In Starbound, you can dig down to a planet’s core, carve out canyons and build mountains, construct vast monolithic alien buildings and traipse around the galaxy in space-age armour you crafted, so it’s safe to say that developer Chucklefish wants you to be creative. And it’s not just the in-game tools you can use to augment your planet-hopping adventure.
Everything is mutable. Don’t like the armour on offer? There are mods for that. Find your spaceship a bit dull? There are mods for that too. Want more races to play around with? Yep, mods. Diligent fiddlers have put together all manner of new content.
Starbound mods can be found in the Steam Workshop, and can be easily installed. It’s worth checking if the mod permanently changes your game files, as you may not be able to undo this. There also isn’t a mod manager, so you can’t simply enable and disable mods at will. Some mods don’t work well with other mods installed, so check the capability with other mods as well as your current game version.
The best Starbound mods
Frakin’ Universe
This is one mod where there’s no turning back. Frakin’ Universe changes Starbound as you know it, adding new races, collectibles, and weapons – as well as adding more gameplay, and expanding on combat and crafting. This mod also adds plenty to exploration, with science addons that expand on research, so you can learn the recipes for any craftable item.
bk3k’s Inventory
This is another mod that comes with a game altering warning, requiring new characters for this to work. Bk3k’s Inventory adds three times more space to your inventory, and organises the categories to make finding items easier – making changes to main, armoury, materials, furniture, decorations, crafting, food, farming, hobby, and vehicle inventories.
Enhanced Storage
Another quality of life mod, Enhanced Storage improves the storage system by adding and changing the way containers and storage works in Starbound. From increasing capacity in each container, to keeping stored items in a container after it has smashed.
Weapon Stats
This handy mod makes it easy to compare weapons quickly, as it displays item level, DPS, and damage per energy for swords and guns in Starbound, based on raw damage. If you’re looking for the same stats on your legendary weapons, bows, and melee, also be sure to check out the Legendary Tooltips mod.
These are the best Starbound mods, but the community continue to add to the pool of creative mods from Christmas adventures, to new race additions and weapons – you can keep an eye on all the new and best mods on the Chucklefish community forum.