Starbound Starter Guide: Surviving Your First Day in the Galaxy

Starbound throws you into a procedurally generated galaxy with thousands of planets, and the only tutorial worth mentioning ends roughly the moment you realize the universe is bigger than your hunger bar. This guide covers what actually matters during your first session: building a character, surviving your first night, and reaching the gateway that unlocks the rest of the game.

Booting Up Your Star Captain

The decisions you make before landing sound cosmetic, but they tie directly to playstyle. Spend a minute on the menu instead of mashing accept.

Picking a Race

Race in Starbound is not just a portrait. Each of the seven species unlocks its own armor sets with passive bonuses, so your pick quietly influences gear progression for the whole save. The roster is:

• Human: the all-rounder default.
• Apex: simian survivors stuck in a rebellion plot.
• Avian: bird folk with a religious arc.
• Floran: carnivorous plant people who really enjoy hunting.
• Glitch: medieval robots running on permanent roleplay.
• Hylotl: peaceful fish people with a refined aesthetic.
• Novakid: glowing energy beings with cowboy energy.

Difficulty sits in the same menu. Casual disables hunger and softens deaths. Survival keeps hunger on and drops some items when you die. Hardcore is permadeath. Pick Survival for your first run unless you already know how rough dying mid expedition feels.

Your New Ship

Race also reskins your ship. A Floran vessel sprouts vines on the hull. A Hylotl one looks like a docile mechanical shark. Once the intro mission ends you wake up inside the thing, and it doubles as your mobile base, storage room, and travel hub.

Four interaction points matter on day one:

• S.A.I.L.: the onboard AI that hands out missions and tracks the main story.
• Shiplocker: 64 slots of overflow storage for everything that does not fit in your inventory.
• Fuel Hatch: shows how much fuel you have for warping between systems.
• Teleporter: drops you to placed flags, party members, or other teleporters.

Surviving the First Planet

Beaming down is where the real game begins. Your hunger meter is already ticking, and the planet does not care that you just arrived.

Foraging Before You Starve

Hunger drains continuously. Once it empties you lose 15% movement speed and start taking damage. The fix is simple: every starter world has edible flora across the surface. Look for Tomatoes, Rice, Pearlpeas, and similar low effort crops. Walk up, press the interact key, done. Different planets host different flora and fauna, but there is always something edible if you scout long enough.

You can swallow raw produce in a pinch, but you are throwing away most of the benefit.

Cooking on a Campfire

Cooking turns crops into buff food. Build a campfire from a torch and a few wooden logs, place it on the ground, then interact to load ingredients. One Tomato becomes one Tomato Juice, which raises your maximum HP by 20% for 90 seconds. New recipes unlock as you collect new ingredients.

One catch: cooked food has a spoilage timer. If it sits in your inventory too long it turns into useless compost, so eat or stash perishables soon after making them.

Setting Up a Base

Backpacking to the ship every night gets old fast. A small surface shelter is the better play.

Use the Matter Manipulator to chop trees into Wooden Logs, open the crafting menu (default C), and convert logs into Timber. Stack enough Timber to wall off a small box with a door and you have basic protection from the hostile critters that come out at night.

Inside, drop an Inventor's Table (12 Timber + 4 Wooden Log). It is the workbench that unlocks every other early game station:

• Wooden Workbench: 4 Wooden Log, 4 Cobblestone, 10 Timber.
• Foraging Table: 4 Wooden Log, 10 Timber.
• Spinning Wheel: 5 Cobblestone, 1 Rope, 40 Timber.
• Anvil: 120 Timber, 1 Wooden Log, 8 Iron Bar.
• Primitive Furnace: 4 Mud, 1 Campfire, 20 Cobblestone.

Prioritize the Anvil. It eats the most Timber but unlocks weapons and racial armor, both of which you will want before going underground.

You can absolutely pour hours into a floating laboratory later. For now, a four wall shed is enough.

Going Underground

Plant fibres craft into Ropes, and Ropes let you climb down vertical shafts without splattering on the cave floor. Once below, your Matter Manipulator harvests Mud, Cobblestone, and the early metals that matter most: Copper and Iron Ore. Smelt the iron, hit the Anvil, and you finally have a real loadout.

Finding the Gateway

At some point S.A.I.L. radios about a strange ancient energy source. Follow the marker until you reach a stone Ancient Gateway sitting somewhere on the planet. It is broken, naturally, and needs 20 Core Fragments to power on. Core Fragments drop from old mineshafts and rocky caves, so by the time you finish tier one underground you usually have most of them already.

Once repaired, interact with the console and the gateway warps you to The Ark, the central hub for the main storyline. Talk to the old man waiting there, watch the cutscene, and Starbound's real progression unlocks. From this point on the galaxy is the limit. Or the planet count is, but only one of those sounds dramatic.