What to expect from the next update, 1.0 and beyond

Happy Halloween!

So here we are, only a few updates left before 1.0 and I wanted to give you a run down on what to expect. There are 3 updates planned before 1.0. The Combat Update, The Story Update and a miscellaneous Polish Update. Let's start by talking about what's coming up in the next patch, which isn't far away now.

The Combat Update

We've been calling the next patch the combat update, and with good reason. The goal of this patch is to entirely revamp the combat and the moment to moment gameplay in Starbound by revamping weapons, monsters, quests, rewards, vehicles and more. Weapons Until now, weapons in Starbound were a combination of hard coded engine features and the configuration files that controlled them. This has changed drastically in the combat update with the engine now allowing for scripted weapons. Creating entirely unique weapons has become massively easier and as a result from this point forwards Starbound patches will include wonderful new items far outside the scope of the previous item engine. Modders will also be able to take advantage of this system to create incredible new things. The sky's the limit on this one. Weapons in vanilla Starbound now fall into two categories, generated and unique. Generated weapons have been converted to the new scripted weapons system and we've given them awesome special moves as a result. The general weapon classes have also been revamped in their primary fires. Hammers require a charge up, spears can be held out defensively and so on. We've worked hard to give each type of weapon it's own identity and have built the special attacks around this identity. Weapons also have elemental types and in future patches we'll be using those to give damage bonuses and reductions on certain enemies. Unique weapons are hard to find, will require multiple steps to obtain and will do entirely unique things. I don't want to spoil too much, but this is the kind of thing you can expect: We've worked really hard on ensuring all of the feedback and damage responses from these weapons is satisfying and spot on. Knockback has been massively tweaked, hitboxes, hit sparks, sounds, you name it. Combat 'feels' so much better. Monsters Monsters in Starbound have been a mixed bag. We've worked hard on the procedural monster generation system and whilst it achieves a lot of things, we felt that the game was missing recognisable monsters with truly unique hand crafted behaviour. That's where these hand crafted monsters come in. In a similar manner to the weapons (though not quite to the same extent) we've built a system to allow us to add unique monsters efficiently and easily. This also extends to modders. The addition of these monsters will allow us to use them in quests, provides hand crafted challenges for missions and gives us a good way have monster drops make sense. There are unique monsters for each sub biome and a large pool of general unique monsters that will pop up from time to time. We're making sure there's incentive to catch every unique monster and put together a complete menagerie. Quests All of the current Starbound quests are going to be replaced by 1.0. We've been building out the quest system and we're finally at a point where we can replace some of the