Keep up on Starbound’s development with the Roadmap

Look forward to losing hundreds of hours later this year

Our coverage of Chucklefish’s upcoming space-faring open-world game Starbound has been criminally weak. Aside from some brief mentions here and there when talking about Terraria and Edge of Space, we’ve been dark on the game over that past year of its development. I’m part of the problem, because I heard “Terraria in space” and immediately filed it under “buy it as soon as it’s available” in my brain, and haven’t been keeping up with its progress.

That ends now. Chucklefish has released the delightful Starbound Roadmap, detailing the various components of the game and estimating their levels of completion, as well as which team member is working on what at any given time. At the top of the page, there is the vague, but promising release date listed as 2013. After reading through some of the sections on the Roadmap, it’s clear that Starbound is intended to be so much more than just Terraria in space. And I have now filed it in a different section of my brain: “long for it every day until it is released.”

Check out the screens that have been posted below, and if you want a quick run down of some of the features planned for Starbound, scroll past the gallery.

After going through all of the different parts of the Roadmap, it’s clear to me that Starbound is so much more ambitious than Terraria, which itself was far deeper than it initially let on. If you aren’t keen on looking through the whole site, here are some features that you may want to know about, in handy bulleted list form for quick consumption.

• There appear to be six different playable races, with distinct genders
• Each race has its own style of village and dungeon
• Party mechanics will be implemented for multiplayer
• Hunger and temperature will be factors to keep in mind
• Planet biomes are determined by planet size and distance from the system’s star
• Each planet has one dungeon to explore
• Alien creatures will be procedurally generated and include quadrupeds, bipeds, humanoids, and more
• NPCs will have missions that give the player more direction
• Vehicles are planned, including mechs and hoverbikes

I’m losing my mind just thinking about all of this. I can’t wait for all of those progress bars to fill up so we can get our hands on it!