The game you play when your computer can't handle no mans sky

It literally felt like the "story" missions were put together in a single week if not a few days.

Comes across as they "finished" and did their 1.0 so they wouldn't get harassed by their community anymore.

5 years for 5 missions of "scan this race's furniture" ...extremely uninspired...

other content is decent, weapons give you a nice mix of stuff to try out and upgrade, unfortunately later there isn't much use for them.

Bosses are kind of fun when your fighting them, but they go quick and there isn't much to rave about until they add some more enemies.

There is no point mining apparently, to get all my ores I just planet jumped a couple times each tier, in the cities you can loot every box and chest and get the ores from that, the people don't mind, only if you break their pots...? lol

the NPC cities make it a pointless risk to mine if you are playing the mode where you drop stuff on death.
They should be less frequent in my opinion, and the world and digging should be more interesting somehow.

The block set is very nice, there is many blocks, furniture, and colors to use if you treat it as a casual building game or are interested in it in that regard.

Overall a decent builder, other aspect leave a bit to be desired. I can't help but be dissapointed since I've been waiting since the game was announced and wanted so much more from it.

A friend of mine brought up a good point about the '1.0' release of Starbound. Much like Skyrim, it requires extensive modding to patch up all the inherent problems with the final product.

Business practices like this should be inexcusable.

But I digress. On with the review.
So, Starbound is finally out of beta, or so the devs would have you believe. Being a pixelated sandbox game, it's going to receive many post-launch updates, so the game's not complete until the developers start ignoring it.
Kind of like the near two-year hiatus early in the beta process.

But this is a review of the game, not Chucklefish's poor business practices. The game has changed little from the "big" beta update that removed sectors. The game's storyline is rather weak, having you run all across the universe scanning furniture and posters for clues so an elderly woman can open a door to fight a tentacle monster that some super-ancient deity being sealed away in ancient times. Everything about the storyline is shallow, meaningless, and overall disappointing. It doesn't feel like I saved the universe, I just dug down and got lucky by hitting a gel pool to help break the fall from the giant lag spike that the final boss suffers from.

But I digress.

The space travel is rather uninteresting, being a system where you click a planet and sit through about thirty seconds of hyperspace to end up in orbit. The lack of any other space mechanics makes the game feel soulless and empty.

The combat system took a turn for the worst by throwing itself in the garbage with 1.0, bringing back the old boring combat system of contact damage, which makes creature capture pods lack any redeeming qualities. All the monsters you capture just slam into each other repeatedly until they die (And your captured creatures always do) and you have to revive them at a Healing Station. At least try to make your lifted Pokemon mechanic interesting! Weaponry touts itself as having unique special attacks, but the only good weapons are legendary weapons, and those are almost exclusively reserved to two-handed swords.

Crafting also got hit by the recent changes with the removal of racial weapons and weapon variety for each tier, changing it to two uninteresting, weak weapons to choose from. Tungsten-tier materials stiff you with terrible axes and hammers, so you have to hunt down an Energy Whirl spear to actually be capable of killing things. The Borderlands-style variety is completely tossed out the window, as an Energy Whirl spear is the only weapon you actually need throughout the entirety of the game. All other unique weapons are absolute garbage and not worth your time. Hell, even some of the unique weapons are useless. Example, one sword has the unique ability to freeze an enemy solid, stopping their time. However, in stopped time, you can't even hit the enemy. What's the point of that? The combat and weaponry got hit hard by the recent update, and it shows.

Farming is a bit of a chore, and it requires mods to fix. Which it shouldn't. The game's hunger system is a minor annoyance due to the overabundance of food, making it so you have to constantly shoot food into space using the Terramart Shipments in order to find a purpose in farming, but even that is pointless since a massive crop yield only gives about 300 pixels. Selling crops, weapons and materials isn't worth it, as the prices listed on items are 5x what any vendor will give for them. The only efficient way to make money is to scour planets on Fiery worlds, which requires the pointless padding item-gate of an EPP, one of the worst design choices I've ever seen in a videogame. Nanosuit techs were way better.

For a game that's trying to build an interesting universe, it utterly fails in doing so when you find the same exact village layout for the twelfth time, where they send you to save their friend from the dungeon halfway across the planet that's the exact same as the last three dungeons you raided. The removal of nearly all race-specific mechanics that were present in the beta process heavily affects the game as a whole, making it feel less interesting and more like a boring, game-y space game that lacks any real substance to make it unique and keep you coming back.

