A quick refresher: Starbound is the Terraria pseudo-successor (Edit: Some of the same talent’s on board; it’s not directly affiliated, though) that lets you generate your own planet. That in mind, I suppose it only makes sense that an inhabitant of one of its many worlds would be militantly anti-ape. After all, apes + a planet = Planet of the Apes. It happens every time. I’m sure, though, that you’ll be able to discriminate against other creatures as well, seeing as Starbound’s co-op building system is looking as impressively versatile as, well, everything else about the strikingly ambitious wonder. Wiser people than I once said, “If you build [a break], they will come [and watch a new Starbound trailer].” Truth be told, I’ve never really understood that saying, but it’s starting to make a little more sense now.



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Are you impressed? You should be impressed. I mean, given the sheer volume of elements Chucklefish is hoping to pack into this game – from randomly generated creatures, biomes, and foliage to interaction with every object in the universe to chaotic combat to space penguins – you’d think depth for each individual feature would be out of the question. But the building system looks to be quite powerful – especially when you have friends in the mix. Observe:

“Each player is equipped with a gun that can levitate, place and remove blocks and items. It’s capable of placing single blocks or blocks in groups of 4. So you can very quickly fill the space you need to fill whilst having the option to tweak smaller details. Every object that looks as if you can stand on it or place another object on top of it functions as you’d expect. Any block can be placed in the foreground or the background, left click places/removes blocks from the foreground whilst right click places/removes blocks from the background, allowing you to quickly alternate between the two.”

Fingers crossed that this is indicative of how much detail Chucklefish is putting into every fiber of Starbound’s crisscrossing web of systemic DNA. Well, mostly. I mean, the potential downside to that would be a release date several billion years from now, and I enjoy games the most when I’m alive. So hopefully Chucklefish works its fishy magic a bit more quickly than that. Somehow.