Something to note for new players as well, it is not just the Ark that is persistent across all your characters. When you first start the game on your first character you create a blank canvas universe that every character you make will play on. Each character will start in some place in that universe. So once you get your FTL drive fixed, if you know the coordinates of the star system one of your characters is in you can go there and see things that your other characters have done. So if you wanted to you could make a new character and get to the point and get your FTL fixed so you can see your coordinates, then go to your main character and fly all the way there and drop of items or something on a nearby planet and go back to your other character and pick them up. or you can send your new character to your main characters section of the universe. It's pretty neat.

So I'm only 8 hours or so into the game, playing on Survival, and I'm completely new to games like this. There's some other stuff you haven't mentioned that I didn't quite grasp to start with, mostly related to the interface and controls: 1. You can use items without putting them on your hotbar! Just left click them and then left click again outside of your inventory panel to use it. Particularly useful for food. Also, hold Shift and click on an item to transfer it directly between a container and your inventory, without having to click and drag! 2. On your hotbar, some items (torches, building blocks, 2h weapons etc) take up both sides of a slot (left and right click), while other items (rope, salve, flashlight, shield, 1h weapons, etc) can be "dual wielded" in either the left or right click slot. 3. If you're playing on Survival - FOOD GOES BAD! If you eat rotten food (or raw food) you will get food poisoning. But more importantly, a raw food's preservation state gets renewed after cooking, so you can wait til something says "This will go bad soon" and then cook it, and it will be fresh again! 4. In your ship's navigation panel, you need to RIGHT CLICK on a planet or other destination in order to travel there. This is not explained to you whatsoever, and I was messing around with the interface for ages before I finally had to google it. 5. FLAGS! Craft flags using the Crafting menu (C) as soon as you're able, and you can use them as one-way fast-travel points. Once it's planted (even underground) you can use your ship's teleporter to travel there. You cannot travel back from them however, you need to be on a planet's surface to beam back up. 6. You can move your inventory panel! Dragging it off to one side allows you to click through crates and stuff while being able to actually see what you're doing, rather than having the inventory block your character and everything around it. This seems to reset upon exiting and reloading the game, but it's still really useful. 7. When placing blocks (dirt, stone etc) you can right-click to place it on the background rather than the foreground. Similarly, when mining, you can right-click to mine the background blocks! I didn't realise this, and walked past so much ore etc that I assumed was just background decoration! 8. When mining or placing blocks, hold Shift to switch from a 2x2 target area to a 1x1 area. Great for when you're trying to build or mine out a particular structure or area in your base.

Thanks for actually having a decent quality mic. You're one of the few star bound youtubers I can actually listen to

bro thx man i almost dropped the game but you helped me understand the game and just made it enjoyable take my sub and keep going

Thank you so much for this! First played this a year ago and was overwhelmed and put it down after about 30 minutes. This guide helped me out quite a lot!

When i started i picked survival thinking it woud give me the full game but i got a couple hours in and went for a big mining tour and discovered the planet core thinking it was just a big pool of lava but i fell in and died losing EVERYTHING i always keep all the bars and ores in me and didint know i shoud have stored so im sad but this tutorial helped me from trashing this game so thanks!

Just gonna add in, you CAN die multiple times in a row without losing your dropped items on Survival difficulty. They won't just disappear if you die a second time so you don't have to rush back to your corpse. Take your time and move slowly/carefully. So long as you don't quit/restart the game you should be fine. Also if you go for survival, keep some healing items/plant fibre on your ship or in your camp. Your healing items and crafting materials WILL get dropped on death which is going to make getting back to your corpse harder if you haven't stashed any in the camp/ship. Also when exploring/making mines, make sure to always move in a relatively straight path. That way you won't get lost as easily when trying to get back up or find your way back down after death. If you explore in lots of random direactions all the time then it becomes a pain in the ass to navigate the mine and you will get lost a lot. There's of course tricks that you can use like leaving torches in a certain pattern to designate "main" paths or cutting shafts that you follow to get where you need to go but it's a lot easier to just explore in a relatively straight path without too many random offshoots. Last one is that all your crafting stations can be upgraded. Most of them also have multiple tabs. Look at the top of every crafting window and you'll see a greyed out "upgrade" button. Hover over it to see what materials you need to upgrade that specific crafting station. If you need a material that you don't know how to find then upgrade the furnace and you should be able to make them providing you have the raw materials. Some raw materials require you to travel to other stars and planets, which means doing the main quest line until your ship is fixed and ready to go. You'll also need fuel which can be found on moons. Upgrading obviously lets you craft more/better stuff, which makes the game easier. One thing that will be very useful later is the Pixel Compressor, which lets you convert your pixels into actual items that can be stored in containers. Doing so comes with a 20% tax on whatever amount of pixels you're trying to convert but that's still better than carrying all your pixels around everywhere and losing them on death. Especially on higher difficulties. If someone wants to ask something, feel free. I'm not 100% through the game so i don't know everything but i should be able to help out with most starting stuff.

