Tropes with their own pages:
- Anticlimax Boss:
- The Heart of the Ruin, if you have endgame equipment. At Tier 6 equipment, his regularly-summoned flunkies are laughably easy to beat and less deadly than the Occasus mooks summoned by the previous boss, the Bone Dragon. While it does have wide-area, powerful attacks, those are easily telegraphed and avoided. The only troubles are its ludicrous amount of health and that the flunkies it summons from other biomes can pose a threat due to their high health.
- A couple of optional bosses like Dreadwing and Shockhopper Mk I can become this. While they can be fought at pretty much any time, they warn that you'll need "very good equipment" before attempting them. This gives the impression that they should be fought near the endgame, but if you wait until then they become hugely easy as they are only Tier 3 and 4 respectively.
- Come for the Game, Stay for the Mods: The game on its own is a pretty fun sandbox-style game with an adventure mode guiding you along as you unlock more things. However, the game's lifespan has been tremendously extended thanks to its modding community, including (but not limited to) mods that completely rebalance the entire universe, add entire quest storylines, add all manner of playable races, create crossovers with other properties, and add outfits for you to show off.
- Common Knowledge: That the Florans are a race of carnivorous plants. They're actually omnivores.note While they definitely prefer meat, the Floran PC is able to survive purely on plant-based food if this is required. It's not Gameplay and Story Segregation either, the Floran PC enjoys Diodias and Pussplums and mentions preparing rice as a side dish, while Eyebowls and the Hot Bone (both entirely vegan) are Floran dishes. Technically, Florans eating each other is vegan too. It doesn't help that the popular Frackin' Universe mod turns the Floran into true carnivores.
- Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Some players retain the habit of creating the infamous "commieboxes" from Terraria (aka simple wooden houses that look like a box) for their tenant Non Player Characters.
- Creepy Cute: The Floran may be murderous and cannibalistic Extreme Omnivores, but their endearing enthusiasm for stabbing and their flowery appearances get them this treatment. Not only that, but the Florans' quirky way of speaking can be adorably childlike.Floran PC: (about Tall Grass) Floran hide in grassss. Pop out. Boo! Ssstab.
- Sometimes the random generation of creatures make some of these.
- Midnight biomes are populated with humanoid Living Shadows who gather around creepy shrines with glowing red eyes. However, they're completely harmless and are even unable to defend themselves against hostile monsters, making them seem strangely vulnerable. They also seem to like wind chimes, and can often be seen playing with them. This makes them quite endearing despite their evil appearance.
- Critical Dissonance: On Metacritic
. While the game has been positively received by many game review sites, player opinion and scores are much more divided thanks to the Broken Base. - Demonic Spiders: An early patch that changed the leveling and damage systems resulted in flying enemies being incredibly powerful and aggressive. They still can have some tendencies towards this, however. Bet you didn't think that tiny sparrow thing breathed fire. Still, as most monsters are procedurally generated, you can always end up with one of these where you least expect it.
- Designated Hero: You can easily become one if you want. Even if you go around robbing and murdering everyone in sight, as long as you complete the main questline everyone will still treat you like a hero.
- Ensemble Dark Horse:
- For a relatively uncommon and unplayable race that only show up in savannas, the Fenerox are surprisingly popular.
- Novakid are very popular, despite being rare to encounter, having hardly any lore and being the only playable race without an artifact and associated quest.
- Fan Nickname:
- Frackin' Universe renames Shadows to Tenebrhae, and this name is sometimes used for them within the fanbase.
- The Cheerful Giraffe update - which finally brought Starbound out of Early Access - is commonly referred to as simply '1.0' by the playerbase.
- Game-Breaker: Engineer crew members occasionally improve your ship's Erchius mileage. The broken part is that there is no limit to how many times an engineer can do this, nor how fuel-efficient your ship can get. After a while, even if you're jumping from one extreme corner of the galaxy to the opposite, the amount of fuel needed is so minuscule that the game just rounds it down to zero, removing fuel as a gameplay mechanic entirely. Even after you can go anywhere for free (100% efficient), every so often your engineers will still cheerfully announce that they've made your engines 10% more efficient. The icing on the cake? Thanks to the tenant system, you can get an engineer before you even leave your starter planet for the price of a few Colony Deeds and doing a few quests for your colonists.
- Corrected as of the 1.3 update. Engineers now only provide a speed boost. Mechanics now improves fuel efficiency instead (and don't expand the tank anymore), but at a flat rate - 10% for just having them on board. A second mechanic grants an additional 5%, a third half that, and so on.
- Goddamned Bats:
- After the devs found the flying mooks too powerful and aggressive, they were toned down, but they still pose a big annoyance.
- Small, fast hostile enemies with Bash can easily close the distance and get a hit in on you.
- Monsters with the "Gravity Slam" ability will throw you into the air and slam you into the ground. While this may not do that much fall damage (if any), you can't move in to attack them or fire at them while you're being thrown!
