Video Game / Starbound

The universe is waiting.

After waking up late and nearly missing your own graduation to officially become a member of the Terrene Protectorate, disaster strikes when a mysterious entity simply known as The Ruin begins destroying Earth. As you jump into a barely functioning space ship to escape, you find yourself hopelessly lost in a sea of stars. From there, you must visit procedurally generated planets to research technology, meet new people, explore, and save the universe.

Starbound is a Wide-Open Sandbox Scifi Adventure game. invokedNot to be confused with a Classic Mac game that lets you conquer planets to get more ships and destroy opposing races, nor with a Lucky Star fic aiming to parody EarthBound.

Take Terraria and give it a more Science Fiction based focus with space travel and you have Starbound. Or as some like to say Terraria IN SPACE! It is developed by Chucklefish, an indie game company started by Finn "Tiy" Brice of Terraria fame along with several new faces.

Players may choose one of the playable races for their characters: the Apex, the Avians, the Humans, the Hylotl, the Floran, the Glitch, or the Novakid. Each race has a bit of lore attached to it and will tie in to the primary storyline.

The game is singleplayer or multi-player capable and will have the possibility of other modes of play added in at a later date. Additional features may be added via the communities suggestion system as free post release content.

Beta was released on December 4th, 2013 for all who preordered the game, and the final game was released on July 22nd, 2016. The game receives semi-regular content updates and bugfixes, with the 1.4 Bounty Hunter update as the final update as of June 2019.

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Provides examples of:

• Abandoned Laboratory: A possible randomly generated area on planets. It seems sometimes the Apex Miniknog take their experiments too far.
• Abandoned Mine: A possible randomly generated area on planets. They're filled with aliens not native to the planet's surface and often filled with plenty of useful items stored away. There's one guaranteed on every starting planet.
• Abnormal Ammo: Uncommon and rarer guns can shoot bullets with special effects, such as ricocheting shots, piercing shots, bullets that split into two shortly after leaving the barrel, and (for legendary guns only) Sticky Bomb bullets that attach to solid blocks and explode when an enemy touches them. Meanwhile, grenade launchers can shoot rounds that resemble Mario's fireball, cluster bouncing grenades, and even mice and pigs. There's even a gun that shoots tentacles!
• Advancing Boss of Doom: Of a sort. The Erichus Ghost begins to hound you the second you mine a single bit of fuel from a moon. It will constantly advance on you, and has a corrosive aura that kills you in seconds if you get too close. There's also the tiny matter of the fact that it is completely invincible. And as if that wasn't enough, it also increases its speed relative to how much fuel you're carrying! In fact, the only way to remove the Erichus Ghost from a moon is to terraform the entire moon, but that is no easy task.
• After the End:
  • The game begins with you barely escaping the destruction of Earth by a giant tentacle monster from space.
  • Many planets bear the ruins of previous inhabitants. On lower-risk planets (i.e., peaceful ones like Garden or Forest biomes) these are generally limited to the odd ruins of a stone or wooden house, but on more dangerous planets such as those with a Toxic or Scorched biome the background picture makes it pretty clear this planet used to have a pretty advanced civilization until the climate went to hell.
• Airborne Mook: Several of them. Most of them will attempt to shoot at the player.
• Alien Sky: Particularly during night on a planet, the player can usually see the other planets in the subsystem.
• All-Natural Gem Polish: The diamonds you can find at great depths in each planet are even described as "beautifully cut".
• Ambidextrous Sprite: Asymmetrical clothing is mirrored, depending on which direction the player is facing. Weapons and tools which are consistently held in the correct hands regardless of which side you face. A 2-handed weapon will always be in your left hand.
• Annoying Arrows: Arrows are nothing more than a projectile with various damage stats. Any additional effects will come from the bow having special attributes. While some enemies are quite very alien the arrows have the same effect across the range of species.
• Anti-Frustration Features: There are no bugs which are exclusive to Midnight biomes, because trying to spot a tiny bug in perpetual darkness would be nearly impossible.
• Anvil on Head: The player Floran references this when inspecting an anvil:
  "Very heavy, useful in a trap."
• Apocalyptic Log:
  • The last transmission that came from Earth was an SOS that they were under attack by a mysterious destructive force, and that escape ships are barely able to make it off the planet.
  • You find a codex in the Ceremonial Hunting Caverns, written by a former resident of the planet... before the Florans came and killed everyone.
  • The messages you find in the Erchius Mining Facility, as the workers tried to request aid against the monsters from their superiors... who just locked down the facility and wrote it off as a lost cause.
• April Fools: One video showing off new sound effects.
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: During The Baron's Keep mission, all of the Occasus mooks use Medieval weaponry to attack you such as bows and catapults. It starts getting hilariously ridiculous when they send in a guy riding an aerial screw that wouldn't normally be able to fly!
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: While inspecting the "Force cell" as a human:
  A cell designed for the most dangerous of prisoners. Killers, thieves, jaywalkers...
• Artificial Atmospheric Actions:
  • You can find villages of wooden houses on Scorched and Volcanic planets, where the local weather includes rain of fire. The houses will inevitably catch fire, furniture pops loose when their base blocks are destroyed... and the villagers will accuse you of stealing and turn hostile, due to the game's programming. Never mind building wooden houses on a fiery planet, why do they think you're responsible for the weather? (It does make sense for the medieval Glitch, though).
  • NPCs will happily let you ransack their chests and crates, but flip out and call the guards the second you dig up some sand too close to their house.
  • Some of the procedurally generated quests make them NPCs that give them seem incredibly stupid. They can include delivering a message to someone in the same room, trading away an item only to then ask for the same item later in the quest chain, bringing someone home who's less than a screen away from their village, collecting a crop that's found growing in the village, and so on.
  • Villagers will tell you off for stealing if you break anything in their village, even if you put it there yourself and they saw you doing it. A villager may ask you to make some woven fabric, for example, and watch as you put down your spinning wheel to make it, then shout at you when you try to take it back. This happens even if the item is something they couldn't possibly want, like a pile of poo.
• Artificial Gill: Equip an Environment Protection Pack and you'll no longer need an Oxygen Meter for areas without air, such as water, moons and asteroid fields.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • During the game's beta phase, the game's AI concerning critters and NPCs (especially the latter) was pretty lacking. Most NPCs didn't know how to retreat, rushing headlong into a situation that has gotten them killed by the dozen. NPCs often got lost in or outside of their own homes. This was mostly fixed once the game left Early Access.
  • In the release version but patched out later: If you count the AI that places landmarks like houses and such, that one's also a little stupid every now and then. A good part of the time, NPCs can't get home because it's flat out impossible without digging, techs or a grappling hook, as the generator placed it on some chunk of rock suspended on background terrain on top of a mountain, or buried it into a hole so far inside the ground it looks more like a bomb shelter than a house. The idiocy part comes when you consider it's the NPCs that are supposed to be placing these houses, so you just can't help but wonder what kind of moron would build it that way.
  • In-Universe multiple times: prior to the the first boss fight, your companion A.I. SAIL will warn you of increasing levels of Erchius radiation^note It's speculated that this radiation caused the mutations in the miners, but this is later revealed to have involved the boss of the mission. Exposure to Erchius (even bathing yourself in it) has no direct ill effects in-game, suggesting it's actually harmless. and your "peril level" (in morts). The quest-giver, Esther, will chime in to politely shut it up.
  • The Glitch themselves. Their whole existence stems from a programming bug, restricting them to their Medieval Stasis, and the self-aware Glitch are only such because of *another* bug (or, possibly, they're the only ones functioning correctly- it's not clear). Regular Glitch do seem to suffer from inbuilt stupidity and become extremely superstitious whenever their simulation is threatened, and all Glitch have hard-wired blind spots preventing them from fully functioning like the robots they are (they can't heal properly without being treated like organic patients, for instance).
• Artistic License – Chemistry: Prior to the Cheerful Giraffe update, Plutonium ore could be found in fairly large deposits on dwarf planets. Plutonium is currently found only in pitchblende in amounts too tiny to be used, and must be actively manufactured.
• Artistic License – Paleontology: If you fail the minigame to reveal and recover a fossil, you only get bones from the deposit. There are also the Glitch and Floran fossils, which are made of metal and wood respectively. The problem is that fossils aren't actually bones (or wood). In fact, true fossils are completely inorganic. A true fossil is, in essence, a stone casting of a bone (or whatever else), created by minerals seeping through layers of sediment and filling the empty spaces left behind by decayed organic matter.
• Artistic License – Space:
  • In game, Frozen stars are blue and much colder than normal, while Fiery stars are red and much hotter than normal. In real life, the opposite is true - red stars are the coldest, while blue stars are the hottest.
  • Bodies orbiting terrestrial planets are called moons, but bodies orbiting gas giants are referred to as planets, even though these should also be called moons. They also don't use the specific "moon" biome that regular moons do.
• Art-Style Dissonance: The game uses its bright pixel art to get away with dark game elements, such as the near-extinction of the human race, an antagonist who wants universe-wide genocide, and gory biomes and cosmetic items.
• Asteroid Miners: You can do this by either getting above the atmospheres of a normal planet or by visiting an asteroid belt that can spawn randomly in any star system. It's easy to see the ores and you don't have to dig through dirt and stone to move anywhere, but there's no oxygen and navigation is tricky- planet-based asteroids still have the planet's gravity and belts have zero gravity (and require a mech to deploy to in the first place).
  • Mechs come by default with a mining drill arm specifically designed for doing this.
• Asset Actor: Non-playable races that don't fit the standard humanoid shape (namely Deadbeats, Creepling, Agarans, Frogs, Alpacas and "Maggot Man") are represented by playable races (Florans for Agarans, Hylotl for Froggs, Humans for the rest) wearing outfits not usable by the player without modding or admin mode. You can tell because they use the original race's sound effects when spoken to.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: The Novakids as a race. They have no interest in preserving history or passing it along, which also stymies them technologically - new breakthroughs are completely forgotten within a few generations.
