Frackin Universe Change Ship
Fermina Enge
I was pleased to see that the expansive mod had embiggened itself over the last three years, pretty much to the point where everything felt new. Yeah, many of the craftable items are the same as is the general sense of gear progression that comes from mining new ores on new planets to build things that help you mine newer ores on newer planets. But there was a clever implementation of a new Research system that ties it together in a (slightly) coherent package.
Play or skip the tutorial. When it asks whether you want the default ship or the Build Your Own Ship (BYOS) option, choose BYOS. This allows you to skip a huge block of vanilla Starbound progression and immediately construct a ship of your dreams.
Get a Mining Laser ASAP. It is better than Mining Picks, Mining Drills, and the best, most upgraded Matter Manipulator any day. You will still want to upgrade the latter over time though, as the Mining Laser burns through both normal and background blocks, which can be problematic in certain edge cases. Like when the background is full of lava, for example.
Did you build a base on an Ocean planet? Lobsters are EZ-Mode. Craft some Lobster Traps and watch as they magically fill up with free food. Lobsters stack to 99, do not require cooking to eat (but you can if you want), and actually sell for a decent amount (1980px per 99 stack). While there is an indication of freshness, lobsters do not appear to spoil; this may be a bug that is fixed later.
Where Grow Trays excel is when they are used either with a stackable product, such Silk, or with a food item that normally despawns when harvesting, such as Wheat. In most other situations, I prefer planting crops in dirt.
For me, the most practical use of an ITD was moving items from a Lobster Trap or Growing Tray to a box automatically. If the box is actually refrigerated storage, then all the better. Red, blue, red, blue, done. If you want something more fancy, you are on your own.
Always deploy with your Mech on new worlds. Depending on how much (if any) time you spend with the Mech-building side of things, your Mech will not make you invulnerable to planet effects or damage for long. That said, it will absolutely extend your life by a few precious seconds in case you get beamed down in the middle of a USCM camp full of snipers that can one-shot you. Just note that if your Mech explodes, you die with it. So either beam back up to your ship or bail.
Get an X (Radiation, etc) Ball Wand/Staff. Regardless of your fighting style, having a Wand/Staff with Radiation Ball (or whatever) will change your life. Specifically, it will allow you to attack enemies around corners/from range with guided death. Even better, you can dig a 1-block hole in a wall or floor and then squeeze your orb of death through it to murder your foes with impunity.
Nautilus Armor / Kraken Armor / Leviathan Armor
This armor series eventually grants you Acid, Poison/Bio, Gas, Pressure, and Oxygen immunities once you reach the end. If you combine this with the Thermal Shell EPP, you will be immune to the most common damage types. A Field Generator EPP will make you further immune to Radiation, at the expense of making lava a concern again. This will cover just about everything aside from Shadow and Insanity, which can handled with EPP Augments.
Valkyrie Armor
With this set, you get Oxygen, Gas, Pressure, and Radiation protection, plus technical immunity to fall damage (you float downwards). This seems like considerably less protections than the same-tier Leviathan Armor set, and it is, but the Valkyrie gear boasts a 500% weapon damage modifier instead of 276%. Definitely a glass-cannon set, with half the armor of Leviathan and a third of War Angel.
[EPP] Thermal Shell
Providing protection against heat, cold, lava, and burning on top of 20% Fire and Ice Resistance, the Thermal Shell is one of the most useful EPPs in the game. Many armors can give you heat immunity, but none of them will save you from taking damage in lava, which is weird. Even the Field Generator, which appears to be a strict upgrade to the Thermal Shell given how it includes Radiation protection, makes you vulnerable to a lava bath once again.
[Augment] Immunity I & Immunity Field
Pretty much the final word with Augments, Immunity I provides protection against Heat, Cold, Gas, Radiation, and Proto-Poison at a base level. Immunity Field is a recent, stronger addition that grants a 2nd level protection to those same qualities while adding on Radiation Burning, Poisoning, and Liquid Nitrogen immunities. Still does nothing versus Shadow/Insanity/etc damage, so be wary of what planets you are beaming to. Although having a specialized armor set against those qualities with a Thermal Shell with an Immunity Field Augment to handle the rest will do you well.
What has won me over are all the changes made to support the above complexity. Dozens of new elements and ores have been added to the game. There is now a large number of completely new planet types, and every planet has been infused with micro-biomes. Difficulty is increased across the board as well, making the exploration and exploitation of these new worlds require a lot of attention.
