Early Access exploration and crating game Starbound has just received its first stable update since March of last year, containing a pretty vast list of additions and improvements.
Combat’s seen a major overhaul, there’s now a universal hub where players can shop and trade, and a new playable race, the ‘Novakids’, have been added to the game.
”Because of these all changes, we recommend that everyone start a new character,” says developer Chucklefish. ”The game has changed so drastically that you’d miss out on most of the new content if you simply used an old character. As a result, the launcher will automatically rename your old data. We may be releasing external tools in the next few weeks to import and convert these files to approximately equivalent characters, but unless and until then they will be unusable.”
Starbound’s been on Steam Early Access for a while - since December 2013 in fact - and I think it’s fair to say that fans were getting quite worried about the lack of recent updates. This huge patch should assuage them, at least for the short-term. You can read up on the full patch notes here.