I havn't heard or seen anything from starbound for quite a while now. Is this game dead, and no more updates? Has anyone heard anything?

You can't kill that which never truly lived.

Anyway it sure seems to be, the bounty update was the last thing they tossed out and now they seem to be focused on their Harry Potter Stardew Valley thing. I think the general expectation is that anyone who's left playing is probably using Frackin' Universe or another handful of mods for content.

Bit of a shame that they never fully invoked the offhand suggestion that Tiy made; to let the community take over or to hire some of the higher profile modders.

I wish someone or a group would take over and get this going again. I don't play Universe mod.

A pinned message from someone from Chucklefish's staff in Starbound's channel in Chucklefish's official Discord server says this:

"The game isn't dead, it still has a thousands and thousands of players. It is currently being optimised for console which means there's a feature freeze right now. Yes, we are still working on it and testing it and trying to bring it to players. No, we can't give you an update because we just don't have anything to update you on."

And here we are, nearly two consoles later.
So, what have we gotten as an update so far then?

Hint: Nothing. Even the console ports of Terraria got more than this. They've had four years to work out the kinks if this blogpost is to be taken at value.

You mean the same company that doesn't upload soundtracks is also lazy and behind on keeping their game up to date on gog? I'm so shocked.

I did see a blog post where they stated that on console when they tried to get several people on a game the game slowed way down and that they had not been able to fix it.

They are still trying but there are no promises to when it will be done.
Here is the blog post from December 2nd.
___________
Hello everyone!

We’ve got some exciting news! Starbound will be releasing December 8th on Xbox Games Pass for PC!! This version is PC only, and identical to other PC versions with the new additions of Xbox achievements, and the ability to invite and join friends through your Xbox Live network.

This is a great chance to try Starbound if you’re an Xbox Games Pass subscriber – and we’re so pleased to have it join the great collection of titles available! It’s a fantastic value at only $9.99 a month and you’ll also gain access to over 100+ wonderful games (aside from our very own Wargroove, we also recommend checking out Carto, Ape Out and Frostpunk).

Last year we shared a number of updates about Starbound’s Xbox console version, which we’d been showing at public events and felt was nearly ready. Our last update was that the console version was suffering from serious performance issues with 3-4 players together in some scenarios and we felt it couldn’t be released to the public in that state. We’ve worked with a number of different developers to try and address this, and have made some progress – but we’re still not confident enough to say when it might be ready. We’ve seen all the requests for an update on console development, and we understand this isn’t the news everyone’s looking for – but we want to address it and reassure we are still working on it with our partners!

We’re also supporting Jingle Jam by Yogscast again this holiday season, where you can grab a bundle with Starbound and some other great titles to support charity! In the meantime, if you want to see what else we at Chucklefish are up to, you can follow us on Twitter here and chat to us in Discord here. Until next time, peacekeepers!

That was posted in December of 2020 indeed. The post about the performance issues was from June 2019.

It is now March 2021. I will personally congratulate the devs themselves if they manage to release a competent port that doesn't bankrupt them and isn't a gong show in some portion or another.

There was already a lot wrong with the game when they came up with this idea. I can't imagine adapting it to console has been easy. How many certifications for release they've failed, battling the ESRB, dragging the code across the chalkboard to optimize it away from SDL1, fixing the 64 bit memory leak that's been known across multiple versions...

But then there's aspects that were never even optimized for desktop, like the inventory, the navigation system, or just getting around on planets. These are things which simply couldn't exist as they were on a console.

Just putting it bluntly, a lot of Starbound's UX was designed around the screencrunch of a netbook, and not massive 4K screens at several meters away.

Man that is not true, I have played this on laptops, my s7 plus tablet, 55 inch oled, 4k 1440 and 1080. As for optimized sounds like you are just repeating stuff you heard. This game runs fine even on some of the worst laptops. I have had people play on my server with like 50 dollar laptops. The only people i ever seen complain about it not running right are people who have no idea what they are doing, and try to run the server and the game on the same computer and are using really old computers. As for the xbox one s, x, and series s x they are faster than most peoples computers are, it would work fine if they allowed dedicated servers.

As for 4k I will never understand why it is so hard for people to grasp. Making a game have a huge UI so u can see it at 10 feet doesnt make the game optimized for 4k. If you cannot read windows font at the distance you are sitting at 100 percent zoom 4k is meaningless. In order to see 4k on any game at 10 feet you would need a 90 plus inch screen. If you have a 55 you need to be around 2 to 3 feet from it to see 4k from 1440, 65 is around 4 ect some one made a chart on rtings. My guess is because most people have really bad TVS, unless you have a high end 4k tv 1500+, 1080 looks like garbage because the scaling is terrible on the tv.

If you have a 4k 55 inch screen and are sitting meters away, you cannot tell the difference between 1440 or 4k end of story. 4k 60 fps, vs 1440 60 fps at 6 feet same graphic settings would be impossible to tell the difference. Unless you have better than my vision which is 20/15. The general rule as i said if you cant read windows text at 100 percent at 4k you cant tell the difference, you are just filling your head up with garbage about how you think you can.

It's less about all the things you mentioned and more a matter that the buttons are tiny things made for ants. Most of the UI was, and still is tiny. Terraria's quickbar as Minecraft's quickbar both have big ole hitboxes.

Yes UI scaling is super important these days BOTH for people who want to use HIGHER resolutions (because YES 4K looks vastly superior to 2k WHO WOULDA THOUGHT) or for those who have some visual impairment...both legit and important factors...Even games like Aquanox back from 20 years ago look great on 640x480 OR 4k...so how come so many newly released fail at this? Most of them forget to PLAN for those two factors I mentioned, and games suffer because of it obviously, is this one of them?

Probably because the simple matter of fact is they built it on the back of an old crappy version of SDL that doesn't have scalable vector support.

Yes