Happy Monday! Today is an especially happy Monday, because it’s Unstable Update Day … which means Stable Update Day isn’t too far off! Are you excited? I’m excited.

Confused? Unstable updates work like this:

We automatically upload everything we’ve changed in-game to the opt-in Nightly branch each night.

When we’ve completed the update we’re working toward, we push the update to the Unstable branch. You can learn more about opting in to the Unstable branch here.

When we’re sure that the update isn’t causing crashes or terrible bugs, we push the update to the Stable branch.

We’ve changed and added a lot this update, so I’m going to get right to it. Read below for patch notes!

First off, in case you’re worried, we are not wiping characters or universes this patch and have no plans to do so. You can continue playing your existing characters and worlds from previous stable versions of Starbound, but there are a few things that will have changed.

The biggest change is that this patch brings the first part of a major rebalance to weapons. Any randomly generated melee or ranged weapons you have will be regenerated to a weapon of the same type and level (and keep their name), but will have different appearances and rebalanced stats. This includes weapons modded with custom drawables, so for those of you who care about this, make sure to keep a copy of your drawable data to recreate the weapon later. Most non-generated weapons will have altered stats, but otherwise keep similar abilities and appearances.

While we’ve done our best to add conversion scripts for all of the things we’ve changed, it’s been awhile since the last patch and there may be some that we’ve missed. If you’re playing Unstable with your characters from a previous (vanilla) Stable version, please let us know if you’ve lost items or have trouble loading existing worlds so we can sort it out before the Stable release!

If you’re the kind of player that doesn’t mind starting over and wants to see all the newest changes, you will probably want to start a new universe for this patch since we’ve made a lot of big improvements to terrain generation and biomes that you might not get to see otherwise!

Since we’ve changed the combat balance so much, we’re still in the process of tuning the monsters, NPCs and mission bosses. If you find things that are way too hard or too easy, let us know!

We’ve done a lot to improve performance but there’s still a lot more we plan to do before the game’s released. Hopefully you’ll see things running smoother, but don’t panic if some areas are still slow.

Liquids in and around microdungeons sometimes aren’t placed in a correctly settled manner and will settle after the world is first loaded

NPCs occasionally get stuck rotated after getting out of bed, which is hilarious but unintended

Some NPCs in biomes aren’t well equipped to fight monsters

If you’re running Windows 7, make sure you have service pack 1 installed. Seriously – install those service packs!

Steam may leave dbghelp.dll in the win32 or win64 folders by mistake, which will cause Starbound not to launch. You can fix this by getting rid of the file or deleting and re-installing Starbound.