#biiiiiirds

On the first day of Tumblrmas my followers gave to me, a very angry cassowary

On the second day of Tumblrmas my followers gave to me, two shoebill cranes, and a very angry cassowary

On the third day of Tumblrmas my followers gave to me three condors, two shoebill cranes, and a very angry cassowary.

only ducks, jays, ravens, secretary birds, and kiwis will be shown though

Starbound is a sandbox platformer type of game often summarized as "Terraria in SPACE!!!" but with some big differences. It's available for purchase on Steam, and I think there will eventually be a non-Steam version? It's currently in early open beta stages, so don't make a character in it yet if you don't want your data wiped out every now and then. (There's a new patch I haven't tried yet that's out this morning, but as of last night, the patch version makes it much more difficult to kill monsters as well as making birds behave somewhat more Alfred Hitchcock-like than neccesary, in addition to increasing their range and attack power. But the version before that was too easy. So balance issues will probably be an ongoing thing, but again, this is an open beta, not full release, so that makes sense.)

You start out as a male or female of one of six races on a space ship. The races are Human, Floran (plant people who tend to be pretty bloodthirsty and refer to themselves in the 3rd person), Glitch (robot people who preface everything they say with clarifications aka "Statement. I am a Glitch." or "Insincere. I am most pleased to see you.,"), Avian (bird people, many of whom worship the god Kluex and are decidedly...antagonistic towards those who don't) Apex (ape people, have vast intelligence due to their government's experiments, said government often takes experiments too far, especially on people who criticize them), and Hylotl (aquatic fish people who are mostly peaceful, but have a species-wide loathing of Florans due to past wars). The full release will also feature a seventh species, Novakids (Plasma and gas based beings formed from the fusion furnace of a star long ago, held together by a metal brand on their face, and possessing short attention spans and memories, as well as lacking an innate understanding of non-gaseous species' social interactions).

You beam down to explore a planet, which features monsters, all sorts of terrain and ores, treasure chests, edible produce (and cook-able meat if you kill the monsters with a hunting bow), etc, etc. You can use material you've gathered to build stuff as well, and can craft certain items such as a furnace and an anvil out of specific materials. And once you have an anvil or find a new weapons some other way (in a chest? Dropped from an NPC you mercilessly slaughtered, you bastard?), you can upgrade your weaponry. Then there's armor - killing stuff with bow weapons causes monster to drop not just raw meat, but leather as well, which could be useful in upgrading your defense, keeping you warm (there's a temperature gauge and you die if you get too cold), or just looking stylish. Or you could craft actual armor out of copper ore or silver or gold or whatnot.

You could find a musical instrument, and play songs on it (providing you have a file of the song in .abc format and it's in the right game folder). You could make an axe and chop down trees and plants and giant mushrooms for firewood and plant matter. You could craft a distress beacon and have to fight a giant UFO piloted by penguins. (I'm not even making that part up.) You could (and should) make an axe to dig through stuff, perhaps even mining the planet to its molten lava-filled core.

Or you could just mine for fuel such as coal, and power your ship's engine, and once you've done that you can explore the rest of the galaxy, or at least the alpha sector. Currently you can unlock the beta, gamma, and delta sectors, with probably more to come as the beta goes on. I can't even imagine how long it would take to fully explore every planet in the alpha sector, much less all four sectors!

Or you could run across a monster and die. :( Don't worry, you respawn on your ship if that happens. And you keep your items too, though you lose some of your pixels (the Starbound universe's currency).

Anyways, I highly recommend it. Now I'm off to raid a penal colony on this planet's moon, so have f-*shot to death by freed prisoners with high-powered guns*

*respawns*

-un...yeah gonna have to get better armor to kill those guys haha

P.S.: The music in this game is so fucking amazing, if you do buy the game be sure to get the soundtrack as DLC, it's by Curtis Schweitzer (http://curtisschweitzer.com) and Jeremy "Solatrus" Iamurri (http://blog.solatrus.com/). Toby "Radiation" Fox (fwugradiation.tumblr.com was also on the music team for Starbound but I guess something came up cause none of his work was on the soundtrack and he said it's likely none of it will be in the game at all. :(