- Monsters with the "Grab" ability will grab you in place while causing continuous Collision Damage.
- Literal example with Batongs, they're moderately fast flying enemies that tend to attack in large groups and swarm the player.
- Good Bad Bugs:
- Core mining - the practice of mining down to the molten core of a magma planet and placing soft blocks you can remove easily inside the lava. This both removes the lava and causes precious ores to appear, which can then be mined out far more quickly than finding and mining them from cobblestone or obsidian. Apparently, these ores would be generated there if there was solid rock instead of lava. And before you ask, yes, you could use ice for this purpose, and it won't melt.
- Leather armor (Snow Infantry Armor) had both a good amount of heat and protection, which was fixed, since the large boost in protection was a bug.
- Building a colony on a moon used to produce abnormally powerful gear. The quality of random loot is determined by the difficulty level of the planet, which goes from 1 (low) to 6 (inconceivable). Moons had an internal difficulty level of 10, in order to make the Erchius Ghost as dangerous as possible, but moons have no loot chests, so the benefits of the high difficulty didn't normally come into play. Tenants in a colony, however, give out loot for rent and quest rewards according to the difficulty of the planet, so tenants on a moon would occasionally hand you weapons that were much, much stronger than anything you can find on any planet. Moons have since been patched to have a difficulty of 1.
- The Martinus Transformation liquid duplication glitch exploits a quirk in how the engine renders liquids. Dripping small amounts of a liquid into a second liquid will result in the first liquid being slowly but surely converted into the second type. This has been exploited for infinite fuel. As of Version 1.3.4, it has not been patched out.
- Hilarious in Hindsight:
- The in-game movie poster described a relationship between a Floran and a Hylotl. A year later, the same movie about a romantic relation with an Amphibian premiered, albeit with a human janitor.
- The in-game movie poster
- Memetic Mutation:
- When the plant-like florans were first revealed, and Word of God stated that they were originally intended to be a One-Gender Race (but couldn't be due to programming limitations), fans quickly started speculating as to how such a species would reproduce. The (joke) answer that caught on was that they just rub their butts together.
- Starbound, the best Soda Drinking Simulator ever createdexplanation.
- When the plant-like florans were first revealed, and Word of God stated that they were originally intended to be a One-Gender Race (but couldn't be due to programming limitations), fans quickly started speculating as to how such a species would reproduce. The (joke) answer that caught on
- Moral Event Horizon: Asra Nox crosses it when she summons the ruin in an attempt to destroy all sapient life except for humans, even though the ruin will destroy everything. After you arrest her in the peacekeeper mission, even she knows she has a lot to repent for, after all her desperate attempts of wiping out all non-humans.
- Narm: After you complete the final mission of the main quest, the Ruin explodes while you're trapped in its core which takes your life. A big deal is made of this, with your allies back at the Ark horrified and saddened over your demise, until you're very dramatically revived by the precursor entity. This emotional moment is only effective until you remember that respawning after death is canon, and you've presumably watched yourself being cloned/reassembled back on your ship with no ill effect whatsoever several times before, making this situation feel like a colossal over-reaction. It might be justified that The Ruin is a Final Boss, New Dimension as the entry point is only that huge portal, and thus without direct connection to the ship your character might be gone forever if not for the Cultivator bringing you back.
- Nausea Fuel:
- Bloody Puss, a smoothie made from pussplums (which as the name implies resemble pustules) and flesh strands. The questionable name doesn't help at all.
- Relatedly, Ocumelons. A floran player character will cheerfully inform you that they're almost as good as the real thing.
- As food starts to decay it goes from "will go bad soon" to "starting to smell rotten" to "almost too rotten to eat", and you can still eat it in this state. The idea of eating meat and eggs that are so far gone that they smell bad is nauseating.
- Play the Game, Skip the Story: The current plot of the game is often criticized for being generic with no characters to get invested into. As a result, mods to simply skip the plot exist and many of the players ignore the plot in favor of exploring and building.
- Popular with Furries: Starbound's fanbase has considerable amount of overlap with the furry fandom, thanks to the game's wide assortment of anthro-style races such as the Hylotl, Avians, Apex, and Fenerox, alongside more exotic fare like Florans. Game Mods tend to go further, adding popular furry species such as the Avali (a race that appears in almost as much Starbound fanart as any of the game's official races, to the point where many people assume the Avali originated there).
- That One Boss:
- The Bone Dragon that shows up towards the end of the Baron's Keep mission. The boss can throw fireballs which do large chunks of damage, leave traces of fire on the ground which can damage you, and it also destroys any cover you could hide behind. In addition to the dragon, you must fight constant waves of cultists on the ground and they are pretty durable and decently painful. If you end up dying during the fight, you have to start the mission all over again since there's no Checkpoint unlike other missions.
