I Destroyed a Planet in Starbound

Over 120 hours. That’s how long I spent doing a single task in Starbound. I have 195 hours logged in the game - some in Early Access, a bunch post-launch, several more after losing my save game to Chucklefish’s no Cloud Saves and the save file being in a non-standard location…

Starbound is a pixel-based “Terraria clone”. That’s the best way to describe it - you gather materials, craft things, fight monsters… But this is set in space, and you can travel to different planets in your upgradable ship. You can also mine fuel from moons, but man those moon ghosts don’t like that…

I was given the game by a coworker for my birthday a couple of years ago, and really enjoyed it. The different biomes, the sci-fi themes and even the art style appealed to me. Admittedly, after losing my first save file I considered not returning, and in a lesser game I would not have. But I got the urge to build a base inside a volcano, so restarted.

Whilst milling around trying to get better equipment to fight more of the story bosses, I found myself musing what would happen if you tried to dig out the centre of a planet. I had been to the centre of several, of course, because I needed materials. The closer you get to the centre of a planet, the tougher the materials you can find. For instance, mud is very easy to mine with your Matter Manipulator, and cobblestone is harder. Copper is easy, titanium is hard - you get it.

However, I didn’t just want to reach the centre. I wanted to remove every single block from the world. All of the dirt, bone, sandstone, obsidian, tar, goo… Yeah, not all of the materials are familiar ones. A lot of it has no use outside of looking pretty sweet when used to build things to look at.

You’d think that I would want to choose a nice, small planet to conduct my experiment on, wouldn’t you? Well, you’d be wrong. I spotted a random desert planet on my sensors and went for it, reasoning that it didn’t have trees for me to worry about.

My only rule for this endeavour was that I would get rid of every single block which could be stood upon - except for any that were part of existing structures. So bricks, glass, wooden panels, carved stone - that sort of thing - would be left alone. I would also leave the background panels, as you can’t stand on those. This was to make the job easier on myself. I activated God Mode, fully upgraded my Matter Manipulator and set to work.

20 hours into the project, I was convinced that I wasn’t going to take much longer. I also figured that I had put this much time into it, that I might as well see it through. This is the Sunk Cost Fallacy, where you basically don’t want to think that you’ve wasted your time/money in a project, and will therefore continue to try and see it through. Yes, even though I was aware of what I was doing, I still carried on… 100 hours in, I found myself waning and actually stopped for about two months. The final stretch of 15 hours was made just recently, and included many teleports to my ship and back down to the planet. The game tries to put you on solid ground after teleporting down, rather than in one specific place, so it was an easy way to locate bits that I had missed.

In total, after my 120 hours of wrist-aching toil in Starbound, I am confident that I have wiped out over 99% of the blocks on the planet. There is at least one town, several ruins and about 20 NPCs left wandering around the structures. I also removed a bunch of the background tiles and left thousands of flaming torches scattered around the depths. If I hadn’t removed the background tiles I would have left many more torches, because in the daytime it lets light in. I’m not overstating how many torches I used - I was crafting them in batches of 400 and kept running out.

For the first 10-15 hours or so, I was convinced that I had to pick up all of the blocks that I was knocking down, and had to destroy them in my inventory’s bin. This is due to a poorly timed system slowdown in the early hours, which made me believe that Starbound had trouble with the sheer volume of loose blocks I was making it display. Needless to say, this belief was false.

Due to the sheer number of random loot chests I came across, I now have more weapons than I know what to do with, and an absolutely full inventory. Blocks, materials, items, furniture - I’ve got it all. I even wound up with over 30 diamonds, not counting the ones that fell into the lava at the centre of the planet.

So, you may ask what happens when you dig out the core of the planet, the thing that items disappear into - which is just completely lava. Well, while you’re digging all of the ground, the liquids are running down - because gravity, duh. Oil and poison both combust and become lava, whilst water cools lava and becomes (very tough) rock. The lava that you create obviously joins the lava in the centre of the planet, and the water does it’s best to cover said lava. Once you’ve finished with destroying the surface, stratum and lava at the core? Well, you’re left with a bunch of lava. But when you grab all of that lava?

Well, you can’t. You can soak up all of the lava that you’ve added to the core, but the core lava remains at a constant level. Sure, you will get the sound as if you’re soaking it up, but it seems Chucklefish thought about this (or it came up during Early Access), and the level never changes or adds lava to your inventory. So, you can’t actually destroy planets in Starbound… But to the people who live there I may as well have.