That said, I did struggle in the beginning. There was too much to take in. There are some tutorial quests that kind of guide you around, but almost all of them simply exist to get you to construct one of the many new crafting stations and leave you staring at yet another huge list of miscellaneous nonsense. The only way past the Analysis Paralysis is to hyper-focus on the one thing that you want to craft, and follow that one thread all the way to the bottom.
To repair the ship engines, enabling flight to other systems, players must clear the Erchius Mining Facility mission. After repairing the ship's thrusters and FTL drive, Penguin Pete, the shipyard captain at the outpost, will open quests to upgrade the size of the player's ship. These quests are given where he is stationed, just west of the outpost.
To upgrade your ship you will need crew members, each upgrade also increases the number of crew members which can be on the ship. To get crew members you have to do generated quests for NPCs throughout the universe - either in villages or summoned tenants. These quests will earn favor with the quest-giver once completed, and they may ask to join your crew. The NPC type determines what role they'll assume on the players ship.
Players can also recruit penguins as crew members from the Beakeasy bar beneath the outpost. In order to recruit penguins the bar must be reopened by defeating the mini boss Dreadwing. Then bar patrons will join your crew in exchange for a dubloon.
Alternatively, there are illicit ship licenses which can be purchased for pixels from the Penguin Bay. These licenses will allow the ship to be upgraded without the requirement of crew, but players must still provide upgrade modules to Penguin Pete at the shipyard.
Before 1.3, the upgrade level of the ship determined its planetary Tier which did affect Tenants spawned inside your ship. For example, merchant tenants were able to sell tier 7 or tier 8 random Weapons (normally tier 6 is the highest possible tier for random weapons). As of 1.3, the planetary Tier of your ship is always 1.
Note: As of 1.4.4 the mechanical, grey background shown in the upgrade GIFs below has been covered by a layer of Wall Panels, Ship Supports, and Metal Railings. This block pallet stays the same throughout every race's ship. These blocks can be mined and used by the player however they wish, revealing the original background.
note: acquiring the required crew members produces an item that may land on the ground if your main inventory is full. Just pick it up and it will be consumed immediately, triggering the upgrade quest in the process.
Starbound was always going to be a game that players would want to re-build in their own image. A procedurally generated sandbox means systems. Lots and lots of systems. It means the community can change whatever they want, and the players have responded at a phenomenal rate of moddery. I've done ridiculous things to my game that I'd never recommend you do. I've added a Dubstep gun and a Vuvuzela*. But there are broader changes I'd happily recommend: tweaks to ship shapes, planet generation, better farming. There's as much to explore in the modding scene as there is on Alpha Diadem 028 III C, and I've beamed down to have a look.
Before you do anything, install this Starbound Mod Manager. It acts like teacher on a school outing to ensure the mods know what they're doing, where they need to be, and how to get along. That's really important when dealing with potential incompatibility between mods. It'll do all this while preventing changes to any of the game's core files, which is probably its most invaluable trick.
And because I dared to start with something as utilitarian and emotionally crippled as a mod manager, my next suggestion would be to grab the Creative Mode mod. It features in both Starbound Nexus and the official channel's "top mod" list, and allows you to play a free-form Jazz solo with the game's items. Its purpose is simple: to allow the players to access as much (though not quite all) of the content as and when they need it. It's the toolbox to unlock the actual sandbox, so you have a lot more resources and abilities available, like invincibility and a super-powerful matter manipulator. It could seem like a giant box of cheats, but the flight mode reveals its true purpose is to enable players to construct anything, unbound by the notion of grind and gravity. There's still some smelting and crafting involved, which I like because it fits into the game's theme, but this is perfect if you're looking to make something of the world.
Starbound's beta status is obvious when you play it: you have all those tools to reshape the world, but you can't reshape your ship? All you have is a cramped rectangle that that an estate agent would label as "cosy". I imagine reshaping your ship so it's more shipshape will be coming in an official update, but I can't see it topping Spaceship: Block by Block Building. Your ship can be completely torn apart and rebuilt using any of the game's materials, and it adds the early stages of a complete overhaul of how the ships work: life-support, landing pods, teleporters, etc. There's more to come from this mod, but if you want to see what it's capable of, just click the main image of the article.
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