Starbound Patch Incoming

Starbound, the first project from Chucklefish, is a sandbox adventure game in which you traverse the universe in search of treasure and riches. Released on the 4th December, the developers have been working closely with the community and a new patch is inbound shortly, aptly named "The Big Balance Update".

Now, the current damage system is a bit confusing and I'm not even going to bother trying to explain it to you. If you'd like to understand it, feel free to read Finn Brice's blog post on it.

What you need to know is that the damage system is changing. The developers will be reducing the number of planet levels from 100 to 10. This doesn't affect the amount of content available to the players, it merely changes how leveling functions.
With this smaller number of planet levels, they can remove the armor penetration levels and simplify the damage on weapons.

Players will now be able to directly compare weapon damage per second (DPS) without having to do complex calculations taking into account armor penetration levels and monster levels. Armor will also be simplified and will gain additional buffs, such as increasing player max health etc.

It's not only your weapons that are becoming simpler either. Monsters will no longer have armor levels and instead, the more difficult monsters will simply have more health. Along with this, Monsters no longer have levels at all and instead, will have a difficulty scale of easy/medium/hard, shown with a marker on the monster's nameplate. This means that a hard monster in a sector 1 planet will be similar to an easy monster in a sector 2 planet.

Another part of this update is that a new baby monster variant will be added. The development team have announced that they will be using this in the future to do some "nifty growth/evolution things". More weapons and items are being created too, along with a new boss (if created in time).

Sadly, this update requires a character wipe so say goodbye to you fantastical explorer. This is, of course, expected with it being in beta at the moment and is entirely understandable.