I'm glad you mentioned that playing on lesser difficulty, which in this case Casual mode, is no more different than playing in regular mode in terms of having fun in general. This is true for most games because I see a lot of casual gamers being pushed by veteran gamers to always play on the mode that "it's meant to be played". Most of the time, this just turns people off and that's not cool. Games are meant to be enjoyed regardless of difficulty. Having said that, my personal philosophy is a lot different: do as much as you can even if it means dying sooner and more frequently, but also affords me of learning from it a lot quicker.

This wound up being slightly too basic for me, with that said I stayed and watched through most of it because I was impressed by your guide/commentary abilities. I was shocked to see a low sub count, keep it up!

I've been in a rut where I couldn't gather my dropped items for so long as I would just die again and it made me take a break, I think I'm going to take your advice and try casual haha.

Just wanted to say THANK YOU. I have been playing this game for a few weeks now and had not figured out how to progress past first planet. The information you presented, and the way in which you presented it, was helpful clear and concise. I got what i needed without having to listen to you repeat yourself over and over. Thumbs Up and favorited as well as a well earned subscription (#300) to see future content you put out. GOOD JOB keep it up.

Just grabbed this game. This guide was super helpful. Easy to understand and well-presented.

One thing for the ship-repair quest: GET. ARMOR. Even if it’s the tier 1 set, CRAFT IT. I just started, and I couldn’t even get past the first section. Once I got armor (and a second pistol) it because possible. Also, explore the entire area if possible, as there is some good loot.

Thank you for the guide, I've played games for 30 years, mostly 4X, but this one has a steep learning curve. One thing that helped me was the comment that you will be able to go round the world, mine had a very steep dropoff, no bottom in sight, I thought that was the "end " of one side of the world and could never find the temple. After watching your video, I built a stair case of dirt blocks down the drop off and discovered it went on. and on. Still haven't found the temple yet but finally found some iron ore instead of all the copper I already have stockpiled.

I have just picked up this game thank you so much for making this! It helps a bunch!

thank you soo much this helped me so so much and microphone quality is nice.

Hey man your channel is kinda small but the quality of the video is that of a bigger youtuber. Honestly hope your channel blows up. I know its been awhile since the upload but I am def subscribing.

Thank you so much for this guide. I absolutely loved Terraria and bought Starbound for a similar experience but very quickly felt that the game was very unintuitive and overwhelming as you land on the first planet. This was further compounded by the fact that I initially picked survival mode (just like you talked about!). Nothing feels shittier than trying to get your bearings in the world and get the hang of the gameplay only to die, lose all your shit and then beam back down to the planet feeling lost with absolutely nothing. Overall I just got the overwheling sense that I was missing something, something that this video really helped put into perspective and help me understand. I feel like now I can finally give this game a second chance and maybe get a similar experience to the one I had with Terraria. Thanks again.

I just got Starbound recently and started playing it on survival and have had a really hard time, thanks a bunch for the insight of what to do man you deserve more subs!

Video I Wish I Watched When I Started Playing Starbound For The First Time

Thank you so much honestly the most helpful starter vid ever. Also 405th sub woot!

