting Table. You should plant the saplings nearby for an easy and inexhaustible source of wood.

The wooden planks can also be used to construct your initial shelter, in which you can place your crafting table and create a wooden bed that recovers your health when slept in. Remember to place your camp fire near to your bed to keep you warm, and dot several torches around the place so that you don’t freeze to death inside your own shelter. Also remember that left clicking with the Matter Manipulator or a material in hand allows you to work with the background layer.


Ensure you set up a farm. For this you will need your seeds and a Stone Hoe, constructed from 25x Wooden Planks and 10x Cobblestone. Use the hoe on an area of the ground to till the land and make it ready for farming, then plant your seeds and wait. To harvest the crops when they are ready, hover your cursor over them and press ‘E’. The next best way of obtaining food is to craft a hunting bow using 10x unrefined wood and 1x plant fibre. The hunting bow causes Raw Alien Meat to drop when you kill some aliens (some will drop leather instead). Cook the meat on your camp fire to enable yourself to eat it.

Once you have constructed your shelter, it’s time to go exploring! Be wary, though, as caves and mines can be just as deadly as the surface of the planet, with alien life forms dwelling deep beneath the surface. It’s always a good idea to keep a large stack of torches on you when exploring underground, as not only can you get cold, but your flashlight can be somewhat limited below the surface.

You should also head to your crafting table and craft a Stone Pickaxe (10x Cobblestone and 20x Wood Planks) to make mining faster, as it will be unbearably slow with the matter manipulator. The main resources you need to look for to begin with are Copper Ore and Coal. The Coal will be useful for creating more torches, whereas the Copper Ore will be needed to create armour, which is the next thing you should focus on in order to continue surviving. See our Ultimate Armour Guide for more information on creating each armour set.

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