i haven't played this game since the month it came out, december 2013. how much better has it become since then and is it as good as terraria
after the beta, these things have changed:
-a lot of lore-related things from each species were removed and replaced with one story element/lore thingie, the terrene protectorate. (which has a tutorial level when making a new character if you leave the 'skip tutorial' box unchecked) for instance, your apex character didn't really run from big ape in the first place (if i'm not mistaken) and instead any of the species you picked just runs from earth getting dededestroyed by giant tentacle monster #125878521751295 (the ruin)
-most of the bosses you were able to build (like that robot with a brain) are now unable to be built, but instead are replaced with bosses in story missions that you have to unlock by playing the game and getting to that point (the bone dragon, however, was reused as a boss, so you can still fight that, albeit with a... change.)
-combat update, as explained by others already
-i'm not sure if this was a thing already, but you can get a crew on your ship to upgrade it rather than beating the tar out of everything you see until you get like 10k pixels. if you wear a terrene protectorate uniform and do quests for random npcs, they might want to join your crew (and spontaneously get their own protectorate uniform) and they have their varied classes (like medics, whom give you stim packs and such, and engineers, whom upgrade your ship fuel)
-something awaits you on the moons... run from it
-you can get mods from the steam workshop to enhance/upgrade your starbound experience, whether its altering the game entirely (frackin' universe) or adding a few new blocks to decorate your house or whatever you build with
-i think multiplayer was fixed so the server doesn't crash randomly...? though you'll get booted out of a server if you don't have a mod someone else has, depending on where the person is... it's really confusing, and it sucks, even with 'allow assets mismatch' enabled
-many of the randomized mobs were given the axe and instead mostly use mobs that won contests
-rip sectors i think? (aka, "sectors" were removed)
there's a buncha other stuff, but tl;dr:
"wow wtf what happened to like 1/4th of the content in the beta- wait what it was replaced with a rather short story? wow ok... at least the music's good"
personally i enjoyed starbound in both the beta and release, but i prefer beta better (even with all of its bugs and crashes) because there was just more to do in the beta than the release, but release has the steam workshop and pretty good music (in my opinion)- if there was a version of starbound where it had everything in beta with bug fixes and crash fixes plus the steam workshop, shut up and take my money
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