Backlog, you are WAY to underrated, you should honestly have at least 10k subscribers by now and your videos are easy to understand and your voice is clear and smooth, and you deserve a sub so here you go :)

I definitely wish I knew what survival was like when I first played the game... What ended up happening is I would die really far away from the spawn point, lose all my stuff there, start going out to get my stuff back, die on the way, repeat. It sucked, I nearly dropped the game before I decided to play on admin mode so I could build stuff (which was one of the main things I wanted to do)

Jesuussssssss you could get a ton of subs with that voice n the nice explanations! Keep it going dude!

For the difficulty options, you can create a very simple mod by just going to your mods folder, making a new folder (name it whatever you want) and then create a text file and copy and past this: { "casual" : { "hunger" : false, "allowBeamUpUnderground" : true, "deathDropItemTypes" : "none", "reviveCostPercentile" : 0.1, "permadeath" : false }, "survival" : { "hunger" : true, "allowBeamUpUnderground" : false, "deathDropItemTypes" : "none", "reviveCostPercentile" : 0.3, "permadeath" : false }, "hardcore" : { "hunger" : true, "allowBeamUpUnderground" : false, "deathDropItemTypes" : "all", "reviveCostPercentile" : 0, "permadeath" : true } } You can change any of the parameters that you want, but this keeps all of the difficulty the same except it removes dropping items on death in survival. With this, you can customize your difficulty settings to pretty much any way you want. Why there isn't a setting in the actual game to be able to change these options, I have no idea. Once you've made the file, rename it to "playermodes.config" and you'll be good to go.

Very helpful, explained everything perfectly! Keep it up my dude.

Thank you so much for making this. I literally almost put the game down but then I though about watching a beginners video to see what I was doing wrong. This cleared a bunch of things up!

I did the exact same, survival being a long time gamer. Kicked my ass a number of times, and hadn’t been back since. Until I found your advice video. Thanks.

literally this is so helpful i was so lost starting out and now i get it more thank youuuuu im enjoying this game so much more now that i know the direction to go!

When I played Starbound for the first time, I didn't get very far because I didn't know how to travel to other planets, but I just had to right click them. I spent hours trying to find videos where it was shown but they were in an older version where if I remember correctly there was a "travel" button but then one time I just accidentally right clicked one planet and figured it out lmao

I just bought this game. Havent event played and realised there's not many videos on this game. Have my sub man cheera

I've recently become a master of surrounding myself in a dome of dirt when I'm about to be killed

Woah. I picked up this game to play with friends and they had Frackin Universe, I didn't realise just how much that mod changed the intro missions

I just want to say that your race isn't completely meaningless, as it does affect the Armour you can craft, although all of the armour sets seem to be roughly the same in terms of stats. However, the Novakid, unlike all other races, have a custom set of craftable weapons, which are pretty different from the normal set of weapons you can craft, as they focus more on guns and ranged weapons rather than melee weapons.

THANK YOU DUDE! I picked up the game yesterday and had no idea about the base camp, I spent a while mining around trying to find this base camp 😭

couple things I wish I knew sooner.. and I didn't know this until hour 200: pressing ALT allows you to see chests and other interactable objects, and holding CTRL while moving your curser to the corner of the screen will move the camera view.

I'm so glad I watched this. I was going to use Survival mode coming from Terraria, but then I decided to go with Casual when I realized that "difficulty" in this game only affects hunger and death penalties. My brother and I played Terraria on expert, but with a normal character that only drops money on death.

Thank you so much man, I picked this up on a steam sale early 2022 started it and instantly fell off due to not knowing where to go and being punished for dying by dropping everything. I am playing starbound now for the first time properly in 2023 after watching this guide and all I have to say is Wow… coming from a player who has put 1000s of hours into survival games like Ark & Valheim, starbound has jumped to the top of my favourites list easily.

0:56 Me who just started and died like 15 times: Yep. Mmhm.

You should also talk about your second hotbar - space management as well as locking your hotbar by clicking the green lock which leads to easy management

I have been playing this game since early access, but stopped to let it mature. Being back there have a been a lot of changes. Thank you for this I been stuck on what to do for some time.

