the game is simplistic and unfinished, but it provided a perfect breeding ground for modders to clean up the unfinished content and populate the universe with creatures and places.

It has a controversial development anyway, from what I remember most of the game art was made by interns who were promised payment and positions and got neither

@[email protected] I didn't follow the game when it went from beta to 1.0, but having played the beta later (builds are still downloadable on Steam if you know the right IDs to point to Valve's SteamCMD), I can understand the complaints. The game felt to me more adventure-focused previously, but then it shifted into a more general exploration/sandbox game, expanding but simplifying several aspects and ditching a lot of the plot in the process.

Also the developers never officially said the updates were over, and 1.4.x feels like it tries to bring back a bit of that adventure loop. But after 1.0, updates slowed until the game felt abandoned. And at least up to some 3 years ago iirc, the developers would say on the official Discord groups that they were waiting for news on a supposed console release before resuming updates to the PC versions, to make feature parity easier.

However, at least in my opinion, it's still a decent game well worth the time and money spent, and it does feel like a complete game. I'd recommend it, specially with how cheap it goes on sales. And if you want to check out older builds if you get it on Steam, feel free to check this tutorial (amusingly and unironically using Starbound as the example). GOG version iirc is only available from 1.0 onward.

Lastly, there's a community for it here on the fediverse if you'd wish to follow: ![email protected]