Starbound slips and Terraria gets a patch

Starbound, the side-scrolling procedurally generated planetary exploration game that is totally not Terraria, won’t launch until sometime in 2014. The game will only be released in beta form at the end of this year according to an update on the Starbound Newsletter despite earlier estimates of a 2013 launch given to pre-order customers. Chucklefish explained that the 1.0 release was pushed back due to normal development growth.

When we began pre-orders back in April, the idea of not completing the entire game by the end of the year seemed absurd! So we set our official “release date estimate” for 2013 and elsewhere stated that the game would definitely be out this year.

Game development is fairly unpredictable, though, especially on games as large as Starbound, and things often take much longer than we could have thought possible. Given that, we’d taken the stance that it’s the beta that will definitely be available this year, not the full game. While we’re always actively talking to people in IRC and the forums, we only recently updated our website’s info to reflect these changes! Sorry about that.

Coincidentally, Terraria received its 1.2 update this morning which added a slew of bugfixes, new features, enemies, and items – including craftable rocket launchers. Watch out Skeletron! I’m going to have a rocket launcher when next we meet!