• Ax-Crazy:
  • The Floran race as a whole.
    Floran Village Watchman: (to a player with a drawn weapon) "Floran no like sstabbing when others do it."
  • To drive the point home:
    Floran Prisoner: (seeing the player) "Flesssh."
  • Several pieces of the findable Floran in-game lore mentions stabbing things a lot.
  • Floran PCs, despite having fled to the stars to escape the savagery of their brethren, are not exempt from this. The only thing that really distinguish them is the fact that they're aware that stabbing is not good for all interactions.
    Floran PC: This music make Floran want to ssstab! But so do most thingsss
• Awesome Backpack: The Enviromental Protection Pack, or EPP, which is a core part of game progression. Crafting and upgrading it allows you to, in order, breathe on airless moons, shield yourself on radioactive planets, stay warm on frozen planets, and keep cool on overheated planets. It can also be fitted with upgrades that give you extra bonuses, like health regeneration, boosted damage, improved mobility, and hands-free lighting.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Like Borderlands, the random gun generation can give weapons that are of common rarity that are less than useful. An example is pistols, one of the easiest guns to acquire, can deal one damage per shot, take 8 energy per shot, and have a firing rate of 3.30 (which is pretty fast). The end result is a pistol that can only really be used to pepper enemies from afar.
  • Many cool weapons found on planets tend to be weaker than player-crafted weapons of the same level.
  • Pickaxes and drills. They increase your mining speed exponentially with each material, but don't last very long before breaking and are limited to mining the area directly next to the player.
  • Throwable weapons. They do more damage than most weapons (especially against durable humanoid enemies) and some of them are classified as "hunting" weapons (increasing the drop chance from monsters). However, they are consumable items instead of using energy like guns and they tend to clog the inventory.
• Bad Boss: The Letheia Corporation, who runs the Erchius Mining Facility. First sign that a horrible monster has awoken in the place? Lock the place down, seal the workers inside, and cut off all forms of communication so they can't tell anyone what happened... but not before sending them a cordial "Thank you for having worked for us, bye" message. It even turns out this is standard procedure, meaning they're aware of the monsters but don't do anything in the form of precautions, much less find safer work environments.
• Barbarian Tribe: The Florans' savage behavior comes off as this. In addition, their bases are often littered with barbaric decorations, such as bones and skulls on spikes. They even go so far as to have "Greenfingers"- elite, wiser (and, usually, saner and more responsible) tribal elders.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: The starter mechs, none of which have protective canopies of any kind. It takes a later quest to get the blueprint for a better model with complete covering. Yet either will let you breathe just fine.
• Battle Couple: Sometimes, you can find a male and female pair of bandits/tomb guardians. They sometimes emit hearts when idling.
• Beef Gate: Once the player's ship is repaired and fuel is gathered, there's nothing outright stopping the player from heading to planets intended to be explored in the late game; albeit, it's (usually) a poor idea to do so, as most enemies will likely one shot you with early game armors and equipment. However, all but the first and second tiers of planets have some form of hazard caused by the local star (radiation, cold, or heat) that will very quickly kill a player without an upgraded EPP.
• Big Brother Is Watching:
  • The Apex suffer from a very advanced case of this. The player character, should he or she be an Apex, is a member of the rebellion who escaped after the Miniknog, the Apex's oppressive government, crushed it. As you can imagine given the game's general tone, it is lampshaded ruthlessly; there are even posters featuring a character dubbed Big Ape, who is said to be all-seeing and who commands those who gaze upon his visage to OBEY. None of the player characters are impressed, least of all Florans, who comment that they have no plans to obey their dinner.
  • Apex dungeons have posters that read, "Big Ape is All Seeing".
  • Apex in Apex settlements will talk about hidden cameras, spies, and other activity alluding to the big brother nature of the Mini Knog government.
  • The reason why Big Ape is able to do all this? He's a Brain Uploaded Sinister Surveillance AI.
• Bittersweet Ending: The end of 1.0's story is definitely this. You destroy the Ruin, but die in the process since you can't teleport away, and the Cultivator uses the last of its power to bring you back to life. Earth is also still gone and the Protectorate is in disarray, and Asra escapes justice until the end of the Bounty Hunter questline in 1.4.
• Blackout Basement: The underground is obviously devoid of natural light, with some exceptions. It is advised to carry a large stack of torches and a flashlight as it is very possible to be killed by an unseen monster.
• Blatant Lies: Many of the codexes you can find in the game are very blatant propaganda pieces that directly contradict the things you see in the game, contradict other codexes, or even contradict themselves. A notable example is the hylotl codex "A Treatise on the Floran" which is basically a The Reason You Suck speech against the entire floran race, calling them out on every crime they ever committed against the hylotl, then ends with a very half-hearted sounding "we definitely forgive them"

• Bloody Bowels of Hell: The Flesh and now-removed Heck biomes.
• Body Armor as Hit Points: In addition to providing overall damage reduction, suits of armor also provide an increase in total health, improving survivability in both directions.
  • This is also how the Energy meter for Mechs functions when taking hits; once a Mech is out of energy, it's rendered useless until it recharges. Damage from enemies will drain the energy reserves, and more advanced Mechs have greater energy capacity.
• Bloody Murder: There are aliens that can attack you with their blood vomit, an example being the Scaveran birds.
• Body Horror: In the Erchius Mining Facility mission, you encounter infected miners whose heads have been transformed into that of the pink fleshy aliens you've been facing throughout the facility. It's then revealed that said aliens are miners who have gone through a horrible mutation of some sort.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The hunting bow can be crafted very early. It's slow to fire, but does a good bit of damage that early on, especially since you don't have any other ranged weapons to start out with. It also increases the chance of getting meat, leather and other hunting products from enemies, which are great for early survival.
  • The Matter Manipulator. It can't mine very fast, even at its increased speed upgrade, and its mining area is only 2x2, (compared to the 3x3 of pickaxes) but it will never break, can be upgraded to collect water and other liquids, can reach a good distance, and cannot be dropped by mistake. Since update Upbeat Giraffe, it has its own spot in your inventory (freeing a block on the grid), can be upgraded to mine faster, get a bigger mining area and can mine liquids. As of Spirited Giraffe, it becomes even more useful since not only are pickaxes and drills no longer craftable, but they also break far quicker when found. And now as of the official release, it starts off 2x2, slow, solid matter only, and within five blocks of you, but can be upgraded to collect liquids, wire electronics, color objects, reach up to eight blocks away, dig out 5x5 spaces, and break down matter twice as fast as the best drill or pickaxe found randomly.
  • For all the fancy foods you can make, the most efficient, in terms of storage, is boiled rice. As uncooked rice stacks, unlike actual food in the base game, you only need to plop a campfire (or find an equivalent) and churn out as much boiled rice as you need whenever you're hungry.
  • Technically though, roasted mushrooms are more efficient overall since - despite them needing 5 mushrooms to make on a open fire - they can be grown from a mushroom 'tree' instead of needing to be farmed. Rice wins in storage since it's 1 to 1, where mushrooms are 5 to 1, but with how high the uncooked versions can stack the storage efficiency doesn't really come into play.
  • Canned food. Can be bought from the outpost for a relatively cheap price, will near always fill you up to full and stays fresh for so long that it practically never spoils. Once you have access to the outpost, you won't need to hunt for food again unless you're cheap or want to get the bonuses provided by higher-level cooked foods.
  • While you can unlock other abilities to replace the basic ones you can unlock at the start of the game, the three starting ones you can unlock at the outpost^note A Double Jump, a dash and a morph ball are by far the most versatile for any given situation.
• Bottomless Magazines: All guns will have infinite ammo, and be able to fire endlessly, allowing even freshly created guns to be fired. The tradeoff is that each shot drains the energy bar for a certain amount, with higher end weapons giving a larger drain.
• Bow and Sword in Accord: At the start of the game players will find themselves wielding a melee weapon (with the exception of Novakids, who start off with a gun instead) and a bow. The bow is used to hunt monsters for meat as well as to more effectively combat the various flying enemies.
• Brain Bleach: If they examine a filthy toilet, a Glitch PC will hastily override their analysis mode.
• Brain in a Jar:
  • Some of the glitch have what look like brains in jars as part of their heads.
  • A literal example is a decoration that can be found in Apex-related labs.
• Breakable Weapons: Mining tools can mine faster than the Matter Manipulator, but will ultimately break. This is to encourage the player to upgrade the MM so that it eventually outclasses pickaxes altogether.
• Brutal Bonus Level: Finishing the game allows you to trade certain items with a certain NPC for keys, which unlock portals to the Ancient Vaults, A randomly generated area, of one of four themes, with all enemies as powerful as they can possibly be. Reaching the end pits you against a procedurally generated boss, that depending on the moves it has, can either be an Anti-Climax Boss or a truly vicious killing machine that utterly eclipses the danger of The Ruin itself.
• Burn the Witch!: The original Glitch PC's origin has them being declared a heretic after becoming self aware, and being forced to flee the planet to escape execution. You can find a codex in Glitch villages of a local authority declaring self-aware Glitch to be victims of a "plague of madness" (actual medieval societies did believe insanity to be contagious), and another from a self-aware Glitch urging others to escape to the stars to avoid this.
• Call to Adventure: The backstory of all races of characters has them being a freshly-appointed member of the Terrene Protectorate just before the Ruin destroys the planet, but before the final release of the game, each race had their own stories.
  • Human PCs must look for a new planet to settle because the Earth was destroyed by The Ruin.
  • Avian PCs narrowly avoided the wrath of the Stargazers and fled their homeworld as an exile and an atheist.
  • Floran PCs have grown tired of their fellows' way of life and cannibalism, and look for a more refined, exciting hunt (and want to make friends).
  • Glitch PCs have become self-aware, and thus were viewed as freaks by their own people and were forced to flee as outcasts.
  • Apex PCs are rebels against the Miniknog, and are fleeing the repercussions of said rebellion after it was crushed.