When I first started out I also played on survival and found myself dying to hunger, after I discovered how to craft and that monsters dropped meat, found the core fragments by digging down tho, never used the mine

extremely underated youtube, id like to see you go big someday

I think I’m around five hours in, and instead of rushing to the arc I actually explored the planet because I didn’t realize what I need to do on the service. I had enough bars to get two of the three upgrades the first time I went to the ark. Not having to go back and farm was pretty nice, specially, not knowing I was going to get a dash and double jump.

I have a few extra tips to offer for anyone reading: -The Ark's kitchen has a cooking station that can cook advanced foods, normally you get access to crafting these after beating the Mining Facility instance, but you can access it earlier here. Food isn't needed in Casual difficulty, but it gives very useful buffs, strongly recommend getting into that if you don't find farming/cooking to be too big a hassle -Village Quests are good, if you can find a Village as some planets won't have them, they give weapons, modules, seeds, and other misc items, you can even recruit NPCs that you do enough Quests for. Some of these Quests use certain 'landmarks' near the Village such as old huts or foliage, try not to destroy or build over these because it will make the Quests pick landmarks that are further away. -Bit of a later game thing but important to know, chests with items in them can lag the game, it's dumb but true, it isn't noticeable with just a few chests but if you're a hoarder in these kinds of games and are planning some sort of warehouse, be careful and pick a spot for it outside of your 'main' house, or have multiple smaller storage places.

Instantly thought of the lemino dreams video with the background music

im 50 hours in on survival as a first time player and i like the hunger bar and the item drop on death. gives it some good challenge

great guide, thank you!

I decided to pick this game up again (was in my Library on Steam but I removed it since I didn't play for a few years). Its stil a fun game and I never really got very far. Learning everything all over again and even the penguin leader guy is hard if you don't know how to defeat him. I only play on Survival, haven't even considered Casual mode... I think Survival is only hard when you're constantly having to worry about food, and it can spoil so you have to have refrigerators to preserve them. Once you can craft canned food its easier, but to start its a pita because animals don't really drop meat often and you can only make quick meals like potato/popcorn/carrots/etc. Def a good video for new players starting out..as stated you cannot emphasize enough that getting the double jump/dash/ball mods are about the most important thing at first besides acquiring a ranged weapon!

Good thing i watch this before i play

Super glad i found a guide for this game!! I wanted to get into it since i love terraria and story-based games in general, but i never could since i didn't really know how to progress. So Thankies for this video!! P.s. idc if this vid is 6 years old, i'm still super happy i found it loll :3

I already most of Starbound but yesterday I was super happy to find out something new! I can actually FEED my pet!!

Dropping your items and having to go find them again on death is a pretty standard challenge, as is survival by sustenance. Maybe it's just me, but unless you're a beginner gamer, I don't think you should take those away. It's called "casual" for a reason. I started this game a couple of days ago, and was very close to death by starvation a couple of times, until I got a bow and arrow (which provides steaks and chicken!). I was madly searching for resources to make a hoe, and then planting seeds, hoping to survive. I did. If you don't want to lose all your precious resources on death, put them in a box before heading out too deep.

I couldn’t understand it at first,but after this video,It’s def one of the best games ever made

you're a legend I got no spoilers from this video

Thank you so much! I was so excited to play this game but once i got it, it was so confusing and got to the point where it got frustrating, but this video helped me understand what was going on alot more. Thanks again! :>

can you explain how to setup the hotbar? i feel like swapping weapons, using the hotbar, and just the most commonly used UI parts are frustrating compared to Terraria or MC.

REALLY wish I had some of this info when I started out. Grinded through survival mode and ended up putting the game down after a couple races.. Came back to it recently playing with the missus and actually really enjoying survival mode. That said I still learnt plenty from your vid (Even though I'd played before apparently still a n00b) Thanks man!

Really great and straight-to-the-point guide, very nice!

Quality video, this game has been terrible for the 5 hours I've played and now seems enjoyable lol

Yeah... another one dropped by to say thx. I was playing for an hour and was getting pretty depressed... Will switch to casual now. This sounds all totally reasonable!