And yet, there's one redeeming factor. Building things and running colonies is one of the few joys this game will bring you. Sure, it may take years to scour the universe to find every unique chair and bed, but some might actually enjoy it and adding furnishings to their huge collection. The game has more constructive freedom than Terraria, making it the best in player construction and furnishing out of the three major pixel-based sandbox games (Minecraft, Terraria and Starbound). The major reason towards this is a superior wiring system to Terraria, better block construction (You can place walls using normal blocks and don't have to craft separate wall parts, allowing the player to make any backdrop using any block), more unique furniture, increased interactivity with materials, and no need to build thirty houses to keep some brain-dead NPCs interested long enough to be vendors for you. You can build your own giant mansion and choose to have someone move in using a Colony Deed. It's also a good feature that colonists go for unique furniture types, which adds variety to colonies and encourages thematic construction, which is very easy due to the constructive freedom and no real "rare" block types.

A few minor points- The fossil minigame adds to the collectathon, but does so in an engaging way with a simple minigame reminiscent of a similar minigame from the Gen 4 Pokemon games. Farming may be a boring chore, but there's a huge variety of foods that can be cooked and enjoyed, which often grant the player buffs ranging from max HP increases to low gravity to bonus damage. The mission environments are rather well-constructed and convey their thematic atmospheres rather well, even though they're quite linear. Some of the boss fights are also rather well-constructed, and some of them are quite difficult, such as the Big Ape boss fight. The final boss is horribly designed, and feels like it was rushed, however. Every race has unique furniture, which makes ship upgrading and decoration a mildly enjoyable experience... Unless you play a Novakid. Novakid don't have any furniture, which sucks. The sheer amount of vanity/costume items makes collecting an interesting experience. Some may say this is meaningless padding or a waste of time, there's quite a few nice outfits to find. The racial armors often look quite nice as well. The game's music and playable instruments are the last of the minor comforts I can find in this game, and the music system allows for players to implement their own songs. Despite the game near-requiring modding to make it playable, the game's flexibility for mods makes it a great tool for the code-savvy creators out there. The game's achievement system adds a bit of a completionist edge to it, as well.

Overall, I want to like Starbound. I really do. But no game should require mods to make it have replay value. The game's faults heavily outweigh it's strong points, and this game will require a hell of a lot more work from the developers to make it truly enjoyable and replayable.

Keep at it Chucklefish, and don't take a huge hiatus now that the game's been "released."

I'm just here to say I do enjoy it to some extent but due to the massive content removal I simply cannot recommend. Yes, mods can fix it, but that is not an excuse for the devs.

Ah, Starbound.
I feel like a disappointed parent. A parent that's watched over a child (or maybe a niece or something) for a good few years, watching it grow, watching it learn - all for it to come crashing down in a car accident that paralyzes the kid for the rest of it's life.
Okay, admittedly, that's a bit dark. Allow me to explain.

I ♥♥♥♥ing loved Starbound. (Read: Loved. Past tense. Very important.)

The wonder of exploring a beautifully created universe and finding out neat little snippets of lore from random books you find in kitchen cabinets and secret USCM bases sounded got me to fall in love. The pixel art’s utterly eye candy (trust me, that’s not a good thing, I’ll get to that later) and the combat system was - read, /was/ - pretty fun. I had a few complaints with it (lack of content, difficulty comparing weapons, lack of content, occasional bugs, lack of content, lack of content--)
For a while, I had a review up that essentially just said that the game wasn’t done, and thus I couldn’t judge it properly. Now, uh...
To put it simply, the game still feels unfinished. You agonisingly slowly inch around the maybe 12 different planet types, praying to god it’s just a really long lag spike or something. Could just very well be my computer, but Starbound used to run perfectly fine, and now it’s like trying to race snails through honey.
But I digress- that’s likely just personal nitpicking. However. The severe lack of content for what can be called a “finished” game really does genuinely bug me. There’s so many useless little trinkets and pieces of furniture, but at the same time, there’s so little to do- as many will tell you, the story feels like it was thrown together in a few weeks, or, hell, a few days.

Some other points to note:
-The game’s still uncomfortably buggy.
So, there’s this thing where you use a teleporter on your ship to poof around everywhere. Alright, alright, nothing wrong with that- until your game nearly ♥♥♥♥ing crashes trying to process that you’re teleporting somewhere. What.
There’s also a lot of grievance I have with the matter manipulator. It feels like I hope that the item I want to place gets placed most of the time, whiiich shouldn’t be happening.

