I imagine it must be boiling, acidic blood. The flock begins vomiting blood at me and apparently, blood hurts. You won't hurt an extended family member, right? The once unoccupied space is now rife with a crowd of pink, flamingo-like things. She beams down and disaster hits almost immediately.
#Starbound floran full#
Eventually, Meatfeathers' health is restored to full and, now armed with confidence and a hunting bow, I set her back on the trail. This is already turning out better than my time with Batwell who apparently couldn't hit the ball let alone score a home run. I spread our day's efforts across the floor: a camp fire here, a work bench there and a bed in the corner to rest a weary avian head. Meatfeathers is immediately teleported back to her ship's nurturing cavity. As a precautionary measure, I dig a hobbit hole into the mountain side. Right beside Meatfeathers, a pair of limp-wristed orange bipeds with beehive fins and suspicious grins are bumbling around in a cavern, seemingly oblivious to her presence. Trees and cobblestone are processed, transformed into stone tools and workbenches and camp fire. Would Meatfeathers rise above her ominous name? Resources are in copious supply here, so much so that I can feel the noose of self-doubt slackening. The sky is blue, the trees wonderfully mundane-looking. In comparison to Batwell's home planet, Meatfeathers' world looks considerably more hospitable. Without preamble, we go through the standard routine of grabbing equipment and beaming down to terra firma. For some reason, it's hard to imagine her stooped and crowded with little grand-chicks. The next candidate the RNG spits out at me is a spritely white Avian named Meatfeathers. It vomits a cone of flames and -Ĭurrent score: 0/6 Meatfeathers the Randomly Generated Avian I thought I taw a Cthulhuian monstrosity! I did! I did! I make Batwell whip around, broken broadsword unsheathed, ready to put up a fight. A bird-like thing with fifty eyeballs nested on the top of its skull shows up, possibly drawn by the splashing. Batwell plummets inside and immediately takes damage. As Batwell run across the makeshift bridge, I realize too late I've missed a square. I break off a few pieces of dirt from the ground to try to pave over the noxious goo. With some amount of trepidation, I make her veer towards the slightly smaller body of undrinkable water. If Batwell is going to do something with her life, we're going to have to move out of here. The starting area is fenced in by ominous pools of toxic waste too wide to scale. After ransacking the chests, I go back to trying to figure out what to do. They make a face at her as we ransack their insides: 100 pixels, a blueprint and a medkit.
On the bright side, however, Batwell does end up landing between a pair of be-tongued toxic chests. There's a weird miasma in the air which I suspect may be connected to the lakes of poison dotting the land. The tree line is made up of twisted, vine-like things rather than anything proper-looking. The world Batwell is parked over isn't very friendly-looking. I empty the ship's repository of starter equipment - Matter Manipulator, seeds, torches, torchlight - and head off to planet proper. That's an auspicious name, right? The game launches. Her looks are randomly generated so as to minimize any sort of emotional attachment the poor girl might be dead in a few hours. I start with a human female because homo sapiens are first in the racial line-up. Batwell the Randomly Generated Human Female She came, she saw, she died. If a character survives until the dawn of her third day, she will be treated as a success story and a point in Starbound's favour. The rules I've set for myself are simple: six races, six opportunities to eke out sustainable living on some hostile planet somewhere.
Chucklefish's procedurally generated, sidescrolling sci-fi sandbox is a cruel, treacherous place where death is a nasty, rent-hiking landlord.Īnd to prove it, I'm going to attempt permadeath playthroughs. I've seen lizards with two mouths and no eyes and faceless birds piled high with eyeballs and I've fought squat, smiling squads of tooth-like critters in the heart of a frozen planet. It took forty hours to come to this epiphany but Starbound is a candy-coated nightmare realm straight from the pit of Cthulhu's dreams.