  • Hylotl PCs are missionaries, looking to spread peace and enlightenment throughout the universe.
  • Novakid PCs awake to find themselves in a broken spaceship amidst the cosmos, and explore the universe seeking for answers.
• Cannibal Tribe: Among the Florans, cannibalism during funeral rituals and wars with rival factions are commonplace.
• Capture Balls: You can throw capture pods to trap any monster that has been sufficiently weakened. Once captured, these monsters can then be unleashed to fight on the player's behalf.
• Cartoon Cheese: Can be crafted from milk, and it looks exactly like you'd expect.
• Cartoon Meat: Types of meat include ribeye steak, whole birds, streaky bacon, fillets of white fish and ribs.
• Celestial Body: The Novakids, described by a human astronomer as "interstellar gas-bag people".
• Chairman of the Brawl: Prisoners in USCM Prisons may wield a metal chair as a weapon, and the player character has a chance of getting one as a drop from them.
• City Planet: Well, ruins of them, anyway. They take the form of Toxic planets, which failed to properly regulate pollution, and Scorched planets, which got roasted by their parent stars.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander:
  • The Novakids tend to have short attention spans (hence their stunted technological development) and a lack of tact when dealing with other races (hence their tense relationships with other races). One was even said to casually ask an Avian priest if Kluex is real.
  • Florans as well, in their psychopathic madness, manage to find some lesser kinds of oddity. Like misreading absolutely every sign they find to mean the opposite of what it actually reads, or in the PC's case, picking a fight with a robotic crafting table's arms.
• The Cloudcuckoolander Was Right: When analyzing the Geometric Screen, the Floran PC claims "Floran read words good. Sssay 'ssstab a meatman'. Huh", which many players will probably dismiss as them just seeing what they want to, considering how... eccentric they can be regarding stabbing. However, doing the same with a Glitch PC will have them say "Analysis. This display appears to read 'stab a meatman' in binary. How unusual".^note "Stab a meatman" in binary is 0101001101110100011000010110001000100000011000010010000001101101011001010110000101110100011011010110000101101110.
• Collection Sidequest: There are 445 entries to fill in the Collection Library. Filling it involves catching monsters in capture pods, finding rare action figure drops from monsters and bosses, fishing, cooking, digging out fosils and catching bugs in a net.
• Collision Damage: Many enemies must actually do an attack animation to cause damage, making shields useful and making non-hostile creatures possible to walk right through/past. However, many monsters do have a "bite" attack that they will use if you're in contact with them, playing this somewhat straight.
• Colony Drop: If you're on a planet that has an asteroid field nearby, sometimes you will either get tiny meteors raining down or a REALLY big meteor that falls anywhere on the planet. Doubles as Jump Scare if said meteor ends up falling on your face.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Applies to item quality and to the stars themselves^note  Yellow, Orange, Green, Blue, and Red, in order of least to most threatening. Each race also uses a unique beam color when teleporting.
  • Items will be surrounded by a colored border on their icon ranging from White, Green, Blue, and Purple for Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Legendary quality, respectively.
  • You can tell the type of star on the star map by its color alone. White are Gentle stars, Yellow are Radioactive, Orange are Temperate, Red are Fiery, and Blue are Frozen stars.
• Commonplace Rare:
  • Iron is virtually nonexistent in the endgame planets, where it's several times less frequent than gold.
  • Leather is a surprisingly infrequent drop when you consider every animal should be skinnable.
  • The game can churn out Mix-and-Match Critters for every planet, but bog-standard cats and dogs are rare enough that the former is only found in a secret area in the Erchius Mining Facility mission while the latter is an extremely rare spawn outside of the Outpost.
  • On of the rarest crops and ingredient to the highest tier foods are chilli peppers, which are found growing on burnt-out husks of planets that shouldn't logically have any plants growing on them.
• Continuing is Painful:
  • When you die in Casual, you lose 10% of your pixels (the game currency). You can convert raw ores into Pixels through the Refinery, allowing an easy and efficient means of accumulating more.
  • Normal, on the other hand, makes you drop almost everything you're carrying on top of the pixels (similar to Minecraft). The game is kind enough to leave your equipped weapons and armor intact, as well as make your dropped belongings player-persistent when the scenario happens, so there's no rush to getting your stuff back as long as you don't save and quit.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Played straight if you just dig down to the core of most planets where the Lava Is Boiling Kool-Aid. Volcanic planets on the other hand have a cinder shower weather that sets fire to blocks (and you) touched by the cinders and you must also have a cooling system in your backpack to avoid taking continuous damage from the heat.
• Cooking Mechanics: The player can prepare edible items, ensuring they would give more nutrition the more complex they are, along with additional effects such as additional energy.
• Cool Starship: Each character gets their own, with its design based off their race, e.g. Florans having a plant-covered ship. It's their base of operations in space, and it also provides the important tech that aids in exploration of the planet below, in addition to apparently being able to recreate any equipment using pixels.
• Crisis of Faith:
  • Some Avians are banished for defying their god's demands for sacrifices.
  • In specific Avian Lore there is the saga of one who was at first loyal, but after marrying an atheist and watching his brother nearly die in the attempt to ascend he lost his faith.
• Cute Machines: Voltip, one of the unique monsters, is a little raccoon- or bunny-like robot animal that claps its paws together in front of it to shoot electricity.
• Dark Is Not Evil: In contrast to Killer Rabbit below, there are many menacing/creepy-looking monsters that are passive and only attack if you provoke them.
• Death Is Not Permanent: Barring the permadeath option, each race has its own method of respawning after death.
  • Humans are cloned in a machine that builds their skeleton, grows muscles and organs, then overlays skin and hair.
  • Apex are cloned in a similar manner to humans, except they're cloned in a capsule full of liquid and injected with the serum that turns them into super-intelligent ape-men.
  • Avians are hatched from a new egg as a chick, then rapidly aged to maturity.
  • Hylotls, similar to Avians, are hatched as tadpoles, then aged up to maturity.
  • Florans are grown from a seed, with their new body hatching from a new plant.
  • Glitch are simply rebuilt.
  • Novakids are reformed from their gasses—in the form of a star quickly accelerating through its life cycle, until it explodes in a nova to reform the Novakid.
• Death Trap: They come in many flavors: pools of magma and poisonous sludge, sharp stalactites and thorns, layers of burning coals, electrified fences, barbed wire, spiked pits...
• Death World: Most planets are Death Worlds without the proper EPP upgrade. Endgame, Magma planets are still intractably deadly - they're more Lethal Lava than Land and may be the target of giant meteorites.
• Defector from Decadence: The Floran PC's reason for leaving their planet? They're sick of their race's Ax Craziness and want to start a new life.
• Denial of Diagonal Attack: Most melee weapons attack in a set range, but one-handed blades can be aimed while two-handed swords have a fixed attack angle. Spears can also do this despite being two-handed, at the cost of not having any arc to their attack.
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • Beakseed is a fruit in the game. To grow Beakseed crops, you need Beakseed Seeds.
  • Some of the randomly generated weapon names can be this. For example, the Mushroom Sword weapon can end up with the name "Mushroom Mushroom", and the Bone Sword can be called the "Horror Horror".
• Devolution Device: The Apex government invented a way to make their own people into ape-men. Supposedly this was a tradeoff to make everyone more intelligent. All of the Miniknog's Squick-y biological experiments are attempts to get their original bodies back while keeping the intelligence.
• Difficulty Levels: There are three difficulty levels: Casual (drop 10% of pixels on death; no hunger system), Normal (lose 30% of pixels and drop resources on death), and Hardcore (once the character dies, it cannot be played ever again).
• Discredited Meme: In-Universe, a Human PC will comment that they don't blame whoever scratched out the "Keep Calm and-" posters.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • Finding or buying a gun in the very early game. Guns give players reach and while melee weapons generally do much more damage (at least, until another gun is found) they don't require engaging in a melee, allowing players to save on healing items.
  • Finding a Legendary unique weapon, especially a sword such as the Time Pierce or Asuterosaberu DX, which often do considerably more damage than randomly-generated or crafted swords at the same level.
  • There is a chance to find powerful randomly generated weapons dropped by boss monsters that may allow the player to simply breeze through the first sector.
  • Changes made to the universe with one character are carried over when you start a new game with a new character. So it's possible to leave some advanced-level items on a planet with the strong character and pick them up with the new character.
  • The wood-and-cobblestone Hunting Spears that you can craft at the first-tier crafting table. They're cheap to produce in bulk, they do more damage per each one thrown than most weapons in the early game, and their damage increases as you progress through the armor tiers. They're even effective against bosses! Plus, each monster killed with a Hunting Spear has a higher chance of dropping meat that you can cook and eat to heal yourself.
  • During the beta, while not exactly the best of ideas, there was nothing outright stopping the player from heading to 'mid-to-end-game' planets first and foremost. With enough luck and dodging skills, it was possible for players to get weapons and armor way above what they should be able to have at that point.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:Invoked with genders in character creation where, for example, the florans have two differently-colored flowers or the Glitch have the two parts of a plug.
• Doomed Hometown: The entire Earth is destroyed in the opening of the game.
• Double Jump: The Pulse Jump tech.
• Downer Beginning: The game begins with humanity losing Earth.
• Dual Wielding: One-handed weapons can be wielded in each hand, so you can have two swords, two guns, or a gun in one hand and a sword in another.
• Dug Too Deep: If you dig deep enough on a planet, you'll eventually end up falling into a massive sea of lava that instantly kills you. You can tell you're getting close because the background starts to show glowing cracks.
• Dungeon Bypass: Averted: Mission areas can't be mined at all, which forces you to progress the way they're designed. Random dungeons are still fair game.
• Dungeon Shop: The procedural generation of every planet gives the possibility of finding random merchants in dungeons, but a special mention goes to the Floran Canyon dungeon type (the ones that go down, down, down and are filled with hostile Florans on the hunt) will have a side room where a non-hostile Floran merchant NPC can be found who will sell random stuff.