-The food system ‘revamp’ or whatever.
Food now rots, Don’t Starve style, except it doesn’t fit the game at all and just causes an inconvenience. As far as I can tell, food doesn’t give any more bonuses like boosted speed (I could very well be wrong on this) and instead you’re given a system where all food counts as an individual entity and rots on it’s own. No stacking. This basically just renders food completely ♥♥♥♥ing pointless.
For one, you can’t check how rotted something is - which is what Don’t Starve does, by giving it a little bar of rotted-ness. Instead, you just kind of have to hope that the vague ‘will stay fresh for a while’ description means /something/, rather than just a generic term slapped on to 70% of the food items in the game. For another: food does not stack. I’ve said this only a few sentences ago, but I don’t think I’ve stressed this enough. Because of how much random ♥♥♥♥ you’ll be carrying around, even having an entire grid of inventory slots for carrying food is not nearly enough.

Speaking of the inventory:
-It’s incredibly inconvenient.
It expects you to carry around an even amount of every type of item (that being: generic things, blocks, furniture, and food). Except it doesn’t work. You can’t transfer one kind of item to another inventory tab, so you just have to suffer carrying 50 weapons even though your inventory is ¾ empty.

-Lack of… things.
For whatever reason, the item drop rate has decreased dramatically. Now, when you spend 20 minutes wrecking hell on a temple, you’re rewarded but nothing but a few hundred pixels. Which, also, for some reason, are now much more uncommon than before. Everything either drops pixels or some other thing very very very very /very/ rarely, and it’s frustrating. I remember, when I would leave an Avian temple, I’d have a dozen or so new weapons to toy around with. Now, I’m lucky to find a chest with a single tech card in it.
As I’ve said before, there’s a ton of useless objects, but at the same time not nearly enough content to find. There’s about 30 different dungeon and village layouts at /best/, and though that may not sound too bad, you’ll get sick of it very, very, veeeeeeeeery quickly.
Plus, there’s so little reward for exploring. Finding loot is incredibly difficult, rather than a satisfying, base game mechanic. Really, is it that hard to drop a few more chests here and there? Or maybe give boss monsters actual rare weapon drops rather than pointless achievements? Apparently.
You want a good weapon? TOO BAD. Here, have 20 pixels. ♥♥♥♥ you.

-The plot.
Allow me to summarize:
Earth gets rekt. ♥♥♥♥ around on a planet for a while. Find a gate. Walk through a building.Talk to old lady (WHO, by the way, has the most ♥♥♥♥ugly gremlin of a talksprite I’ve ever seen) that constantly bothers you over some non existent messaging system that’s never explained. Get a crappy unskippable exposition dumpabout some massive forces beating the ♥♥♥♥ out of eachother and a Cthulhu ripoff that apparently destroyed Earth. Go to some planet. Click on furniture. Listen to her vague generic comments. Walk for 5 minutes past a bunch of ruins, get ♥♥♥♥♥♥ reward bag. Sometimes do side quests or kill things or do disgustingly difficult boss battles with weapons that are way too weak for that point in the game. Repeat.
Not fun.

It used to be simple and easy to take in: you’re a fugitive of some kind. Your ship broke down. You’re orbiting an uninhabited planet. Good luck.
There was a plot, but rather than dumping it on you with crappy exposition dumps, it was subtle. Instead of it being explicitly obvious what happened with Earth, all you know is that Earth was destroyed an undetermined amount of time ago. It feels like a far off, historical event that has little bearing on today. Instead of having to listen to some ugly sprite condescendingly teach you about some otherwordly ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥t. you read codexes to find out about the world and lore, or just talk to NPCs you find on your journey. Everything felt like it had more personality, but now it’s all soulless and empty and depressing like a suburban neighborhood.
They ruined the wonder of exploring an unfamiliar universe. It felt enormous, fantastic, even.
Now, you get to click on things.
Gameplay!

I have a good few other complaints, but most of them are nitpicks that don’t really matter all that much on their own. Combined, though, all these little things - for example, the removal of SAIL’s racial AIs - just add to make the game less than what it could’ve.

Oh yeah.
And they got rid of racial armor boosts. Fish people can no longer breathe underwater. Bird people can’t glide. And they cut a bunch of other perfectly good bits of content, like apple pie. Come on.
That’s dumb.

As a good friend of mine put it, it’s a game by pixel artists, not game designers. It’s boring, it’s dull, and most of all, /empty/. It looks pretty, but that's about it. There was potential, here, but they just threw it all out so people would quit whining about them taking a while to build a game.
I wanted it to succeed.
But now, all I can say is that it’s become a disappointment. I can’t expect there to be many more updates, now, since it’s “complete”, and it sort of feels like the game was shoved out the door so Chucklefish could say they finished a game.

