Escape into space with Starbound and begin your procedurally-generated adventures with a little help from Game Front.
Like Terraria or Minecraft before it, there’s an endless amount of content to explore and an insane amount of items to craft. The major difference? Instead of digging through one world, you’ll have an entire universe of planets to pillage. Get help starting out and learn the ropes with the recently released beta on our beginner’s guide below.
Looking for more crafting, creating, and constructing? Check out the 10 best Terraria Weapons, or some of our picks for Terraria’s best mods. For a little variation, drop by the best Minecraft mods list.
Quests: Learning the Basics
There’s No Place Like Home
No matter what your origin may be, every space traveler will find a new world to call home. Unfortunately, this may be forced at first. Your ship has become stranded above a strange new world and you must begin your difficult journey to find fuel to continue your travels.
Locate the ship’s storage container and take a quick look inside. Retrieve the matter manipulator and equip it to your item bar at the top of the hud. Stock up on the complimentary supplies available in storage. It is recommended that you equip the sword and flashlight.
Before continuing any further, become familiar with your inventory. You will have access to two separate backpacks and hotkeys at the top of the hud. You should keep these neatly organized for quick access to any resources you may need.
Shop Class
Sitting around doing nothing on the ship won’t get you anywhere. Start off by constructing a crafting table. Activate the teleportation platform on the left side of the ship or press the downwards arrow button on your hud. Either option will beam you down to the mysterious planet below.
Pick a direction and begin to wander around. This world is full of exploration opportunities that may result in the discovery of incredible treasures, or just death. For now, we’ll keep it simple. Locate a tree and use your previously acquired matter manipulator to knock it down. Collect the raw wood afterwards.
Open the crafting menu and hover over the table to view the required ingredients. The crafting table requires wooden planks to be constructed, so create them in the menu. Next, build the crafting table and place it on your ship. You can beam up safely by using the teleportation button on your hud while on the planet’s surface.
Food Fight
It’s time to do what we do best. You’re on an unknown planet full of alien creatures that you know nothing about. Let’s kill them. However, before you go bludgeoning forward with your hero sword, you should know that we’re trying to find food. You must make it a clean kill with a hunter’s bow.
Plant fiber is needed to create a bow. Search for vines, green trees, or various plants. Once you have the materials, return to your crafting table and make a hunter’s bow. Beam down to the planet’s surface and begin the hunt. Take a creature down with an arrow and collect the alien meat. You should practice with your timing and accuracy to become a more effective hunter.
I know you’re hungry, but the alien steak must be cooked before it can be consumed. To do this, you will need a campfire. Grab some of the torches that were available in the ship’s storage container and craft a campfire. Use the fire to cook the delicious alien meat. Do not lose your campfire, it will be useful again soon.
Out of the Frying Pan..
It’s time to dabble in one of the internet’s favorite pastimes. That’s right, it’s time to do some mining. Equip your matter manipulator and begin collecting cobblestone and coal. Cobblestone is the rocky material found below the dirt. Coal is black and can be found very commonly near the surface.
Collect enough cobblestone and coal to craft a furnace. Check the crafting recipe to see exactly how much of each material is needed. Once you are satisfied with your haul, head back to you crafting table and build the furnace.
Forging Ahead
By this point, you have probably figured out that the world below is extremely dangerous at times. Weapons, armor, and proper tools are absolutely essentially to survival. To create these, you must first craft an anvil.
For this next part, you will need iron ore. Iron cannot be harvested with the matter manipulator, so use your crafting table to build a stone pickaxe before setting off. Search the world for iron ore and stock up on it. Once you have at least two pieces of the ore, return to your furnace and smelt it into an iron bar.
First Contact
This place is getting somewhat tiring to be on, is it not? It’s about time to leave. The search for fuel has not be successful so far, and you may require assistance. To contact another ship, you require a distress beacon. You will need to acquire pixels, silver bars, copper bars, iron bars, and wooden planks.
The previous tasks have provided you with all of the skills needed to activate the beacon. Copper and iron are common and can found buried shallowly below the surface. If you find a system of tunnels, enter it and search for the required metals. Silver is located deeper than copper or iron and is harder to come by. Pixels can be collected by defeating aliens in battle on their home planet. Be cautious while collecting items. If you die, you will lose a large portion of your pixels.