• Dystopia: In the Apex society, Nineteen Eighty-Four meets Planet of the Apes under the rule of Big Ape and the Ministry of Knowledge. Their furniture includes all kinds of cameras and propaganda posters (Most of which are memes).
• Early Game Hell: Mostly patched out but during the earlier builds this was certainly the case. Your starting multi tool took about 15 seconds to chop down a tree, and that much time to mine out a single block of cobblestone. Your only early means of self-defense was a broken sword, and if you went to any planet with a threat level higher than your armor, monsters killed you quickly. Once you crafted an axe and a copper pick, things would go much more smoothly.
• Earth That Was:
  • Humanity is driven away from the planet by a destructive Eldritch Abomination, with the survivors stranded and drifting through space. It's implied that Earth has essentially been destroyed.
  • Now made thoroughly unequivocal in the full game: Earth is consumed by an immense tentacled monstrosity known as The Ruin, and your PC is one of the few able to flee the destruction.
• Eldritch Abomination: Two, one minor, one quite major.
  • The first boss, the appropriately-named Erchius Horror. It's a giant crystal with a single red organic eye that's responsible for creating the mutated miners in the level.
  • The Ruin, seen in the intro destroying Earth, which was barely sealed away aeons ago and serves as the Final Boss. Tentacles. Lots of tentacles. And it's the size of a planet.
• Eldritch Location: Tame examples they might be, but some of the biomes and sub-biomes that the planets can possess are definitely this. It is possible, for example, to come across a planet extremely mutated due to the insanely high levels of radiation, which are extremely weakening: without appropriate protection you will have your max HP reduced by 85% immediately after beaming down. Or perhaps you're digging downwards and suddenly find that the rocks you were mining were suddenly gone and now you're digging through chunks of flesh.
  • Midnight biomes are perhaps the best example: no matter how close they are to their star, they will perpetually be submerged in night, even if the star shines up high, with permanent duststorms as the only thing resembling a weather. What's more, they are full of humanoid, pitch-black shadows which appear to be sentient (they build shrines, at least), but will not react to whatever the player does, and will instead watch, their bright green eyes their only defining feature. The background of these planets also contributes to the mood, and can best be described as a collection of differently shaped spikes stacked over each other.
• Elemental Weapon: Some randomly-generated melee weapons can be enhanced with either poison, fire, electricity, or ice. Poison and fire inflict their respective status effect on enemies to sap their health for several seconds after a hit, electricity adds a projectile attack in the form of a short-ranged pulse of electricity that damage other enemy units nearby rather than the one who was struck, and ice slows down the affected baddie.
• Energy Beings: The Novakids are humanoid beings made of star matter. The Snugget (Novakid racial pet) is a small bunny-like animal that's also made of star matter.
• Equipment-Hiding Fashion: Cosmetic armor is designed specifically to fill this slot. Most cosmetic armor serve as hats or capes with the exceptions serving as parts of costumes.
• Every Pizza Is Pepperoni: The default "pizza slice" item is pepperoni, though you can also craft pineapple pizza.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Early game feels a lot like this—no materials, no armor, a broken sword for a weapon... You're gonna be seeing that respawn screen quite a few times.
• Excalibur in the Rust: The Broken Broadsword the PC starts with at the beginning of the game looks like crap and has crap stats, but it can become the much more awesome Protector's Broadsword once you rescue The Baron, who can help you reforge it.
• Excited Title! Two-Part Episode Name!: Used for the title of the hidden in-game visual novel arcade game, Beautiful Attempt! Sakura Shrine Maiden Hearts+.
• Extreme Omnivore: A product of their carnivorous nature, Florans see a lot of things as possible dinner. Apex Facility items are just the start.
• Falling Chandelier of Doom: The human PC will remark that the Medieval Chandelier would fall down and crush someone in a video game.
• Faith–Heel Turn: Inverted. In-game, the Avian priest and soldier castes are fanatic worshippers of Kluex, who (supposedly) forbids space travel and demands mortal sacrifices. So if you manage to gain their loyalty to the point that they want to join you, meaning they'll join on your spaceship, they will effectively turn their back on their brutal religion to help their new friend.
• Fantastic Livestock: You can buy a number of different creatures to harvest for crafting and cooking materials, ranging from cow-like mooshi that produce milk to robot chickens that produce AA batteries.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture
  • Hylotl society is Japan, both in its traditional philosophy and in its modern cities.
  • The Avians are Mayincatec.
  • The Glitch are Medieval/Renaissance Europe.
  • Apex society under the Miniknog is fairly Soviet in nature, and the name generator for Apex PCs favors Russian or Russian-sounding names.
• Fan Disservice: The "Beautiful Ape Painting" (cannot be built or bought but can be encountered on Apex's artifact quest) is basically Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus but with a female Apex instead, covered in grey fur. Suffice to say, nobody finds it particularly attractive.
• Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables: Some of the alien crops can be bizarre.
  • Oculemons are pretty much eyeball fruit.
  • Automatoes are metallic-looking tomatoes that contain screws.
  • Boneboo plants have bones for their stems.
  • Diodia tastes like copper.
  • Avesmingo has 100 different flavours in one fruit.
  • Neonmelons have glowing seeds.
  • Pussplums are a... well, just read that name.
• Fantastic Racism: Zigzagged: in any given town from a race different to you, one third of its people will be positively curious about your visit, another third will mock you and your species, and the rest will just talk about something else.
  • In the backstory, there are mentions of repeated wars between the Florans and the Hylotl, which has led to great animosity between their species. In game, the two races have universally disparaging comments for each other, an occasionally found piece of Floran decor is spike-mounted Hylotl skulls, and the Hylotl Impervium weapons are named "Stemcutter", "Rootcutter", "Plantpounder", "Vinehacker", etc.
  • Glitch villagers also tend to not care for Hylotls. While they're not as hostile to Hylotls as Florans can be, they are very mistrusting of them and tend love to make fun of them.
  • Before the backstory overhaul in version 1.0, the USCM was the main governing body of humans (officially, at least) and had a VERY noticeable distrust of (and disdain for) every other race. The new Earth faction, the Terrene Protectorate, is much more inclusive and much less militaristic.
  • Occasus fulfills the human supremacist role after they were added in version 1.0. To the point that they want to kill all non-human life in the universe.
    "Bragging. Glitch furniture lasts up to ten times longer than that of your species."
• Feather Motif: Being birds, Avians have a focus on feathers to varying degrees.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: In the late game, this develops. Ferozium-based armor and staves from the Manipulator Table focus on energy, Violium weapons and armor from the Separator Table focus on health, while Aegisalt weapons and armor from the Accelerator Table form a middle ground, focusing on ranged attacks and energy regeneration.
• Film Noir: One of the random lore books you can pick up from a glitch society is a book written like this, depicting a detective looking for malfunctioning (self-aware) glitches in a murder case. The detective's dark secret is that he himself was self-aware, but he deliberately fits in with society in order to help other self-aware glitch stay safe.
• Fire-Breathing Diner: Chili peppers, and any dish made with them, set you on fire for a few seconds when you eat them (their flavor text claims that the humans don't consider this "hot"). Of especial note is the appropriately-named Hot Hot Hotpot, among whose ingredients is lava.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: Besides the ordinary flamethrower, there's the Dragonhead Pistol, which is a gun shaped like a dragon's head that dramatically opens its mouth as it charges up fireballs, and the Firestorm's Fury, a broadsword that has a built-in flamethrower as its secondary attack.
• Flame Spewer Obstacle:
  • The Great Sovereign Temple has one route that's filled to the brim with fire traps. If you go there, Nuru will express her displeasure over it and fire in general.
  • Outside of the main story, there's also the final arena challenge where the fire traps there not only damage you, but also empower the enemies there if they walk into it.
• Fluffy Tamer: The Creature Capture Pods allow players to capture monsters while in their infant forms, then train them to fight for them.
• For Science!: The Apex scientists shout this as a battle cry.
• Fictional Currency: Money in Starbound comes in the form of "Pixels", which are used to create objects from 3D printers or used to craft items at various work stations.
• Final Death Mode: The Hardcore option, upon character creation, will drop everything and keep the character dead when killed.
• Fish People: The Hylotl race complete with under the sea cities.
• Fish out of Water: Naturally, the PC is one for being forced to evacuate from Earth. For the Hylotl, their very first quest is titled this trope.
• Flushing-Edge Interactivity: There are Toilet, Outhouse, and Bathroom Stall items in the game, and the player character can sit on/in them like any other chair item.
• Free-Sample Plot Coupon: Inverted. After recovering five of the six Artifacts, Esther reveals that the sixth was always in her possession, and places it in the gate to the Ark so you can access it.
• Frothy Mugs of Water: Every reference to alcohol in the game since beta has replaced by other liquids. You can find plenty of kegs of juice and bottles of root pop. The Juice Keg item in particular has a Last-Second Word Swap in its description.
• Frying Pan of Doom: As a random weapon model, with its own damage type.
• Game-Breaking Bug: One of the sidequest for settlers is concerning about protecting one of the fellow settlers. Doing the sidequest invariably cause the game to freeze for two to three minutes after fighting off the assailants... and then the quest is stuck. Fixed here, where the quest immediately finished and you'll be given reward after defeating all the assailants.
• Game Mod: One of the key features of this game is the ability to easily make mods for it. This was one of the key goals of the game's designers... and they have succeeded.
• Gelatinous Encasement: The animation for sleeping in the Slime Bed.
• Global Currency Exception: The Ancient Vaults that allow you to upgrade unique weapons and terrraform planets require Ancient Essence.
• Glowing Flora: Luminescent plant life is far from uncommon in the alien biomes of the game, and is often put to practical use as a source of lighting.
  • Bioluminescence biomes are full of glowing plants, alongside glowing rocks and glowing critters. You can harvest the local flora's "glow fibre" to create glowsticks and glowing furniture to light up your own nights, some of which just consist of potting glowing bushes, flowers and vines to use as nightlamps.
