It’s time for our semi-regular-but-not-really checkup on the progress of Starbase, the building-centered spaceship sandbox MMO. At the end of 2020, the devs posted their final set of progress notes, outlining work on UI fixes, a couple of new and improved animations, and several visual effect improvements to things like afterburners, laser and plasma hit effects, and propellant explosions. You know, the stuff that’s pretty to look at so long as it doesn’t happen to you.
After a break for the winter holidays, the devs have shared their first progress notes of this year, offering updates on a mailing system, an automatic “safe mode” for ships that have durability errors as well as an optional durability error message, further animation polish, and some more visual effect polish for things like missile hits, torpedo hits, and remote explosions.
As a refresher, Starbase was announced back in 2019 by Finnish dev studio Frozenbyte as a “massively multiplayer online game with gameplay focused on building and designing spaceships and stations, exploration, resource gathering, crafting, trading, and combat.” It had previously aspired to enter early access later that year, but instead had pushed it back twice; the game now hopes to kick off early access sometime at the beginning of this year.