I’m genuinely kinda sad about this.

Honestly, what a let down. Two and a half years past its original supposed release date and the game feels like they've hardly made any progress at all despite leaving early access. Give this game a pass and pick up Terraria instead.

On paper this seems fun, but most of it is just bland saminess that it gets boring before you even leave the first planet (which takes far too long to be honest, especially if you die with the plot cupons--which you can use up if you're not careful). I'm not going to say it's Terrania in space, because I've never played the game, and I know I might not have played it a long time, but the reason I can't recommend it will make that clear.

It's about as intuitive as a brick is to breadmaking. Yeah, you can probably do it, but you might smash your fingers a few times and break some dishes doing it. The game has a very sparse tutorial that doeesn't really teach you what you need to know to do any of the basics. It might not take you a while, but it is annoying.

You don't have many equipment slots so mining, harvest, crafting, and building are all beta-worthy slogs that take a long time, and a lot of fiddling in the inventory, which doesn't pause the game. Seeing as several of your inventory slots go toward weapons or a light source that means building anything involves opening the inventory, which blocks a lot of things. It's a constant click juggle. It really made me appreciate Minecraft's system

Also the game has (and going by the forums never will have) no real way of setting the display to higher resolutions. So it forces you to use low res (which makes the game look worse than something from the 80s) or you play windowed, which sets the resolution at still kinda bad.

It might be worth tolerating if the experience wasn't just so bland, boring, and hemogenized.

Update: After playing a lot more (most of it offline) because Steam refused my refund. I have to say my original review was spot on. This is a bland, frustrating mess and it's not worth the asking price. I'd also like to add the lack of any kind of helpful encyclopedia. You're going to go to the Wiki for this one a lot.

I'm not going to defend myself with disclaimers and such like so many Steam reviewers do.
This is a negative review and I know it will inherently get downvoted because it doesn't fit with your personal belief that the game is good enough to recommend to others.

I'll present to you some facts.

Early Access

• A joke in terms of real content. Content you can enjoy and go back to, not 'do this and drop it five seconds later and never touch it again' content.
  
• Lesser ores are not used in higher tiers.
  
• No storyline.
  
• Mod system in place requires the majority of written files to overwrite existing ones making compatability a mess.
  
• Client-sided everything makes cheaters able to crash servers and cause havok.
  
• Picks, while flimsy, were useful in digging quickly.
  
• Novakid race taped on to meet with funder goals.
  
• All cutscenes are able to be skipped.
  
• Monster 'elites' spawn randomly.
  
• Moons are used solely for fuel and have nothing else.
  
• Lore is grim with every race having flaws and motivations.
  
• Intro cinematics with a voiceover from the voice of Bastion.

1.0 released

• A joke in terms of real content. Linear gameplay. Building is the only thing that is content, and that's the end-game. Collecting things isn't content, it's chore work.
  
• Lesser ores are used in higher tiers.
  
• Storyline present, has quality of that of a small child. Consists of doing fetch quests five times and has bosses after each. Ending is Disney level and doesn't conform to the player's difficulty level for reasoning on why it's a big deal.
  
• Mod system in place now has a patch system for editing JSON files and for altering LUA files you add on a custom LUA script with the JSON patch to run, and then use a hook idiom to alter the flow of the LUA files. Heavy editing requires the replacement of the LUA file itself.
  
• Client-sided everything makes cheaters able to crash servers and cause havok. Why did this not get fixed?
  
• Picks are far inferior to the matter manipulator, an indestructible block destroyer and liquid collector. Note this is a good thing- item durability is stupid chore work for remaking things. This is the type of item/content that should have been stripped.
  
• Novakid race taped on still with no lore integration or mention.
  
• Intro cutscene with floating wheelchair lady who is an Iris Apfel knockoff is not able to be skipped, and takes a centry to play out.
  
• There are no more random 'elite' monsters but instead shoved into the random quest system, stiffling unique encounters.
  
• Moons have a butt ghost that is not able to be killed and are stupid easy to avoid. Moons still are the "places to get fuel and nothing else".
  
• Lore is happy go sunshine and Humans are the direct relatives of God and can do no wrong whatsoever. Everyone loves rainbows and sprinkles.
  
• No intro cinematics. Replaced with a StarTrek themed "protectorate" intro that apparently every race ever joined and we're a Tier 1 universe now.