  • Slime biomes are full of glowing slime pods.
  • Florans illuminate their homes with glowing plants that give off a muted green light, instead of using more conventional methods of illumination. Their chief reason for doing this is because, being intelligent plants themselves, they have a profound fear of fire.
  • The ocean floors are lit by glowing "oshrooms", or ocean mushrooms.
• Good Morning, Crono: In the full version, the player wakes up at the Protectorate Academy, having overslept and running late for their graduation.
• Great Escape: Many prisons have a release control somewhere. If triggered by the player, the cells will open and the inmates will Zerg Rush the guards. Other prisons already start out with the prisoners having escaped and taken over the facility.
• Green Hill Zone: Garden planets. Lush, rolling hills with weak enemies, plenty of basic supplies, and an abandoned mine guaranteed. Garden sub-biomes on other worlds are a mixed case; the terrain remains hospitable, but those same formerly weak enemies are leveled to be as nasty as the rest of the planet.
• Grievous Harm with a Body:
  • The player character can find a Ball of Gnomes in underground gnome biomes to use as a throwing weapon.
  • Legendary item "Intestine Whip" is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • The Broken Broadsword is the very first weapon you receive. It's entirely likely you sold it the moment you got a better weapon. If so, you just threw away any chance of getting the Protector's Broadsword, one of the most powerful melee weapons in the game. The game in no way indicates that it's worth keeping, other than a vague description that states "A very nice sword in very poor condition". The game is still perfectly playable without it, but you'll still be kicking yourself in the foot for not hanging on to it.
  • The Ancient Alphabet codex is tauntingly available in the Treasured Trophies shop, but to get it you need to trade two halves of a "translation wheel", the collection of which is a fairly opaque process. They're stored in chests in the Erchius Mining Facility and Miniknog Stronghold missions. To access them, you first must locate the hidden doors they're locked behind, and then you must track down the two hidden triggers to open the doors. Nothing in the game suggests that you need to search those specific missions, nor which of the many, many incidental switches, consoles, and valves scattered around those missions are the triggers that open the doors. You just have to scour every corner of every mission to see if there is a door, and then painstakingly flip every switch and activate every console and then go back to the door to see if one of the lights has lit up.
• Healing Spring: Healing Oasis rather. Desert planets may have this mini-biome, with reeds, palm trees, and various pools of glowing water that grants recovery as long as you're swimming in it. The water itself can be drained and harvested with an upgraded Matter Manipulator for bottling or even building your own spring.
• Helicopter Blender: Touching the propellers of an Avian Airship is a One-Hit Kill on your character.
• Humongous Mecha: With a factory capable of producing mechs to ride.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: The "Floran Party" mission. You're invited to a Floran Party. This being Florans, it's a party where they get to hunt you down and you have to escape.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Health is regenerated for a time while the player is well-fed.
• Ice Crystals: Icy planets can feature the Prism biome, which causes ice crystals to appear in place of typical flora (as well as regular crystals deep underground too).
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The early beta versions all have "Koala" in their version names, and said Koala gets angrier each version. For example: v. Perturbed Koala, v. Irritated Koala, v. Offended Koala, v. Angry Koala, v. Furious Koala and v. Enraged Koala. A later stage of beta introduced Giraffe that gets happier with each update.
• I'm a Humanitarian:
  • The Florans. Cannibalism is pretty typical at funeral rituals.
  • An unintentional example would be Moontants dropping Raw Steak. Since Moontants once used to be Human until mutated by the Erchius Horror, it can count in a Squicky way.
• Improbable Weapon User: Florans, or at the very least the Floran PC, which isn't surprising, considering their sheer bloodthirstiness. In any case, when asked about a hunting trophy stand, the PC will fondly reminisce about the time they bludgeoned their prey to death with a trophy stand before setting it up proper, and when commenting on their own flag, they comment they'd gladly stab someone with the flagpole.
• Industrial World: On Volcanic planets, there's the minor biome Foundry, where the NPCs are factory workers or robots and most of the drops are industrial goods.
• Infinite Flashlight: Each starter kit for characters has one. Due to the way lighting works, they are one of the only ways for a character to light up the surrounding area without placing any item. Due to the way the game works, flashlights can be dual-wielded, however this has little benefit except intensifying the light. Later, the Matter Manipulator is upgraded with a Scan Mode that also includes a flashlight which doesn't take up a hand or inventory space, but the trade-off here is that you can't use a weapon while holding the Manipulator.
  • The player can craft a lantern on a stick that provides a moderate amount of light surrounding them and freeing up your hands to do something else as this counts as a clothing item. Later this lantern can be upgraded to a halogen pack that is much brighter, then into a xenon pack that is even brighter.
  • The Light Augment for the Environmental Protection Pack creates a very nice glow around the player.
• Informed Equipment: Normally averted, but you can invoke it yourself with the secondary equipment slots, so your aesthetic pleasing gear won't need to never be seen again once armor with better stats come into play.
• Instant Awesome: Just Add Mecha!: Each race has its own mech that can be piloted once the tech for them is found and equipped. As of Beta v. Furious Koala, human and Glitch mechs have been implemented.
  • The mech system has been revamped in 1.3. Once players fix their ship, they can complete a simple quest that grants them their very own customizable mech. Mechs are mainly used in space encounters (also new to 1.3), but they can also be deployed on planets for some extra firepower.
• Intentional Engrish for Funny: The "Asuterosaberu DX"^note Astro Saber DX.
• Interface Screw: If your heat bar gets too low, the screen becomes progressively whiter until you can't see anything.
• In-Universe Game Clock: Each planet has it's own day/night cycle of variable length.
• Joke Item: The Tall Chair is... well, pretty tall◊.
• Just a Stupid Accent: There's a high-end sword whose name appears to have been transcribed from Japanese... but it's actually the English words "astro saber" transliterated to Japanese and right back again. ...Or rather, an egregiously bad attempt at such. The effect it intends to evoke is that, essentially, Japanese phonology is more restrictive than English, requiring all syllables to (for our purposes) consist of only a consonant followed by a vowel, so English words often need extra vowels when loaned into Japanese. However, this extra vowel is Almost Always™️ U, with O and I cropping up circumstantially (for effects or lack thereof on the consonant), and in particular E is right out. Furthermore, the process tends to respect pronunciation over spelling, so our Great Vowel Shift abominations don't come out the other side, and a coda R/rhoticized vowel usually (not always) gets rendered as additional vowel length or a straight up A. Altogether, the proper result should be アストロセイバー "asutoroseibaa". (It's notoriously hard to predict what if anything is the intended English spelling from something a Japanese author clearly meant to be non-Japanese, but in this hypothetical case with アステロサベル the best bet would be something along the lines of "astero-subbelle".)
• Justified Extra Lives: When a player character dies on the surface of a planet, game resumes from the spaceship. See Death Is Not Permanent for more.
• Killer Rabbit:
  • Among the randomly generated creatures, there are some that turn out to be rather cute. Unfortunately, they're most likely aggressive and will attack you on sight.
  • The Poptop. It's adorable, it whistles the Starbound theme music with little music notes, and it's also one of the naturally hostile and vicious creatures and attacks those who get near. ^note You find out from a book the whistling is to attract prey.
• Kill It with Fire: Florans are not fond of fire at all. Particularly evident when inspecting any fire item while playing as a Floran, as the player will often respond with fear or uneasiness.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: Granted, so long as you don't actively destroy any blocks/furniture in the various towns you can find, most town goers don't seem to have a problem with you raiding their crates, chests, cupboards, garbage cans...
• Laser Blade: The Violium Broadsword and Shortsword are straight examples. The Solus Katana and Protector's Broadsword sometimes appear to be Laser Blades, but they have mundane blades beneath the glowy exteriors.
• Let's Play: The developers posted links to a few people who got beta a few days before the public beta released. All of them end round the 30 minute mark, which is generally just finishing up the beginning of the tutorial quests.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: One of the items you can find is a Starbound arcade game. The description: "A Starbound arcade machine. How meta". Floran characters will even say they got an achievement for "sssmashing fourth wall".
• The Little Detecto: The Ore Detector sends a pulse that detects different ores in the screen you're in, even if they're within the ground.
• The Load: Janitor crew members don't really do anything. They provide no benefits to the ship, and while they can be brought into battles, anything they can do can be done by any other crew member except better.
• Lord British Postulate: The Erchius Ghost on moons is supposed to be unharmable and uncapturable by all means, but when it was first introduced players found creative ways to hurt, kill, or even capture it — via lava, using the Pollen Pump weapon, and capture pods. The devs patched this out rather quickly, however.
• Lovecraftian Superpower: The pink fleshy aliens in the Erchius Mining Facility mission attack by using their hand to spray their flesh at you.
• Low Culture, High Tech: The Avians were granted spacefaring technology by an as-yet-unamed Precursor race who neglected to give them the necessary social advancement to properly understand that it wasn't a gift from their god.
• Madness Mantra: "Floran know one thing - ssstab, ssstab, ssstab".
• Magic Floppy Disk: For some unexplained reason, untold hundreds of years into the future when the entire galaxy has been colonized by different races, floppy disks continue to circulate. Among them include Earth's last transmission when The Ruin attacked, and a galaxy-wide census revealing that there are just over 15 million Humans left, scattered among the stars, and none of them in a colony larger than 4 people each.
• Magic from Technology: The Ferozium weapons are this: super high technology made to look like magical staves.
• Magikarp Power: The broken sword you start with can eventually be upgraded to the best weapon in the game.
• Man-Eating Plant: The Florans are a race of carnivorous plant people. If you play as one, they have a fixation with food and eating, and will comment on their desire to eat the subject if you examine certain posters showing other races, especially the Apex.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It not made clear precisely how Staff and Wand weapons work. They certainly seem magical, producing effects such as fireballs, energy daggers, portals and various auras, but they may simply be making use of some kind of technology, much like the Avian Temple guardians and the Kluex Avatar.
• Mayincatec: The Avians buildings and technology strongly resembles Aztec and Mayan structures.