- Big Ape is notorious as well, not so much for the raw difficulty (he's quite easy once you know what works well against him) as for the Difficulty Spike between him and the previous boss. The way his four projectors work is frustrating - They can all take damage, but the instant one is destroyed the others are fully healed meaning any damage to the others is wasted on that cycle. The projectors are always spinning, making hitting the same one consistently quite difficult as well, and they spin faster as more of them break. He stays off the ground and out of easy reach for most of the fight, making melee weapons very hard to use. And when you do break a projector he goes into full-on Bullet Hell mode for a while before his pattern resumes. Most people either have to overwhelm him with endgame gear, consume huge amounts of healing, or simply die a large number of times until they figure his patterns out. Or you can use the aegisalt pistol against him, since its unique attack style nullifies everything that makes him hard to damage.
- 1.4's Peacekeeper missions has the final confrontation with Asra Nox for the postgame, this time against her mech The Swansong. Among her arsenal are a tracking laser, a sword attack, and homing missiles. Also, she spawns orbs that serve to refill your mech's energy, but once gravity turns off, they form a spiderweb and the beams that connect the orbs will damage you. Lose your mech? Time to start over, since you cannot control your movement in a zero-G environment.
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
- The December 10 patch introduced a new system for damage and threats that does away with Armor Penetration stats which lead to unwieldy damage values in weapons in favor of DPS and reducing threat levels on planets from 1-100 to 1-10 (one threat level per the first four sectors). Cue some crying about how it would make the game too easy. A balancing oversight making iron weapons ungodly powerful did not help matters.
- In a reverse sight of things, the update which changed that caused a bug. The bug itself caused absurdly powerful monsters to spawn with birds being ungodly powerful, being able to insta-kill you. The fact that the update also nerf'd ones armor made early-game areas harder than hard. It was fixed, of course, but those goddamn birds...
- Tyi has seen how bad the new threat level was (specially bad if you could breeze through a Level 10 planet with no problem and then another Level 10 planet would have everything kill you in 1.3 hits) and decided to add decimals to a Threat Level (for example: Level 1 planets will have Threat Level from 1 to 1.99).
- The bow, the basic hunting weapon, now uses about 20 Energy per shot. A simple assault rifle or sniper rifle can do better than it for considerably less.
- One tactic used by players to easily mine stuff was via digging gravel/fine sand and letting the ores drop and slide down. Now, this tactic backfires; any ores loosened by the sand are lost forever.
- The hotbar changes every so often. First you have a change that gave the matter manipulator and a few other items their own slots, along with a default slot returned to after deselecting a hotbar item. Which is a problem for players used to placing quickly-needed items on either end of the hotbar, as now you'll be scrolling past an extra three slots. The real curveball however? The update that removed the default slot, placed the matter manipulator and other fixed items in the middle of the hotbar, and divided the hotbar slots into 2 bars of 6 left hand/right hand pairs. Confused yet? Aside from being wildly different from the previous system, it also means no more always having a shield in your off-hand.
- The Giraffe-level updates took away many items, such as Rubium, Ceruleum and Impervium, unique biomes and weapons that could be found in them, such as the Heck and Zen Biomes. Furthermore it also removed a huge amount of enjoyable codexes and lore.
- Since around modway through the beta up to the 1.0 release build, there seem to have been more features removed than added. Among them the vast array of discoverable techs (Now reduced to 12 easily unlockable techs), crafting materials, procedurally generated weapon types, biomes, dungeons, mobs, and codices (For example the USCM Bunkers and their robots and codices). There also used to be separate levels and stats for different capturable monsters, but they have since all been given the same stats (A mother Poptop has the same stats as a baby Poptop). Every race is now given the same starting quest and story as opposed to the original race specific backstories.
- Viewer Gender Confusion:
- Asra Nox is female, though her portrait and figure in game gives a different impression. The rarity of seeing female villains probably also contributes.
- Dr. Akaggy is also female, but with her androgynous penguin sprite and her stereotypically male job as a mech designer, it's easy to assume that she is a guy. The only evidence for her being female in-game are a couple of easily-missable lines and her voice clips, which aren't heard that often as talking to her usually gives you a quest popup instead.
- Hiraki Corale, Hylotl Adventurer is female, but this isn't referenced in any of her codexes, so again, it's easy to assume that she is male.
- Viewer Name Confusion: The plurals for each of the alien races work in a weird way. Apex, Glitch, Hylotl and Novakid use the singular as the plural, for example "one Hylotl, two Hylotl". This is particularly odd with the Apex and Glitch, as those are real nouns which already have plurals ("apexes" or "apices" and "glitches"). The Avian and the Floran are referred to in the singular when talking about the race as a whole, but have typical plurals when talking about multiple individuals. For example, you'd say "the Floran like stabbing" but "two Florans stabbed me". This is also pretty odd, as it'd be like referring to humankind as "the Human". With all these different rules, people inevitably get confused and start adding the letter "s" in places it doesn't belong. Using "Novakids" instead of "Novakid" seems to be the most common mistake.