I could give more, but at this point I'm just demoralizing myself.

All-in-all the 1.0 release has less content than the early access revision.
I suspect it was shoveled out before No Man's Sky was released to get more sales.

If Tiyuri's Reddit post on adding content post 1.0 will be "mindblowing" is correct, then in the near future this review might change.
Until my mind is blown, I cannot recommend actually buying this over Terraria.

(I want to mention before review that I had a lot more hours of gameplay because I used to run SB outside Steam)

Oh boy. It's 2016. This game is finally out. I don't even know how to begin, but I will give it a try since I am terrible at writing reviews. Get yourself some coffee, food and all necessary supplies for survival because this review is gonna be long. Ready kids? Let's begin!

Starbound is one of the games I was interested in because of two things: sci-fi and space travel. I really enjoyed playing earlier builds and it had decent content despite game being in Early Access, but there were serious technical issues (especially if you play multiplayer). Because of that, I'm gonna list all pros and cons this game has:


Artwork

I will try to split this into details:

• Planets are beautiful! From hot dry deserts to depths of the oceans, there's lots to be seen during exploration. This encouraged me to explore more.
  
• Race design is also well made, especially Floran and Hylotl.
  
• Ship design is well made too! If you want to have a giant castle floating in space, you're gonna like Glitch!

Soundtrack

The first thing I like to notice when I'm starting a game is soundtrack! Starbound has one of THE best ambient soundtracks I ever heard. Even to this day, Starbound soundtrack is still on my playlist. If you ever want to relax yourself with good ambient music, you're gonna like it!

Multiplayer and co-op

You know how they say, games are always fun to play with someone. This game enables multiplayer and co-op which allows you to explore worlds together. However, there are lots of issues with multiplayer (these will be listed in Cons).

Mods

I can't even describe how easy is to mod this game. With right tools, you can easily recolor weapon and change particles using JSON format. If you want to do more advanced modding (like adding new race, vehicles and worlds), LUA is here to make your life easier. Thanks to huge playerbase, there are lots of mods to be found in Steam Workshop.

Sandbox

If you want to be creative and build villages or skyscrapers, you're gonna enjoy huge set of different blocks that allows you to use during building. If you're a builder, this thing is definitely for you (because I am a terrible builder, qq).


Performance

This game has some serious issues with performance. I tested this game on my dual-core setup and it causes freezing during gameplay. This game also has problems with memory allocation which forces you to restart Starbound few times in order to free up RAM memory. Rendering is poorly optimized and makes GPU so hot that you can cook eggs on it. If you need a game where PC asks you to end it's suffering, this game is for you!

Scrapped content

During Early Access, there were lots of items and armor sets. Unfortunately, most of them are scrapped.

Multiplayer issues

Well, here we go. This is the main reason why I set this review to "Not Recommended". Multiplayer is decent in co-op, but if you're going to join servers where there are 30-40 people online, you're going to have some "fun" with issues. Here's the list of problems:

• Dedicated server. It is poorly optimized and it crashes often due to huge usage of RAM and CPU.
  
• Exploits. Server allows client to execute LUA code without any kind of authentication which opens doors to vunerabilities and exploits that crashes the server instantly. Lots of players who joined multiplayer servers got their characters corrupted and unrecoverable due to huge abuse of LUA.
  
• "Allow Asset Mismatch". This is probably the stupidest option ever added to the game. If you're going to join your friend or your server with mods your friend doesn't have, there's huge possibility that you can crash the server or your friend. If you want to play multiplayer or co-op, I suggest you to disable mods during gameplay.

You're still alive? That was my list of my thoughts about the game. I really want Chucklefish to work on optimization and fixing technical issues because this game is a game I would gladly enjoy while playing multiplayer. If Chucklefish fixes critical issues, I will be happy to to review it again. Until then, I will not recommend it. Sorry Chucklefish.

P.S. Sorry if I made some grammar mistakes. My English is still potato.

Edit: My immense game time comes from playing and replaying with every new iteration over the entire course of it's beta, and mods, both things which are not taken into account for this review because they're not a part of the v1 core release

Starbound is a Terraria clone set a long time ago in a galaxy far far away with 7 different playable races all with their own theme and a range of different paths you can take to ultimately reach the end game content: you can farm, mine, fight, colonise and/or explore, and the game allows all this diversity through pixels, the games' money, and the Outpost, a location you must go to early game where everything relevent to advancing the game can eventually be bought there, i.e. the metal bars shop. Also there are other shops there, and they have their uses, but you'll probably visit these shops once or twice, get what you need from them and then forget about them, excepting the colony shop if you're colonising, but even then you'll only go there for the essential colony deeds.