• Mechanical Horse: The Glitch knights behind the castle gates ride these.
• Medieval Stasis:
  • The Glitch were originally built to progress as a society, developing more and more advanced technology while remaining unaware of their nature as technological constructs. A flaw or literal glitch in the system left the Glitch stuck in the medieval period.
  • In an interesting twist, those simulations which had progressed past the medieval era eventually wound up destroying themselves when their technological progress outstripped their social progress. The Glitch survive because they are incapable of advancing further naturally.
  • Any Glitch that tries to progress the race's technology level is immediately hunted down and executed for "heresy".
• Merchant City: Something of a downplayed example with the various Avian Grounded villages (the ones where the locals don't really pay much attention to religious piety) - while other NPC villages may have at most one merchant to buy and sell stuff from, these villages may have up to twenty. Players can get the sense of being in the middle of a busy marketplace when all of them say their "Please buy my stuff!" quotes as they approach. It's downplayed in the sense that these merchants' selection of goods are varied but generally don't have anything particularly rare, though you can help expand their stores through quests.
• Mighty Roar:
  • According to NPC dialog, Apex are capable of roaring. Which is awesome.
    Floran NPC: "If monkey roar, Floran call Green Guard!"
  • Mighty Roar is also an ability used by monsters, which hits a large area around them.
• Mini-Game: Can be written into scripted interface windows. Two examples exist by default (Mazebound64, a first-person maze game, and Beautiful Attempt! Sakura Shrine Maiden Hearts+, a short Visual Novel), and many more can be had through the magic of mods.
  • There is also a fishing minigame and a focil extraction minigame for those that want to complete the collections.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Most monsters and animals are randomly generated and can have a variety of weird body types grafted together.
• Monochromatic Eyes: The Florans have jet-black eyes, coupled with More Teeth than the Osmond Family.
• Mucking in the Mud: Slogging through tar pits will stick you with a slowness debuff. Jumping into liquid slime will cause an even slower debuff.
• Mundane Utility:
  • Certain high tier weapons can have explosions after an attack. These can be used for crowd control... Or for digging (slowly) through blocks.
  • The Matter Manipulator's Scan Mode, which is used to record objects for story reasons or to be 3D printed later, also has a built-in flashlight that doesn't take up inventory space and produces more light than anything else early-game.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: For the majority of the playable races, the player character themselves have taken to space precisely because they got sick of their race's xenophobia in one way or another. The exceptions are humans (who lost their home planet and didn't have a choice), Hylotl (an inversion who seek to spread their ways of enlightenment across the stars), and possibly Novakids (who are described as mostly only doing things because why not).
• Nausea Dissonance: The PC has different reactions to certain objects depending on their race, which often results in this:
  • Most of the PCs are disturbed by the Flesh, Bone and Primitive furniture sets, but the Floran PC thinks they look tasty.
  • The Novakid PC is the only one not disgusted by a spittoon as presumably they're used to them.
  • The Glitch PC seems to be particularly disturbed by rust as it would be the Glitch equivalent of something like gangrene.
  • When inspecting a filthy mattress, most races will be horrified but the human PC will simply remark "I've slept on worse".
  • The Hylotl PC is the only one not disgusted by poop, regarding it as a natural process.
• Neglectful Precursors:
  • The Glitch are a remnant of an experiment that made artificial societies. All the other simulated civilizations developed advanced technology which inevitably led to them wiping themselves out. The Glitch survived because they developed a glitch that trapped them in Medieval Stasis.
  • The Avians recived advanced tech to save them from dying out but they did not get any help to advance their society. The result is a space faring race ruled by their priest cast who demands lots of blood sacrifices.
• No "Arc" in "Archery": Averted. Arrows have a noticeable arc even with the bow at full draw. At the far end of the range the player will need aim higher to hit their target of choice.
• No Campaign for the Wicked: Those who explore the planets are likely to eventually find an intelligent race of mushroom people who can occasionally be found living in mushroom villages. The developers suggest that these are in fact The Corruption and quite wholeheartedly wicked, so they're not playable. At least, not officially.
• Non-Indicative Name: Many things can be cooked at a campfire, but the Campfire Banana is not one of them.
• Non-Mammal Mammaries: Mammaries are defining characteristic between the sexes of all playable species so, yeah. Even the Glitch have breasts.
• Noodle Implements: The Torture Device is... Some kind of fountain thing. Water Torture exists, yes, but we never know how it works (and the description tells us we don't want to), but we do find out that, apparently, Glitch find it particularly unpleasant, the Florans themselves find the thing scary, and that it doesn't work on Hylotl.
• Not Completely Useless:
  • The Broken Broadsword at the start of the game. If you hold onto it until you beat the second-last mission, The Baron can help you reforge it into one of the best weapons in the game.
  • The Poison Resist augment is usually pretty mediocre, as liquid poison and poison-type enemies aren't much of a threat. But it really comes into its own on Toxic planets, which have massive poison oceans and a high chance of acid rain. You can get past the oceans easily enough with a boat, but the only things which can protect you against the rain are antidotes and the Poison Resist augment. Antidotes only last five minutes each and cost a venom sample each time, while the augment's effect is permanent as long as you wear it. If you're going to spend a significant amount of time on Toxic planets and you don't have a venom sample farm, a Poison Resist augment is pretty much mandatory.
• Odd Friendship: The Glitch and Florans react very positively to each other for some reason. When one race is a visitor to another's village, they are surprisingly welcoming. A page in Floran lore also implies the Glitch taught them how to read and write.
  Floran NPC: "Robot and Floran friends." ^note  The robotic Glitch are inedible so they're the only race the Florans don't see as a potential meal.
• One-Gender Race: Despite the variety in the Florans' appearance and the player being given the choice between a masculine or feminine appearance, the ''Meet the Florans'' intro of the race says they are unisex.
• Optional Boss: The Guardians of the Ancient Vaults. Unlike the other bosses in the game, they are somewhat randomly generated, which means their difficulty can range from very manageable to several magnitudes harder than the final boss.
• Our Monsters Are Weird: Inevitably, you're going to find monsters with really bizarre appearances.
• Overhead Interaction Indicator: NPCs that give the player quests are marked with yellow exclamation marks, quest-relevant entities feature blue arrows pointing at them, and when all conditions for finishing the quest are met, a blue question mark appears above the quest-giver.
• Oxygen Meter: Present whenever your character is in water or in space-based biomes with no oxygen. Strangely enough, the Glitch and Hylotl still need to breathe underwater.
• Parental Bonus: Various species notice a tadpole-like creature next to a circle in the display of the Medical Screen item. Avians mention that the screen is investigating reproduction in certain species.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": In some versions, the default password for a server is "Swordfish".
• Patchwork Map: Transitions between primary and sub-biomes are quite sudden, and some choices are strange. For instance, it's rare but possible to find a Garden biome in the midst of a perpetually-blackened Midnight planet.
• Penal Colony: One possible dungeon the player may encounter on various worlds are USCM prisons where the prisoners took over the place.
• Permadeath: You only have one life on hard difficulty.
• Permanently Missable Content: Remember that sword you started out with? You probably threw it away. Unfortunately, the game gives you no hints that keeping it is a good idea since you can upgrade the sword to one of the best weapons in the game later on.
• Planet Baron: The player is able to cover entire planets in rooms and then rent them out. Planet Landlord?
• Planet of Hats: Each race as at least two components to their hats.
  • Florans have the savage and plant-life hat. They are both as lethal and cruel, even to each other, as they can be, as well as being meat eating plants, and they are a plant race.
  • Humans currently are a race without a home planet much like humans in Titan A.E.. Something special for the humans is a possibility in the future.
  • Glitch have the oldest theme, being stuck in the past due to an issue with programming (hence their name), and are still in the time of swords and farming. Despite being robots and stuck in the past, they are actually one of the most friendly races to find on a planet, and seem good natured despite their issues.
  • Apex are ape-men who seem to follow the government strongly. They are a blend of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Planet of the Apes. Their furniture tends to be more centered around the 70s and their "music" seems to indicate that they have regained some bestial instincts despite remaining intelligent.
  • Hylotl are fish people who appear to be the most modern. Despite that, they have a heavy Asian influence in their clothing and ships. It's noted in lore that Hylotl are the most peaceful of the races, to the point of getting mockery from time to time. They also value beauty, which is more of an Informed Ability at the moment due to there being so few items that show that.
  • Avians are a strongly religious race with a heavy Mayincatec aesthetic. Avians value piety to their god, Kluex, above all else, and those who renounce their faith are summarily excommunicated.
  • Novakids are Space Westerners with bodies composed of energy. They are amongst the oldest races in existence, but their short-term memories also makes them the most technologically stunted and does not help in relations with other races.
• Plant Aliens:
  • The Florans. They are a very aggressive carnivorous plant people that react in a hostile way towards non-Floran creatures. They will even eat their own kind if given the chance. There are a few of them who like to be around other creatures, however. It's also noted that they suffer from a "what measure is a non-Floran" as the reason for their aggressiveness, rather than outright maliciousness.
  • The Poptop is a plant, according to source material.
• Plant Hair: The Florans have virtually every kind possible, ranging from simple head-flowers and vines to pitcher-plant "hats" and venus-flytrap-jaw ponytails.
• Plant People: The Floran subvert this. The Meet the Florans page^noteThe entry can also be found on the official wiki. points it out, saying that they put their "survival through reproduction and expansion" above conserving the environment and that the assumption that they are environmentalists because they're humanoid plants allows them to thrive.
• Planet Heck: The Dummied Out "Heck" Biomes have Flesh Blocks and Brains as walls, lights and plants that look like flesh, and unique loot designed from bones.
• Planet Looters: You. A major part of the gameplay is traveling from world to world, stripping each one of resources. Fortunately, none of the worlds you will visit after the tutorial appear to be major homeworlds with a large population of sentient beings you would inconvenience (other than the final mission world, with an enemy you want to inconvenience and its Mooks).