Once all of the supplies have been gathered, return to your crafting table and create the distress beacon. For this next part, be sure that you are fully prepared. It is recommended that you have a set of armor, an upgraded bow, and an effective weapon. If you are not prepared, take a step back and continue collecting resources.
When you finally feel confident enough to activate the distress beacon, cute little penguins will descend from the sky to rescue you. From life. With machine guns. Equip your deadliest weapon and begin to neutralize the fluffy hostiles.
Dodge machine gun fire and explosions until the area is clear of penguins. Dig a hole in the ground and take cover from the flying saucer above. Escape the explosions and begin firing at the ship with your hunter’s bow. After a few hits, the space ship will fall from the sky and you will be safe.
Collect the molten core that was dropped by the flying saucer. This core can be used to craft a metalwork station on your ship. Unfortunately, your ship is still out of fuel and you’re still stranded on the outlandish world. It seems like you’ll have to find your own way out.
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Leaving the Nest: Space Travel
There’s an endless amount of worlds out there, so why spend so much time draining just one of its resources? It’s time to prepare your ship for space exploration. Space ships are essentially interplanetary steam locomotives, so you will need to find coal on the planet you are stranded on.
Coal is a very common substance and can be found in large portions near the planet’s surface. Collect a decent amount of coal and beam up to your ship. Locate the navigation deck on the right side of the vessel.
The control panel on the wall will allow you to manage your ship’s fuel. Insert any amount of coal into the device and press the large “fuel” button to burn it into the ship. The tank can hold a maximum of 1,000 fuel. This is plenty enough fuel to explore any region of the universe. Planets can take anywhere from 50 to 300 fuel to navigate to.
Fill up your ship and enter the nearby navigation seat. You will need to become familiar with the ship’s navigation system. First, you can claim a planet as your home by pressing the “set home” button on the main screen. You can return here at any point by simply choosing “go home.”
Right now, you are most likely stuck looking at a screen with only a planet and some moons. Right click to zoom out to view the entire system. A system will contain groups of planets orbiting a sun. Right click one more time to view the entire sector. Now things are beginning to seem immense. A sector contains an assortment of stars, each of which contains different planets and moons. The universe contains more worlds than you could possibly ever visit, all containing a unique set of environments and inhabitants. If that doesn’t already seem massive enough, more sectors can be unlocked by crafting starmap upgrades.
It’s time to pick a new world to explore. Most likely, this process will be random. However, you should still put some logical thought into your decision. Choose a star, and then choose a planet that you are interested in. The planet will likely come paired with a moon that can also be explored. The navigation system will offer information about the biome type and threat level. Before setting course, check how much fuel you have and what sort of situation you will be getting yourself into. You do not want to become overzealous and end up trapped on a world much beyond your skill level.
Gaze at the endless possibilities and make a final decision. Choose the world and press the tempting “go” button at the bottom of the navigation screen. If you cannot make a decision due to the overwhelming amount of choices, you can press the random button to navigate to an unknown coordinate. Once you arrive, beam down to the planet and begin your journey to find a home.
Finally, be careful during your travels. You will need different survival skills for different situations and biomes. Traversing unknown terrain can be extremely dangerous and you should be prepared for anything.
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Survival
Environments
If you are still a newborn explorer, the forest biome is probably the best place to start. It is extremely easy to traverse and does not pose much of a threat to miners. The forest is filled with a large amount of trees and creatures. The environment here will not attempt to kill you with every passing second.
While the desert biome is not very dangerous, it is not ideal for mining. The dry barren wasteland lacks an abundance of resources that can be collected. In fact, without proper planning it is easy to become stranded here for quite some time.
Be sure to have enough fuel for the ship’s departure and enough food to survive while visiting a desert world. Mining can also trigger the loose sand to form a dangerous landslide. Furthermore, the scorching days are followed by harsh cold nights. Bring a campfire and a tent to survive the night without freezing to death.
