For those considering purchasing SB, truth be told, Terraria is better at this point. I hate saying it, but for me, it's true. I put at least 80 hours Terraria and I've only managed about 40 in Starbound.

There are two major problems I have with Starbound: The experience is still too fractured/shallow and The procedural aspects aren't compelling.

You spend most of your time in Starbound gathering resources and doing tasks for NPCs while fighting monsters in order to craft equipment that allows you to go to higher threat-level planets and repeat the process, which sounds fun in theory but in practice isn't all that interesting. The planets don't feel (forgive the latent pun) organic, they just feel random. Just like Spore, you've got randomly generated creatures, weather, trees and colors with little rhyme or reason behind them. It starts losing its novelty fairly rapidly by about the 20th planet you visit. There are random "dungeons" on planets as well as villages but they suffer from the same issue--there's just not that much to keep you interested long-term. It can be fun to build an outpost on a planet somewhere, but pending an upcoming update you'll be doing it just for the sake of itself.

One of the worst aspects of the way they've set things up is the fact that planet biomes are directly tied to difficulty, so without mods you'll never see, say, a forested planet at the highest threat-level. The lower-difficulty planets are forest-ish, moving to snow planets, desert planets, etc, up through "fire" planets at the hardest level. This severely hurts the already-weak motivation around planetary exploration. Planets also have mini-biomes and other features, but again, it all feels random rather than emergent or organic. It's kind of like the Starbound devs have become so lost in the weeds with feature-creep that they've lost sight of the overall experience. Almost every update they make on their website is concerning some new feature they're adding (pets! colonization! new weapons! new items!) rather than addressing the fact that the game itself lacks some fundamental structure around the core gameplay loop--planetary exploration. They've done some remarkable work in that area, but nothing to tie it all together and make a truly compelling experience. The fact that we're now coming up on two years in Early Access with no major improvements in that area is discouraging.

And, of course, speaking of which, it is Early Access, so things will change and it may eventually become the game that many of us hoped it would be, and it HAS gotten much better since it was first released, but until then it's just not all that great, despite the brilliant devs working on it and the honestly amazing systems they've built, but the whole thing is just so.. disconnected. And mods can only make up for so much. It's not a bad game, by any means, it's just still more of a toy/sandbox than an actual game.