• Plotline Death: Despite dying and respawning plenty of times over the course of the game, your friends treat your character's death at the core of the Ruin like a total shock and a somber moment... and they're just as shocked when the Cultivator brings you Back from the Dead.
• Poke the Poodle: Some of the procedurally generated quests can come off as this, like a band of hardened convicts straight out of USCM prison stealing someone's lunch.
• Power-Up Food: Some foods like Pinapple Upside Crown Cake and Banana Bread grant super speed and jumping.
• Power Up Letdown: Yellow stimpacks. They make you glow brightly so that you can explore dark locations more easily! ...for about 30 seconds.
• Precursors: Seems to be of the neglectful variety, having left behind lots of strange things like dimensional gateways and at least one eldritch abomination. They also technologically uplifted the Avians without bothering to uplift them socially (resulting in a sacrifice-happy theocracy with spaceships and guns) and seeded countless artificial starter civilizations across the galaxy, almost all of which destroyed themselves when they became powerful enough to do so (The only exception, The Glitch, unintentionally avoided this thanks to an accidental programming error that trapped them in Medieval Stasis).
• Prison: All the races have prisons as important locations, where you can go in and see a little more of their idiosyncrasy. The types and amount of torture devices vary from none to lots, the facilities offered can vary just as much, and in the Florans' case they also double as cattle pens.
• Procedural Generation: For planets, weapons, wildlife, and visual details like trees' appearance. The game uses the coordinates of each point in space to check if placing a system there, and if it does, uses said coordinates as seed.
• Proud Scholar Race: Apex have more technological furniture than any other species.
• Psychopathic Man Child: The Florans as a whole are very simplistic but notoriously aggressive and violent. The playable Floran is this less so than the rest of their kind, but it still shines through when inspecting things.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: Gender only affects cosmetic features and has no other effect on gameplay currently.
• Put Down Your Gun and Step Away: The guards of many settlements will advise you to holster your weapon, and after a while enforce it with extreme prejudice if you do not comply.
• Rainbow Pimp Gear: Optional. Each character has eight equipment slots for armor: four for the armor to actually use and get stats from, and another four for the armor to display, so you mix and match gear to play it straight, or dye them so they at least are color-coordinated. There are certain cosmetic items that are chromatic and sparkle when you run with them. So it is played straight. The problem is finding them...
• Randomly Generated Loot: Weapons and shields have randomly-generated stats and appearances corresponding to the difficulty of the planet they were found on.
• Randomly Generated Quests: While the main quests are fixed, side quests from tenants and villagers are generated, and include activities such as bribing someone, capture a monster or buying stocks.
• Rare Random Drop: The "Upbeat Giraffe" update added rare loot tables to monsters, allowing them to drop items like seeds, cosmetic clothes, or instruments.
• Recurring Riff: "On the Beach at Night", is the main theme of the game, and its chorus shows up in many of the other songs on the soundtrack. Unusually, "On The Beach" itself is not in the official soundtrack release (though you can play it in-game on one of the instrument items).
• Remember When You Blew Up a Sun?: You can find a book detailing an (in)famous military maneuver made by a Human commander during one of their earliest conflicts with the Florans, entailing the commander dumping several thousand gallons of what is basically Agent Orange on the Florans. This didn't have the intended effect. Instead of killing them it made them drunk, but still achieved the desired effect of allowing the humans to retake the area long enough to evacuate the colonists. Judging by the last line of the book, it serves as this trope to the rest of the USCM.
• Retcon: The story in general changed fairly drastically between the beta and version 1.0.
  • The tone is much Lighter and Softer after 1.0.
  • The backstory was overhauled, both to make room for the main storyline and to remove various hanging plot threads (i.e. Greenfingers experiments).
  • All races now start as new members of the Terrene Protectorate just before the destruction of the Earth, as opposed to pre-1.0 where each selected race would have a different backstory and Earth had already been destroyed.
• Retirony: The janitor that greets you when you first go outside during the tutorial states being just one day from retirement. Then The Ruin comes and destroys Earth.
• Ribcage Ridge: Occasionally found on desert planets. Sometimes, the giant ribs and skulls are even placed on top of piles of smaller bones.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter:
  • Several randomly-generated aliens may sport a really adorable face and small body. Still doesn't mean that they aren't aggressive, though.
  • The Novakid pet is a Snugget◊, which is a really adorable quadruped made of star energy like the Novakids themselves.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: The Glitch. This borders on exaggeration - the Glitch need to breathe, sleep, eat and drink, can become poisoned, have two different genders, reproduce sort-of-sexually, can become sick, can become wounded, and patch up their "wounds" with bandages. This is actually justified in-game, though: The Glitch were created as part of a social experiment, and since their long-extinct creators wanted to observe how societies develop over time, the Glitch were designed so that their experiences in life would resemble that of organic creatures as closely as possible. Only a handful of Glitch, including the player character (if you choose Glitch as race), are actually self-aware and even realize they are robots.
• Rogue Drone: PC Glitches are Glitches who have become self-aware, causing them to be cut off from the rest of the Glitch collective and branded a heretic.
• RPG Elements: The devs have stated they have no intention of including character attributes or stats. Any effects or specializations comes purely from equipment and food.
• Rubber-Band A.I.: Erichus ghosts get much faster as soon as they're offscreen, ensuring the player can never truly escape them until they leave the planet.
• Run or Die: At the end of the Floran Party mission, there's a boss Floran who takes extremely little damage from all weapons and wields a very painful Bonehammer. You're supposed to flee from him until you can get to the transmitter at the end, then get out of there. You can, however, whittle his health down and get a unique cosmetic item for beating him.
• Sadistic Choice: Upon entering a challenge portal, the player might be presented with a single small room containing a bunny and a kitten on platforms suspended over lava, each with a corresponding loot chest containing a hat resembling that animal. No points for guessing what happens to the platform you didn't pick. It's possible to complete the room without melting any animals, by using the Relocator to pick up the bunny and/or catching the kitten in a Capture Pod... but you still only get one hat.
• Schizo Tech:
  • The Glitch are programmed not to fully grasp that they're robots and cyborgs in an otherwise medieval European society. They also like to use bows while you might be facing them with a shotgun or rocket launcher.
  • Despite the advanced technology available to players common starting tools are made of stone and bows are used to hunt for food from animal life. The most extreme example? As soon as the game begins, the player is presented with a handheld nanomanipulator. The very first thing they're likely to do with it is use it to build a pickaxe. Lampshaded by the pickaxe description, which says it's so last millennium.
• Science Is Bad: Any Glitch who, through another glitch, becomes aware of their backwards technology will invariably start to invent more advanced technology. This is frowned upon by Glitch society.
• Sentry Gun: Can be built and placed, and will attack enemies. They have a limited amount of energy and will deactivate when they run out, but the player can interact with them to replenish it. An upcoming update will allow players to place their own guns into the sentries, allowing them to use those guns' projectiles.
• Shameless Fanservice Girl: Occasionally during Peacekeeper missions, you find that your target is engaging Full-Frontal Assault on you and they themselves don't care. One possible quote has them declare clothes as shackles to society.
• Shout-Out: So many they have their own page.
• Shows Damage: Vehicles get visibly banged up if you're not a careful driver. The boat will sport increasingly tattered sails and chipped paint, and the hoverbike recieves dings and dents, a cracked windshield, and exposed pipes and wires.
• Single-Biome Planet: Downplayed; every planet has a primary biome that covers most of it, but also sub-biomes that can be taken from entirely different planet types. An ice world, for instance, could well have a region of temperate forests. The transition phase need not entirely make sense.
• Sky Pirates: There are Avian groups of pirates, complete with rotor-powered wooden ships. They don't seem to do much piracy except selling guns.
• Slobs Versus Snobs: The Florans (Slobs) versus the Hylotl (Snobs). There are even repeated wars between the two.
• Smash Mook: Many land-dwelling aliens tend to have "Charge", "Body Slam" and "Bash" as their abilities, which makes them either charge at you, jump on you to damage you, or damage you on contact.
• Sorting Algorithm of Threatening Geography: At the start of the game, the player lands on a "lush" planet on a gentle star, where the wildlife is weak but the resources are poor. They progress through deserts, oceans, jungles, tundras, and volcanoes, each with stronger wildlife and better resources.
• Species Subversives: The Laid-Back Koala stereotype was inverted with the update titles when it was in Early Access, which are themed around a koala becoming more and more enraged, starting with "Perturbed" and ending with "Rampaging".
• Sssssnake Talk: Though they are Plant Aliens instead of reptiles, the Florans talk like this, especially when talking about ssstabbing.
• Space Amish: The Glitch are scattered across the galaxy because the precursors put them there, and they all have the same society because of a programming error.
• Space Pirates: Dreadwing and his penguin armies.
• Space Western: The Novakids seem to literally be this, as they have a very wild west-esque motif, complete with western-themed racial armor sets and space trains.
• Spikes of Doom:
  • Several variants. Most of them damage you on contact. Wooden Spikes, however, are a One-Hit Kill on anyone who touches them.
  • For a more decorative variant, Florans enjoy crafting furniture out of the bones of their prey, giving it a very spiky appearance.
• Squee: The Hylotl PC reacts this way upon seeing the Bad Goo Plushie, wanting it for his/her collection.
• Starter Equipment: The Broken Broadsword is your starting weapon and it's outclassed by many crafted weapons early on although it has a large range. Hold onto it until the end of the game and The Baron can repair it into the Protector's Broadsword.
• Stock Food Depictions: Zigzagged. The the grapes are purple and in a triangular bunch, doughnuts are iced and ring-shaped, sushi is maki rolls filled with raw fish, and so on. However, you can also create more interesting dishes like cactus ice cream, pineapple jam and bananas wrapped in bacon. And that's not even going into the food made from alien ingredients.
• Strange-Syntax Speaker: The Glitch speak in the exact same manner as HK-47 from the Knights of the Old Republic series, declaring precisely what sort of sentence they are about to say before speaking.
