Happy Stable Update Day!

So much has changed in this patch, and most of it was covered in our unstable patch notes from the 17th. We’ve changed and added a few more things since then though, so click ‘Read the rest of this entry’ for more complete patch notes. :)

In case you’re worried, we are not wiping characters or universes this patch and have no plans to do so. You can continue playing your existing characters and worlds from previous stable versions of Starbound, but there are a few things that will have changed.

The biggest change is that this patch brings the first part of a major rebalance to weapons. Any randomly generated melee or ranged weapons you have will be regenerated to a weapon of the same type and level (and keep their name), but will have different appearances and rebalanced stats. This includes weapons modded with custom drawables, so for those of you who care about this, make sure to keep a copy of your drawable data to recreate the weapon later. Most non-generated weapons will have altered stats, but otherwise keep similar abilities and appearances.

If you’re the kind of player that doesn’t mind starting over and wants to see all the newest changes, you will probably want to start a new universe for this patch since we’ve made a lot of big improvements to terrain generation and biomes that you might not get to see otherwise!

Since we’ve changed the combat balance so much, we’re still in the process of tuning the monsters, NPCs and mission bosses. If you find things that are way too hard or too easy, let us know!

We’ve done a lot to improve performance but there’s still a lot more we plan to do before the game’s released. Hopefully you’ll see things running smoother, but don’t panic if some areas are still slow.

Liquids in and around microdungeons sometimes aren’t placed in a correctly settled manner and will settle after the world is first loaded

Some NPCs in biomes aren’t well equipped to fight monsters

If you’re running Windows 7, make sure you have service pack 1 installed. Seriously – install those service packs!

Steam may leave dbghelp.dll in the win32 or win64 folders by mistake, which will cause Starbound not to launch. You can fix this by getting rid of the file or deleting and re-installing Starbound.

If you’re still having trouble launching the game, head to the ‘prereqs’ folder in your Starbound directory and install the vc_redist.exe that corresponds to your OS.