Back to YMMV.
- The crafting of armor. Like with the pickaxe, the armor must be upgraded by spending increasingly rare metals that you would rather spend on upgrading the pickaxe first. Artifact weapons on the other hand, are rather commonplace, turning most encounters into one-hit kill issues for both sides. Fortunately, the game drops the refurbishing after the Platinum level, and starting on Sector X (threat level 5+) you can begin crafting armor with the new metals alone. However, pickaxes are no longer able to be crafted as of the final version.
- The penalty for dying. You lose Pixels (20% during betas, 30% in 1.0), which isn't bad when you are low on them, but once you reach the thousands, it can really limit your crafting, since they become a necessity for crafting mid/late-game items. This became even worse in the nightly builds, where on normal difficulty, you lose both pixels and all of your ore. Yes, all of it, including smelted ingots. Needless to say, some of the community was not pleased at all while others loved it for the challenge. Cue massive arguments and flame wars all over the forums. Thankfully it has cooled down a bit, and that there's going to be a new difficulty option that allows you to retain your ore on death.
- The level system used to be this, with armor pierce being basically the level of a weapon, and if it was too high or low a level then the damage was skewed massively. A few people liked it for the challenge, but for the most part it annoyed players because when this principle was applied to guns then it turned fights VERY one sided, with characters dying before they could even get into melee range. Thankfully the leveling was changed so fights no longer end up as a mixture of Single-Stroke Battle and Death or Glory Attack.
- Meteor showers, at least for builders, they deal significant amounts of damage to blocks, you and your time. They happen regularly (even on Threat Level 1 planets) and it seems like they exist just to waste the time spent making a house. Tiyru aknowledged the issue in this Twitter message
, decided to lower the probability, and mentioned that later players will be able to see is a planet can be the target of meteor showers. Now, meteor showers can only occur on moons and level 6 planets. - Certain missing or unimplemented features common to related games that players would normally take for granted, like the ability to pause in single-player.
- An update changed the hotbar system, so that each slot is actually a pair for holding two items at once, like the previous off-hand system. However, a lot of items that USED to only occupy one hand now occupy both. It previously made sense for the Matter Manipulator and blocks, because right-clicking with them have different effects, so they require both hand slots to function. But torches, platforms, furniture, etc? These occupy the entire hotbar slot despite not requiring right-click to function, drastically reducing how much hotbar space you effectively have.
- A lot of the random quests in Starbound (i.e. quests given by Non Player Characters that aren't on the outpost) have two major restrictions on them that can lead to fail states—for one, the person who gave the quest can randomly die to a monster, causing their quest to automatically fail. Secondly, most quests have an invisible time limit to them that you're not told about at all, and you can fail the quest literally as you're about to complete the objective because the timer runs out without warning.
- Nobody really likes the Novakid ship upgrades. For starters, the train spaceship that the Novakid get has a bigger color palette than the non-Novakid ships, so it looks almost ugly in comparison. Furthermore, it expands mostly horizontally, so to access anything in the rooms further in you'll need to run for longer. The ship also has a handful of large rooms rather than the multiple small rooms that other ships get, so dividing up the large rooms can easily look very cumbersome.
- To advance further in the game, the player needs to complete some quests in which they need to analyse items from various races. The process in itself in rather tedious, as only a few items can fill up the quest's gauge, and there is no guarantee that you will find what you are looking for when visiting a planet, leading many players to spend several hours just trying to find, for example, a Floran village, only to find out that there aren't enough of the required items to proceed to the next step. This is particularly irritating with the second such quest, the Hylotl's: their bigger cities are in ocean planets and underwater, making it harder to explore and find them.