In starbound you have the ability to install mods i do recommend playing the game 1st and complete it and then install mods such as frackin universe wich is basically a community Downloadble content(DLC) and others Or play with friends

Thanks a lot! This guide was really helpful :D

Thx a lot, just restarted after trying survival for six hours and just found the ark, lol. Also the ability to loot boxes by destroying them!! Didn't know that. Now to find a video about Armour and crafting.

Great guide, you dont waffle on about crap and just explain everything properly. NICE

Hm, the lack of map just makes me make my home base at the beam-in point. Makes it a lot more convenient until you get teleporters. Same with mine entrances on different planets.

I started my first run in survival mode but I found a gun in a crate early on so aside from finding food staying alive hasn't been too difficult.

dude i honestly wouldnt have progressed in the game if much if it werent for you, take my sub and please keep uploading quality content like this thx

Oh thank goodness! Liked n subbed for your help!

I'm new to the game, so I just blitzed the infected mine mission. It was so damn difficult, but hey, I got a very subpar gun (like 2-6 DPS) and a pretty sweet sword. Definitely don't advise brute forcing it like I did, with like 2 bandages and 4 salves. But you can

Remember: Mods are fun. The vanilla game can be boring, get frackin universe if you have beaten the game. The people who made the mod decided that the base game kinda sucked and re-did the ENTIRE thing. So get ready for another learning curve :)

Whats the background music he uses? I heard it from the nostalgia critic too but i couldnt find it...

Nice video dude. Im surprised your subscribers are only in tripple digits. Your videos seem better than alot of other KZfaqrs, which have 10k+ subscribers. Keep it up man.

Survival/hardcore is designed to punish mistakes and to shape how you play. There is nothing wrong with playing casual, but playing survival only after yoy know everything about the game goes against the objective of survival. It's on you to change how you play so you can adapt to the game difficulty.

thanks for helping me, bought the game a few hours ago and i was in the same situation as you in the beggining

I remember the time before you would find the ark's gate on your planet

10/10 would watch again

I wish there was a difficulty that made it so you had to eat but not lose your items

I'm surprised you didn't mention in character creation that most characters as you get better ores they can craft get better and better melee weapons but Novakid characters instead get better and better guns.

How does he only have 300 subs?!?!?!

I will play this, once I can get it to have better fps

I've played 208 hours according to Steam but haven't played in a couple years and the game is handing me my butt almost immediately upon teleporting to the planet. I run left and eventually come across two unicorns, a couple potato mobs, 2 mobs that look kind of like the chuckle fish logo and a giant green blobby / wormy looking mob with huge fangs. No, they're not spread out, there all in the same exact area, so the giant green blob wormy looking thing kills me. I teleport back down again and decide to go to the right, immediately killed by about 4 or 5 creatures all hitting me at the same time. Keep in mind this is a new playthrough so all I have is a broken sword and nearly broken gun. It wasn't always this hard in the beginning, I remember when I used to play this it was almost a cake walk on the starter planet.

Needing to eat and/or drink is dumb. I instantly chose "Casual" because of it.

On my first playthru i didnt know about the mine, so i set up a base untill i had high enough items to dig to the core…

I started playing for the first time with a friend and he did most of the technical stuff for me so when I first played alone I knew the basic stuff and didn't have that many problems as I learned by watching him, of course, experience, small details that help out a lot and the main battles of the game were learned and done with a few failed tries but I was lucky to start on a good foot ^^'

Started on survival a few days ago after buying this game on the summer sale. Died of hunger and lost interest but after this video I`m starting again on casual. Thanks :)

tHANKS.jUST got into this game.Love This video.

Man, I didn't find this camp or the mine! I just overtook some stone ruins and started digging to the core!

In casual you are allowed to teleport to your ship from underground

thx now i am in mid game on missions and run with endgame weapions and having fun

this was a very helpful video thanks

Nice, clear video.

Great job bro, helps a lot ✌🏼

starbound has changed so much since I last played in early alpha

Thank you i was thinking of returning the game but now i know what im doing

As a beginner Starbound player, if you're used to survival games like Minecraft, can you play on survival mode if you want? Or is it still better to play on casual mode to make the game easier for you?

Sam you should start this up again.

Great job!

this is very helpful and answered a lot of questions that i had

started game a while back could not leave ship so gave up thanks for intro lol