History VideoGame / Starbound

* FanDisservice: The "Beautiful Ape Painting" (cannot be built or bought but can be encountered on Apex's artifact quest) is basically Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" but with a female Apex instead, covered in grey fur. Suffice to say, nobody finds it particularly attractive.

* EverythingsBetterWithPenguins:
** Or not, when they're SpacePirates who try to kill you with a UFO.
** In the Outpost, one sells fake licenses for ship upgrades. Very suspicious with a store name like "Penguin Bay", and with signs that say "100% legit".
** Also in the Outpost, at the Beak Easy bar, you can see multiple penguins holding guns much larger than they are... and you can hire them as mercenaries for the right price.

* IncrediblyLamePun: Several from the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLFO2Zq1X2A speech bubble test video]].

''[[http://playstarbound.com/ Starbound]]'' is a WideOpenSandbox Scifi Adventure game. [[NamesTheSame Not to be confused with]] a Classic Mac game that lets you conquer planets to get more ships and destroy opposing races, nor with a ''Manga/LuckyStar'' fic aiming to parody ''Videogame/{{EarthBound}}''.

Take ''{{VideoGame/Terraria}}'' and give it a more ScienceFiction based focus with space travel and you have ''Starbound''. Or as some like to say ''{{VideoGame/Terraria}}'' InSpace. It is developed by ''[[http://www.chucklefish.org/ Chucklefish,]]'' an indie game company started by Finn "Tiy" Brice of ''Terraria'' fame along with several new faces.

* AlienLunch: 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).

* WhatMeasureIsANonHuman: The Florans treat animals like we treat plants.

* WeaponOfChoice: Each species mentions a different preferred weapon when the player character inspects a Glitch Sword Display. Despite liking stabbing, the Floran player character prefers the [[DropTheHammer hammer]] to a sword or knife.

* ProudScholarRaceGuy:
** Apex have more technological furniture than any other species.
** The Hylotl are noted as being the most peaceful of every race.

* UpToEleven: Almost every aspect of the game is randomly generated, such as loot stats and appearance, planet biomes and color schemes, and even the creatures that inhabit the planets!

* ArmorIsUseless: Averted. You can die VERY easily without proper armor.

* BatmanCanBreatheInSpace: Averted. Attempt to go into a Moon or Asteroids biome without an [[ArtificialGill Environment Protection Pack]] and you'll see that OxygenMeter appear very quickly.
** Played straight with 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.

* AlienNonInterferenceClause: Someone averted this for the Avians, giving them advanced technology directly to prevent them dying out.

* ThePasswordIsAlwaysSwordfish: In some versions, the default password for a server is "Swordfish"

F

** 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 [[https://starbounder.org/Poop pile of poo]].

* UselessUsefulSpell: 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 NotCompletelyUseless 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.[[/note]]

-->'''Floran NPC''': "Robot and Floran friends." [[note]] The robotic Glitch are inedible so they're the only race the Florians don't see as a potential meal. [[/note]]

** 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.

** 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 home village, growing a crop that's found growing in the village, and so on.

* ArtisticLicensePaleontology: 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.

* NominalHero: 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.

* NotCompletelyUseless: The Broken Broadsword at the start of the game. [[spoiler: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.]]

* {{Squee}}: The Hylotl PC reacts this way upon seeing the Bad Goo Plushie, wanting it for his/her collection.

* AdvancingBossOfDoom: 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!

!! ''Starbound'' has been confirmed to contain examples of these tropes:

* AbandonedLaboratory: A possible [[RandomlyGeneratedLevels randomly generated]] area on planets. It seems sometimes the Apex Miniknog take their experiments too far.

* UnfortunateNames: Big Ape, [[{{Dystopia}} not that anyone's going to call him out on it.]]

* FanDisservice: The "Beautiful Ape Painting" (currently removed from the game) is basically Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" but with a female Apex instead, covered in grey fur. Suffice to say, nobody finds it particularly attractive.

* FinalDeath: The Hardcore option, upon character creation, will drop everything and keep the character dead when killed.

* DiskOneNuke:

** While [[BeefGate not exactly the best of ideas]], there's nothing outright ''stopping'' the player from heading to 'mid-to-end-game' planets first and foremost. With enough luck and dodging skills, it's possible for players to get weapons and armor way above what they should be able to have at that point.