Snow biomes pose a true challenge to the brave explorers who choose to traverse the cold worlds. Before you even think about beaming down onto a frigid planet, place a campfire, torches, and a tent into your inventory.
The torches and campfire will raise your temperature and prevent you from freezing. The tent will allow you to quickly restore your health. Furthermore, if you plan on making your winter trip long-term, you should invest in a set of Snow Infantry armor. Special clothing will grant you winter weather resistance. Finally, be careful while mining in this biome. Deeper levels of the planet will become colder, and can even result in instant death if a campfire is not lit.
Moon biomes are home to the most freezing temperatures you will ever experience. In this type of cold, torches or a campfire will not prevent you from dying. The Snow Infantry set is absolutely essential to surviving on a moon. This environment is definitely not friendly to novice explorers.
One of the most common environmental hazards you will encounter is water. Currently, destroying background tiles is the easiest way to avoid water. Destroying the background will drain the water from the area. This method also works for green poison water. Poison water will inflict damage for a few seconds after contact and is very deadly.
Upgrades
Space explorers can’t just walk around in normal boring clothes using an ancient stone pickaxe, they require a bit more pizzazz. Any anvil or metalwork station can be used to upgrade your character’s weapons, armor, and tools.
If those pesky assault penguins have taught you anything, it is that weapon and armor upgrades are important to survival and efficiency. An upgraded set of armor can offer you increased defense, energy, or special perks. Also, if you find yourself trapped in a mine at night with a seemingly endless horde of monsters attacking, you’ll wish you had something more than a broken sword.
Properly maintained tools will dramatically increase your efficiency as a hunter and miner. A tool can be upgraded from stone to copper, silver, gold, platinum, and finally diamond. Unfortunately, most upgrades require a decent chunk of pixels to craft. Don’t fret though, you will only need to drop your currency on an upgrade one time. Do not waste resources by rebuilding tools. Instead, use raw ores to repair your equipment.
Your ship will come equipped with a tech station. Here, you can apply different techs found throughout the universe. Tech will offer permanent character upgrades such as speed, levitation, double jump, and teleportation.
The ship’s 3D printer can be found in the same place as the tech station. The player can scan items to create a schematic for the printer. Schematics can be used to replicate multiple copies of an item without having to locate the resources for it. However, once you scan an item in your inventory it will be destroyed. Pixels can be used at any time to craft an item at the printer.
Living Off The Land
Since you will be visiting a vast assortment of planets throughout your career as a space explorer, you will need to learn how to live off the land. First, you may notice the many unique creatures that inhabit each world. There are hostile and non-hostile monsters on each planet, each of which are randomly generated. The monsters become more hostile and difficult to kill at night, so it is recommended that you sleep to avoid them.
Some planets are home to settlers of various races. Settlers are actually able to speak to you, and often have homes and supplies. They are a good source of items such as tents, beds, or weapons. Some sectors contain boss creatures that can be summoned by using specific items. The Penguin UFO is summoned by the distress beacon, the Dragon King by the decoy princess, and the Inactive Robot by building the robot.
After spending some time working on a world, you may start to feel hungry. There are two solutions to fill your stomach. Farming is the safe solution, but takes time to actually produce food. Seeds can be planted in the ground and will eventually produce a crop. Hunting offers an instant reward, but you will risk death while battling the creatures. Weaken the monsters with melee attacks and land a lethal hit with your bow. In most cases, this will produced alien meat that can be cooked at a campfire.
Replenishing your health is fairly simple. It only requires that you find a place to sleep for the night. Tents and beds can be used for a proper rest, and your health will be fully replenished upon waking. However, if you do not have access to a bed, bandages can be crafted from plant fibers for instant health.
Most of your time will most likely be spent mining. Mining will be most effective in large underground tunnels below the planet’s surface. It is recommended that you bring torches, a campfire to stay warm, and a tent to sleep in for health. If you want to be precise, you can mine one block at a time by holding the shift key. The flashlight can be used to light up darkened areas, or background tiles can be broken to light up an area without torches. If you wish to see a darkened block out of your range, the matter manipulator can be used as a long-range flashlight. This technique is very useful when trying to find hidden ores.
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