I just started playing starbound again for the first time in almost TWO YEARS. I was a week 1 buyer and thought there would be more to it by now. I can say though that I have played it 30 hours the last week and have really enjoyed it, but now that I have completed all the quests I'm just digging though planets looking for certain vanity items and gathering pixels and doing those challenge doors.
I just wanted to post a few things I noticed in the last week since playing.
I wonder about pixels, what the possible lore reason is that they can't be placed in containers? Clearly some mystical force has left them in containers underground on every planet in the galaxy. I wouldn't mind if they were storable but you lost more of the ones you were carrying when you died, even 100%. Right now it's best just to store a bunch of ore and extract whatever amount of pixels you need to use.
The damage isn't too extreme from most enemies/attacks, but I'm used to playing Terraria on expert where endgame enemies kill you in 3 hits. The controls and physics in Terraria make it way easier to dodge though, and endgame items/buffs give you like 6 health regen per second or something. I think the biggest danger in Starbound is lava. I barely touch a puddle of it and half my health is gone. I died from lava maybe 3 times. I died from fall damage a few times, once was when I jumped off an airship, attempting to pulse jump before I hit the ground. Terminal velocity is so high though that I was dead before I could react. Shorter falls aren't a problem with pulsejump and blink.
A problem I had with the game was the ship upgrading. I didn't know I had to do the cake quest to be able to buy an upgrade, so by the time I did the cake quest I had the parts for 4 upgrades and my matter modulator had 3 upgrades. Maybe ship upgrading should be independent of the quests, or maybe require only a certain amount be completed.
I didn't know about lantern-on-a-stick/xenon pack until I had the final ship upgrade. I was looking through items on the wiki when I discovered it. I was able to discard the flashlight after that. I admit the flashlight did make the game spookier and really shows off the lighting. I didn't know about about the lantern because I never picked up oil which unlocks the recipe. Slime unlocks it too which is funny because I spent an hour digging though an alien planet looking for a slime cave only to realize afterwards that slime isn't used in the recipe for the lantern, but it does unlock the recipe.
The critter/pets right now don't do anything. The ship pets don't do anything, and captured critters are the same as normal critters, such as a birds running away from you. I know that more is being worked on and will be added to this in the next patch and coming patches.
The bosses were also really easy. I know the developers said they wanted to had "very difficult" bosses or something like that.