The Future Of Starbound and Creators Chucklefish

Chucklefish, creators of Starbound, have released a blog post detailing the future of the company and Starbound itself.

They explain how Starbound's levels will progress, compared to the current beta:

Play through tier 1 and gain enough pixels too.. > access the tier 1 mission > fight tier 1 boss > gain oxygen tank tech > now able to access tier 2 planets with non breathable atmosphere

They also explain that there will be much more variety in how you obtain pixels, once the features are implemented.  You could be a farmer, an adventurer - even a land baron!

 If you’d like to become an intergalactic farmer, growing and selling crops, keeping livestock and so on; the farming feature will be fleshed out enough for that to be your means of pixel gathering. On the other hand, if you prefer to be an adventurer, taking quests and gaining pixels as rewards; that route is just as good. Perhaps you prefer to be a builder, charging npcs rent based on the quality of the homes they inhabit. A pirate, robbing towns and ransacking villages. A tomb raider, gathering rare artifacts [sic].

And if you're worried you'll finish the game, there will be plenty of PvP, a Director Mode, user-made missions and support for .pak mods!

Some of these changes will come after the next update, where Chucklefish will change the way they push updates to Steam - engine updates and content updates.

Now, as for Chucklefish themselves, they have big plans as a company.  They are opening an office in London, which will help when they begin to publish other developer's games!

They list Stardew Valley, Halfway, Treasure Adventure World and Wanderlust Adventures as games they are already preparing to release.

The final titbit is perhaps the most interesting:

We’re going to be producing a second game alongside Starbound, with an entirely new development team.