So being released 5 years after Terraria it must have some improvements, right? Sure, like how it removed the dedicated background blocks and just made it so you can place blocks in the background, and gives the opportunity to find ores in the background instead of just in the foreground, the matter manipulator is an era appropriate upgradable high-tech dream compared to picks, axes, hammers and buckets, upgrading crafting benches feels good and is visable from the begining giving you clear goals to progress further up the tech sapling, making buildings is fast and the end result can look amazing with so many different blocks with a wide range of themes to pick from, the hotbar feels good to use since items sit there virtually instead of physically allowing you to have a single item in multiple loadouts, the missions are a nice bit of flavour pitting you against unique bosses, 2-handed weapons all have some cool secondary ability that adds some flavour to fighting enemies, and damage is upgraded mainly through armour, which allows you to find a cool and unique weapon and continue using it all the way through the rest of the game; later weapons have a higher base damage than ones you'll find early, but there are unique pre-made weapons with fixed values instead of procedurally generated values that you can find at any point, can last you the rest of the game and don't feel overpowered because of this system.

Now all that's well and good, but I can't help but feel it falls flat in so many instances. Enemies are lifeless and forgetable with the only challange in combat being how much health the monster has compared to how much damage you can do and it's made worse by the fact that EVERY procedurally generated mob does nothing but charge, an attack that involves walking up to the player, standing still for a second and then flinging themselves off the edge of whatever cliff you're standing in front of and is completely negated by simply hopping over them. The pre-made mobs are only a little better throwing their own unique attack in, but they only do the one thing and they all have this period of charging their attack that either gives ample time to set yourself up to dodge it or sprint up to them and whack them to death before they lightly dent your health. The only times combat becomes treacherous is early game when you're unarmoured and have no healing items, if you fall into a pit swarming with mobs or there are a large amount of hazardous blocks and you fall into them because of the floaty controls.

Techs, which are additional options for mobility, have such a small selection and feel unimaginative: you've got 3 slots and each slot has 4 techs available, but after looking at them for 1 minute it's really easy to pick out the best for each slot and then forget there are any others at all. Then there's the EPP, an item that on the surface seems like a good idea but then you realise that its role used to be filled by a 4th tech slot and didn't utterly consume the back slot in favour of the light backpack, which is now literally useless because you're choosing between surviving at all on any planet with a hazardous environment and seeing easily in the dark. Use the flashlight? Hope nothing you use is 2-handed. Torches? That's an entire loadout slot because anything that requires the matter manipulator consumes both hands. I was expecting that the final upgrade for the EPP would smash it together with the light backpack, because, you know, that would make sense in a high-tech universe, but it didn't. Seriously, I have this all purpose handheld constructor/deconstructor, can make ground penetrating radar to find caves or ores and can make pokeballs but I can't stick a lightbulb on this thing that's supposed to help me survive in hazardous environments. There is so much irony in this because your AI even comments on how dangerous it is to walk around in the dark when you first make torches.

All the quests are boring. Honestly, all of them. Do yourself a favour and save 10 minutes when you make a character and tick that little box to skip the intro quest because all you do is run right and watch cutscenes about a stupid area you'll never see again. It's a very pretty area, but that's it. All the other main quests are scan a lot of stuff belonging to a specific race that isn't ever Human or Novakid and hope there's enough in the area so you can just do the mission and progress. I can't complain much about the random quests, but that's just because they're all "Do this specific thing for this specific NPC instead of for yourself" with "specific thing" being something you'd normally do in the game, except for the one where they make you click on another NPC and then run back to the first which is ♥♥♥♥ING DUMB and has nothing to do with actually playing the game.

The planetary procedural generation is trash, and once you've seen one planet of it's type you've seen them all except for whatever "dungeons"/villages and mini-biomes happen to be scattered on it, which are all literal cut and paste, so once you've seen one the next time it appears on a planet you know where everything is in it they become predictable and dull.

Please don't think that this is a bad game, and I've thoroughly enjoyed the time I've spent playing it, but as of the time of writing it's a game with a lot of missed potential and sloppy mistakes as evidenced by the modding community tweaking and overhauling aspects, adding cool vehicles and mechs but relying on mods doesn't make the game good, it means the mods are good. What the devs have ended up making is a solid base, a platform that I hope they continue to add depth to.