Starbound's long-awaited bounty hunting update is live

Sci-fi survival game Starbound, still one of the best space games on PC, has finally added bounty hunting. First announced way back in September 2017, the 1.4 Bounty Hunter update adds a new Peacekeeper faction aimed at corralling criminals and restoring law and order to the universe. You're their newest recruit.

The gangs you're hunting won't be easy to find. You'll have to follow a trail that leads between planets, picking up clues as you go. Each gang has a final hideout where you fight a boss to complete the bounty.

There are new story missions linked to the update, and if you follow them you'll rise through the ranks of the Peacekeepers, who have snazzy bases set up around the universe. Along with these story missions for specific gangs, the update adds procedurally-generated bounties and criminal gang "microdungeons" to battle through.

Update 1.4 isn't just about bounty hunters, though: it adds rare elemental variants of certain monsters, and you're encouraged to catch them and add them to your Rare Pets collection.

It also introduces plenty of new items including drones, seven new weapons, a mining laser, and eight new armor pieces. You'll find plenty of new furniture, too, much of which is related to the Peacekeepers.

The full list of new monster variants, items and furniture can be found in the patch notes. I haven't touched Starbound for years, but this may well draw me back for at least a few hours.

Thanks, RPS.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.