Starbound has become one of the most enjoyable 2D action-adventure games for lovers of sci-fi and space exploration (or just anyone who likes Terraria).
Chucklefish’s take on the “procedural generated space opera” formula has captured our hearts with its charming sprite-based graphics and intuitive gameplay.
That said, humans will eventually get bored of everything. And if Starbound has lost its sheen for you, then mods are a great way to reignite your passion for exploring the great pixelated unknown.
So many fantastic mods are out there, and they can revolutionize your Starbound experience.
Let me share some of my favorites to get you started.
Visiting a moon in vanilla Starbound is pretty underwhelming, them being barren and all.
At most, you can get some fuel, but that’s about it.
As the title suggests, Less Dead Moons does away with these barren astral bodies – not by removing them, but by filling them up with content and bringing them to life.
It spices things up by adding new structures and dungeons to almost every moon, as well as NPCs operating these facilities.
You’ll even find a bit of lore here and there, and micro-dungeons make mining on them much more engaging.
It’s always fun to customize your UI a bit, and the HoloHUD Interface is a favorite of mine.
This nifty mod will replace your previous UI with something much more holographic. It touches the sidebar, action bar, the party menu, the chat, the quest tracker, and text boxes.
It doesn’t change the crafting menu or the inventory, though.
But it is super colorful, and it supports a quickbar.
This techie & bright look just feels more appropriate for a game set in outer space.
Watching your Starbound character playing your favorite songs on their instrument of choice is just too cool to miss out– especially if you’re musically-oriented in real life as well.
And if you don’t believe me, you’ve clearly never watched Cowboy Bebop.
Cyberpunk Stylist is a mod that’ll bring them together again by adding some cyberpunk-inspired wigs and hairstyles, all to customize your character like an 80s geek’s wet dream.
With these, you’d look right at home in Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City.
They can really bring out your character’s personality, especially if you use this mod in conjunction with Green’s Dye Suite for some custom-colored hairstyles.
Don’t you hate having to visit five different stores every time you want to do a DIY project, or cook something out of the ordinary?
I sure do.
The Merchant Inventory Extender will make sure that never happens to you in Starbound, by expanding the inventory of vanilla merchants so they’ll sell everything they could possibly sell at all times.
Every merchant will carry around 30 items now, helping you stay well-equipped throughout your travels.
It’s normal to assume that crafting has to take time.
After all, time is one of the most important resources we invest in real life.
That said, we don’t really need to represent reality quite so strictly in our games – and a lot of us just don’t have the time to sit around waiting for something to finish crafting.
Instant Crafting is a client-side mod that disables the timer on crafting tables, making everything finish instantaneously.
If there’s something about Starbound’s pace that doesn’t quite do it for you, this may help turn things around.
Another great thing you can do with your UI is make it more practical with the Extended GUI mod.
This nifty modification enlarges several aspects of the UI, including the map and the inventory windows. This makes it easier to look through your item hoard and find your way around your surroundings with a bigger map.
You’ll also be able to fit more items on-screen at one time.
It’s like having more counter space at home!
Anyone living in a 1-room apartment with a tiny kitchen knows how important that can be.
Space stations in Starbound are some of the most exciting things you can find floating around– and having one of your own can make you feel like you’re truly going somewhere in the spacefaring game.
This Boundless Space Stations mod helps make your space-abode much more interesting (and customizable) by removing space constraints when designing your station.
Where the previous limit was 1650×500 units, it’s now 64000×64000.
You’ll still need plenty of materials to create the colossal space citadel of your dreams.
But it’s a great thing to aim for in this addictive sandbox title.
The Land of Ooo is just a marvel of whimsical worldbuilding! I can’t get enough of it – and I found a great way to bring some of its charms to my Starbound game.
The Land of Ooo Forge adds a nice collection of Adventure Time swords, mostly the ones wielded throughout the series by Finn.
These include the Golden Sword, the Root Sword, the Demon Blood Sword, and many others.
It also adds an Adventure Time-themed forge (with cameos from BMO and Jake) where you can craft these fantastic weapons.
They’re all gorgeously recreated in Starbound’s pixel art style, and the forge looks right at home in my base’s workshop.
If you’re putting more and more of your free time into Starbound, you need to start making your gaming efficient – and a good inventory mod can greatly diminish the time you waste looking through your things.
Bl3k’s Inventory is one of the most recommended in the Starbound community, thanks to its simplicity.
It adds several more tabs on your inventory, and makes each of them thrice as large.
It’ll also help you organize your items by sorting them into categories like Armory, Materials, Furniture, Vehicles, and so on.
A super important QoL add-on that every Starbound player should have is Enhanced Storage.
This overhauls your item-hoarding experience and makes containers much more versatile.
Among other things, it adds new and larger containers – and specialized ones for different uses.
But it also improves item sorting, and makes it easy to search through your collection. You can also easily transfer items between storage and your inventory, rename containers, and more.