  • They don't even know they do it. One of the codexes states that a visitor tried speaking that way to them thinking it was the polite thing to do, but they just got confused as to why he was doing it.
• Sufficiently Advanced Bamboo Technology: The Glitch spaceship looks like a castle.
• Super-Persistent Predator: Most enemies won't stop chasing you. A few bird species will, however, give up on prey that gets away.
• Survival Sandbox: Permadeath mode turns the game into this.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: During Peacekeeper missions where you must apprehend a criminal, sometimes they wear a Paper-Thin Disguise and deny they're who you're looking for.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: Rarely on Peacekeeper missions, you'll find yourself at a Erchius fuel storage facility, where you could collect enough liquid Erchius fuel from cannisters and resevoirs to fill your FTL hatch twice. As it's inevitable that you'll jump from one star system to another, you'll find yourself loaded for several missions.
• Technology Uplift: Someone did this for the Avians, giving them advanced technology directly to prevent them dying out.
• Technopath: Greenfingers can grow plants into technology they find, and then use the plants to control and interact with said technology. They can also pass on said "altered" technology to other Floran. This may explain why the Floran ship has vines growing all over (and in) the hull.
• Terraform: Clearing Ancient Vaults provides access to a Terraforge, which in turn can produce Terraformers (provided you brought the appropriate materials) that can gradually change the biome of a whole world to one of the player's liking (whether that be a lush Garden or a hellish Decayed one). Ancient Vault end bosses may also drop Microformers, which can do the same for specialized microbiomes like Crystaline or Eyepatch).
• Terrain Sculpting: The Matter Manipulator allows players to do this on near every planet they want given enough time (though this is easier after it's been upgraded to dig and plop down material faster).
• Terrible Trio: Big Ape, Thornwing, and Greenfinger were often mentioned in the lore as working together before the lore was reworked.
• That Makes Me Feel Angry: Glitch always preface what they say with the emotion they are delivering it with.
• Third-Person Person: Almost all Floran speak like this.
• This Is a Drill: You can't craft them right from the beginning, but they take the place of pickaxes later in the game.
  • The 1.3 update added customizable mechs, which can be equipped with a drill arm.
• Third Eye:
  • The Hylotl have third eyes.
  • Some Glitch have four or even six eyes. And because in the sprite they look the same, some have eye-nipples.
  • Some of the procedurally generated monsters can have a third eye.
• Throwing Down the Gauntlet: In one lore entry, Big Ape challenges Kluex to a cage match to prove Apex superiority, unaware that Kluex is not alive when he makes the challenge.
• Tin Tyrant: The Glitch's Doom Lord armor set, natch. Complete with horned helmet.
• Toilet Humour: The game has plenty of poop jokes, with a sewer being one possible randomly-generated dungeon, poop golems, and poop as a decorative object.
• Too Many Mouths:
  • Some of the Florans have Venus flytrap-like jaws attached to their heads.
  • Some of the monsters can have multiple mouths.
• To Serve Man: Floran characters will openly refer to other species as potential meals when examining posters and other decorative objects, and seem to have a particular fixation towards the Apex, for some reason. Floran NPCs will also threaten to eat the player character.
• Towering Flower: Giant flower biomes have been a feature since the earliest versions, but not always in the same locations. Earlier versions had giant flowers in the "toxic swamp" mini-biome that could appear even on low difficulty planets, while the current version has the giant flower mini-biome that can appear on jungle planets.
• Trademark Favorite Food: The Apex love bananas. A given for being ape-folk.
• Trashcan Bonfire: Found in prisons, bandit camps and other such places of ill repute. Notably, the Glitch PC notes that it looks unsettlingly similar to a burning Glitch.
• Underwater City: A given for the Hylotl, considering they're Fish People. And they look awesome.
• Universal Poison: The liquid known simply as "poison" can be found in a huge variety of places, from Miniknog laboratories to decrepit sewers to the bowels of the Ruin. It inflicts the same status effect that's caused by monster attacks and eating raw meat.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Two sentient races, the Agarans who are mushroom people and the Colorfuls who look like rabbit ninjas, are not playable. Their villages and houses can appear on planets however.
  • Enemies that use weapons will generally not drop said weapons, though comparable weapons are often available to the player from other sources.
  • The boss Asra Nox uses advanced technology to move around during the battle. The player has access to similar technology which can be upgraded, but nothing quite as powerful as what Asra Nox uses.
• Unwanted False Faith: Avians in a naturally-generated village may ask if the Avian player character is Kluex and is going to take them away.
• Useless Useful Spell:
  • There are 14 unique EPP augments, but the only ones that ever get used are Damage, Healing, Mobility, Light and possibly Poison Resist. This is because an EPP can only have one augment equipped, and some augments are just more useful than others. Swimming or Thorns is nice to have in theory, but they're not worth your only augment slot. There's also the fact that equipping a new augment destroys your old one. Some augments could be useful in specific situations, such as Fire Resist when exploring a Volcanic planet, but they're not worth sacrificing your Damage III augment for, especially considering how rare augments are.^note Poison Resist manages to be Not Completely Useless because it provides full immunity to poison and toxic rain, while Fire Resist doesn't make you immune to lava or meteor storms. Because of this, it's generally worth getting a Poison Resist augment for exploring Toxic planets, even if it means crafting a spare EPP for it.
  • The same is true for collars, which are basically augments for pets. Like augments, they are very rare, only one can be applied per pet and applying a new collar overwrites the old one. The only useful ones are Healing and Oblivious ^note for attaching to a Lumoth in order to use it as a light source, and possibly Damage if you have some other method of healing your pet.
• Variable Mix: Different music plays depending on the planet and what time it is on that planet. It also becomes muffled and disorted when you go underwater.
• Victor Gains Loser's Powers: Defeating the main storyline bosses has a chance to give you a weapon based on one of their attacks. For example, the Erchius Eye dropped from the Erchius Horror allows the player to fire a watered-down version of its Wave-Motion Gun attack.
• Videogame Flamethrowers Suck: While the Flamethrower is potent if you get it early, it's only a tier 2 weapon, so it will be decisively outclassed by the time you reach Durasteel level.
  • This is an artifact of the Flamethrower being a unique weapon, meaning it's stuck at Tier 2 and its stats are always the same low values every time you find it. In previous versions, "flamethrower" was a weapon class of its own, and flamethrowers could be just as strong (or weak) as any other randomly-generated weapon.
• Violation of Common Sense: Well, it's not the player character's fault per se, but the player can create colonies of people on any planet, who give currency and item rewards to their landowners. The rewards scale if tenants are hosted on more dangerous planets; from a gameplay perspective, this makes sense, since those dangerous planets generally come later in player progression. Story-wise, who in their right mind would pay more to live on a volcano planet than a less deadly one?
• Was Once a Man: The pink fleshy aliens in the Erchius Mining Facility distress mission. After facing a number of these, you eventually encounter miners undergoing transformation into one of these horrors. One of the surviving uninfected miners even mentions that the pink things look like people. It turns out that they were turned into these things by the area's boss.
• Weaponized Exhaust: You'll take damage from bumping into the thrusters of ships.
• Weird World, Weird Food: A given since you're now living among the stars and likely hunting and gathering when you start off. Some foods are more alien than others, like Oculemons (fruits that look like eyeballs) and Automatoes (metallic tomatoes).
• Whale Egg: You can buy eggs of livestock at Terramart. This makes sense for chickens, not so much the mammalian fluffalo and mooshi.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The Florans treat animals like humans treat plants.
• What the Hell, Player?:
  • NPCs in villages will criticize the player for destroying their homes before calling the guards on them.
  • The Hylotl player character will mention their distaste of some of the more uncultured stuff the player might want to do, such as smash pots and jars or summoning a Floran colonist.
• Witch Hunt: Any Glitch that, through yet another Glitch, realizes that they are part of an experiment and that their technology can be more advanced is treated as raving lunatics and are hunted down by the mainstream Glitch.
• With This Herring: At the beginning of the game, you're supplied with only a matter manipulator, a flashlight, 10 torches, a few cans of food, a broken two-handed broadsword, and the meager clothes you're currently wearing^note If you play the tutorial, you can add a couple doses of healing herbs and bandages if you check the last cargo box before jumping onto your ship. The matter manipulator is slower at mining than a stone pickaxe, the flashlight only illuminates areas at a small angle (unlike the torches and almost all other light sources), and the broadsword should immediately be replaced with a hunting knife once you have the iron to craft it.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: On Survival difficulty and higher, the player characters have a hunger meter that slowly depletes over time, and must eat in order to replenish it. Yes, even the robotic Glitch need to eat.
• Womb Level:
  • The "Tentacle" biome on The Ruin. The outer layer is composed of sludge and tentacle blocks, trees are replaced by tentacles, and burrowing inside them you can find clusters of nerves, brain tissue and pools of poison.
  • Flesh Biomes. The "ground" is made of either flesh or bones.
  • Curiously averted with the rather benign Eyepatch minibiomes. Sure, the trees have enormous eyeballs and are made of some kind of fleshy fiber, but the ground is regular dirt and the water is perfectly ordinary. The local fruit, Oculemons, are delicious, if a bit unsettling.
• Word-Salad Humor: Arcade games in this galaxy have some seriously odd names. Psychedelic Rodeo Melee is a rather artsy game, Stylish Thief Wasteland is apparently violent as hell, Screaming Fashion Agent is seriously terrifying, and that's just the start.
• Wrench Whack: If a mechanic crew member is brought into combat, they'll eschew actual weapons in favor of bashing things with their wrench.
• Wutai: Hylotl appear to have this as their other hat, the first one being fish people and everything that implies. Their default clothing resembles Japanese clothing, and their spaceship seems to take off both the Chinese koi and Japanese dragon. The ship's default interior has strong resemblances to eastern housing as well, complete with lanterns. Hylotl cities mostly take after modern Japanese culture, featuring advertisements for popular cartoons, childrens toys and plushies, night clubs, and living areas that are fairly small for their size.