Starbound Is Still One Of The Best Sci-fi Survival Games, And It’s Finally On Xbox Game Pass
A PC classic is finally on Xbox Game Pass.
One of the best things about Xbox Game Pass’ monthly additions is the mix of old and new they offer. Play through them all and you’ll get to jump between recent releases and games you haven’t heard about in ages, each with their own charms. One of the most exciting games added this month is a little bit of both.
Starbound is a pretty old game. Released on PC in 2016, it’s a crafting game directed by a former Terraria developer, which takes that game’s basic shape, stuffs it into a spacesuit, and blasts it into the vast cosmos. It’s also a pretty new game. In an incredible act of understatement, developer Chucklefish popped up on social media one day in August 2024, eight full years after the game’s release, to say, “It's been a minute, but we're proud to announce that Starbound is almost ready to launch on Xbox.” And now, after previously coming to PC Game Pass, it’s finally landing on Xbox Game Pass for consoles.
Starbound has a story-based campaign, but finding your own path is usually more rewarding.
Owing to their shared developer, Starbound has a lot in common with Terraria, so much so that you might have trouble telling the two apart at a glance. It’s a 2D pixelated survival game that sees you digging your way across the world to stuff your pockets full of dirt, then using the resources you’ve collected to craft everything from tiny mud huts to towering skyscrapers.
There are also plenty of enemies to fight, from hostile wildlife to bandits to massive bosses, and a sprawling arsenal to help you deal with them. At the outset of the game, you’re essentially being inducted into Star Trek’s Federation when a giant space octopus interrupts the proceedings, and you’re technically on a quest to keep that sort of thing from happening again. But combat and interstellar cephalopods are more of a distraction than a guiding component of the game.
Every time you think you’ve seen everything in Starbound, it throws something weirder at you.
The real point of Starbound is — well, whatever you want it to be. You certainly can pursue combat and follow the main quest if you find them more appealing than I do (though that’s doubtful), but you’re under no obligation to. More likely, you’ll spend a lot of time jetting from planet to planet, looking for rare crafting materials and interesting bits of architecture, and snatching them up for yourself. Starbound features an impressive amount of variety, thanks to its procedurally generated planets. A wealth of different alien civilizations spread throughout multiple biomes greet you on every one, and zipping through the cosmos just to see the sheer diversity of it is enjoyable on its own.
Eventually, though, you’ll probably want to settle down. Hopefully you’ve been shoving all the most interesting plants and doors and decorations you found along your travels into your space backpack, because arranging them all into your own dream home (or castle, or saloon, or laboratory, depending on your style) is the true joy of Starbound for most players. You can build a fully functioning farm, invite NPCs to join your commune, or just get to work on building the wildest, most structurally unsound monument to mankind’s hubris possible.
The joy of home ownership in space is one of Starbound’s biggest draws.
That all becomes a lot more fun with friends. Starbound supports parties of up to four players (only two on Xbox One S, though) to make it a little less lonely out in space. Multiplayer is by far the best way to play Starbound. It’s fun for a while to build your own little kingdom as a space hermit, but it becomes decidedly more fun with a group of friends all in the most outlandish getups they can find to build and fight and generally be a nuisance together.
As the success of multiplayer in farming sims like Stardew Valley shows, getting a group to make a little home together can be just as fun as teaming up to blast aliens or duel superheroes. And Starbound happens to be one of the best, and certainly strangest, playgrounds to do it in.