One of my favorite features is that it’ll tell you the price of items, and calculate the value of your entire hoard for you. You can finally brag about your Starbound net worth.
Some help us from behind the drapery, like Futara’s Dragon Engine.
This excellent mod edits Starbound’s config for better performance, especially on systems that struggle with the vanilla game. It works by reducing how much of an area is rendered at once.
Now, what you see is the entirety of what’s being rendered.
It also reduces how many particles are created whenever blocks are destroyed, which could be a heavy load off of some systems.
Among other things, it helps diminish frame skipping. It also lets you have custom music for shops, combat, and field exploration.
How to craft better, faster, easier… but don’t you ever need to uncraft something?
I certainly do. So I got a brand new crafting station for my base – the Uncrafter.
This powerful space tech will take any item you feed it and break it down into Grey Goo. This gooey material can be stored more efficiently for later use.
All things considered, this is a great way to put those old pieces of armor and outdated weapons to good use – or at least have them waste less space in your storage.
While some are busy traveling around looking for the next big thing, others prefer to build a homey base and spend their time tilling the soil and tending to the land.
Compact Crops makes it much easier to practice agriculture at an acceptable scale, without needing stupid amounts of land.
It makes crops grow closer together, increasing crop density (and therefore, yields).
Get this if you just want to live a simple life close to nature, but haven’t quite made the jump to Stardew Valley just yet.
There’s always need for many containers in Starbound to store all of your space trinkets and materials.
Might as well make them as good as they could be!
Improved Containers makes them closer to the ideal by introducing persistent storage, mass selling, searching in containers, automatic sorting, and quick stacking directly from your inventory with just one click.
This mod also makes newly-opened chests a bit less explosive.
Rather than just ejecting their items when opened, they’ll store the rewards for you to pick out in a civilized way.
So I obviously had to get a race of adorable cat people for my Starbound universe.
The Felin Race is a complex and long-lived society of humanoid felines living all across the galaxy.
The mod adds custom Felin furniture, outfits, vehicles, and ships. It also makes some Felin villages spawn here and there.
They even play custom instruments and speak a unique language (that’s actually custom-made rather than jumbled-up English). This is basically the Lord of the Rings of Starbound mods!
The first thing I thought of adding to my Starbound game was some more races.
I’m always in the mood for cute critters, so I was instantly drawn to the Avali.
These feathered creatures resemble a middle ground between a rabbit and some kind of terrestrial bird.
Despite their tribe-like aesthetic, the Avali are very technologically advanced – and they’ve got some powerful weapons to show it.
Along with the playable race and their weapons, you’ll also find furniture, Avali equipment, vehicles, and mounts that really flesh out the race and show what they’re all about.
I’ve always been a fan of mecha anime like Mobile Suit Gundam and Code Geass.
And now I can live the dream in by Starbound game thanks to XS Mechs.
This incredible vehicle mod adds a wide variety of mechs to your game. Even the most basic model is pretty cool, and it only gets better from there.
The smallest mechs are only a couple humans tall, but some are much bigger than that. They’re all quite mobile, can fly up pretty high (some can even leave the atmosphere), and carry devastating weapons like missiles, cluster bombs, and miniguns.
Considering these are both games about exploring a universe full of species that form an intergalactic ecosystem, Starbound fans have a large overlap with Mass Effect fans.
The N7 Arsenal mod brings a lot of Mass Effect’s charm into Starbound by way of new items, weapons, armor, and lots more.
Among the new weapons, I’d highlight the M-8 Avenger, the N7 Valkyrie, and the classic N7 Eagle handgun.
There’s also lots of cool apparel, including Quarian, Turian, and N7 Human armor.
One of the simplest ways to renovate Starbound is Frackin’ Universe, an all-encompassing overhaul that brings a lot of new content into the game.
Among other things, it introduces many new biomes, new races, and even new monsters.
There’s also an improved crafting system, more science and research objectives, and so on.
Unfortunately, you can’t just grab an old save file and continue playing with Frackin’ Universe. It changes so many things that it just wouldn’t work without a fresh save.
But if you like this mod, you’ll be glad to know it’s compatible with most other great mods, such as Universal Uncrafter and Compact Crops. You just need to apply a patch.
The worst part about installing mods is the time you spend choosing what to get.
After all, you want to get to the game – and no aspect can go untouched.
Arcana is a massive mod that’ll completely overhaul your Starbound experience with just one simple install.
It adds armor, clothes, furniture, new buildings, and tons of gameplay improvements, especially when it comes to food and farming.
On top of over 60 unique weapons and armor sets, Arcana also adds new bosses and planet biomes like the Illuminated Plains, the Windswept Peaks, and the Arcane Desert.
There’s even a new race – the Arcanians!
If you’re looking for something that’ll make your next playthrough feel fresh, this is it.
Nelson Chitty is a Venezuelan expat living in Argentina. He’s a writer and translator passionate about history and foreign cultures. His ideal weekend is spent between leisurely playing games of Civilization VI and looking for the next seinen anime to marathon.
