Starbound‘s “Glad Giraffe” update launched today, also known as the “Combat Update”. It adds a ton of new stuff including weapons, biomes, and vehicles to name a few. Given that it’s also known as the “Combat Update”, obviously there are some changes involving combat within the game. Both generated and tiered two-handed weapons now have special abilities you can use by right clicking. There are more than 45 secondary abilities like this available for various classes of both melee and ranged weapons. For example, some guns can have flashlights on them now. The developers have also remade shields and improved Starbound‘s blocking mechanics. Knockback has also been improved to make it more effective and reliable, too.
They have also added a few new classes of unique and rare weapons including boomerangs, chakrams, and fist weapons. You can find blueprints for these and use them to upgrade these new weapons to higher tiers that are more devastating and specialized. You can also dual wield the fist weapons to enable you to use powerful combo finishers. There have also been some small changes to the hammer and spear mechanics. You can continue holding the left mouse button to keep the spear out after attacking. For the hammer, you can left click to wind up, and right click to unleash your charged hammer right into your enemy’s face.
In addition to the combat changes, there are many new monsters to encounter in your journeys among the stars. These new monsters have special abilities and behaviors of their own. You’ll find the new monsters all over the galaxy. They’ve also been given clearer telegraphs to make it more clear when they are about to attack you. You may also want to keep your distance from hostile monsters as they will now damage you when you touch them. The “Electric Stun” status effect has been replaced with “Electrified”, which simply damages nearby monsters periodically.
Ever wish you could travel around your planets a bit faster? Well, Starbound now has a new system for player-controlled vehicles that you can acquire at the Outpost. These vehicles can be spawned and despawned by using Vehicle Controllers. The new vehicles come in two major flavors, hoverbikes, and boats. Vehicles can be repaired by paying a visit to Rob Repairo in the Outpost (you will need to have some auto chips to repair your stuff). The hoverbikes come in several nice colors, and allow you to traverse the surfaces of planets quickly. They have a passenger seat so a friend can come along for the ride, but do drive carefully so as to not blow yourself up (your passenger might not appreciate that)! The boats are similar to previous boat tech, and a friend can come along for the ride in these too.
Starbound‘s “Glad Giraffe” brings some other major additions to the game as well. There is a new class of planets known as “Midnight Planets”. The image below shows one of these. There are also new “Frozen” planets which replace the previous Tundra worlds. Additionally, there are a few new biomes to be found in the galaxy now, too. These include Hive Sub, Steam Spring, and Prism biomes. All underground biomes have seen improvements to their backgrounds in the form of new background caves and parallaxes. There are also another 300 new micro dungeons added in this version of Starbound.
There have been some changes in the area of questing, too. Colonists will now occasionally give you procedurally generated quests. Doing these can help your house or social standing. The “Abandon” button can be used on these procedural quests or you can decline them from the start as well. Another improvement added to questing is the fact that the quest giver’s portrait is now displayed on the quest dialog windows and in your logs.
There are still a number of other miscellaneous things that have been done in this update. Starbound now has craftable elevator objects, “because stairs are so last millennium”. Capture pods are used for capturing and relocating critters (for now), but a more complete pet system will be returning in a future patch. They’ve also added dyes to change the color of clothing and armor alike. The changelog also says there are lots of new items, costumes, objects, colony tenants, and more. They say there are “too many to list”, and the same is true for bug fixes, item tweaks, and balance changes to the world of Starbound. Tons of item descriptions have been added, fixed, or replaced in this version of the game, too.
All in all, Starbound‘s latest update “Glad Giraffe”, has added a lot of new stuff to the game as we’ve come to expect. The game just keeps getting better with time. So dive in and explore all of the new stuff the game now has to offer. Chucklefish Games have also released a new trailer for this update, which you can view below! Now, if I just had some more time to play it!
