It’s been reported by players of Starbound that it’s difficult to progress and get anywhere in the game due to character wipes whenever the game updates. Thankfully, Starbound developer Chucklefish has released information about the game’s upcoming patch and promises that this patch will be the last patch that wipes players’ saves. Having said that though, they don’t promise that this patch (and future patches) will fix the issue of wiping a player’s world.
The patch itself will fix a number of issues within the game, such as fixing an issue that would sometimes prevent Starbound’s launcher from initiating, fixing spawn points so players don’t either spawn underground or outside their ship after saving in the Captain’s Chair, making minor performance improvements, fixing bug crashes related to the UI and more (including new game modes too).
As for the dreaded character wipe, the post detailed that this patch will introduce a fix that will prevent saves from being destroyed after each patch-up, meaning that players won’t have to worry about their characters and their ships being destroyed from here on out–no future patch will wipe these two features. However, the patch will wipe the saves anyway (bit of a contradiction, I know), but making a save after this patch will not be wiped when the next one comes around. What’s more, Chucklefish hopes that this patch will also be the last time it will need to wipe worlds, but they can’t make any promises on that. An explanation from one of the studio’s employees was cited as a means to help clarify things a little.
“The problem is that the organization of planets may change so if they go muck with a planet, how do we put it in the celestial map? Or if they build on a biome we remove, or something. So no promises, but we’ll try. But promises on the player / ship.”
So, while the studio assures that any patch after the one that’s coming up will not wipe your characters or your ships, it still doesn’t know if it may or may not need to wipe worlds that you may be playing on with patches from here on out. Hopefully a patch to fix that issue will come around soon.
Starbound is currently in Beta, and is available on Steam’s Early Access. For more details and specifics on what will be changed and added to Starbound , you can head on over to Chucklefish’s post on the matter here .