How to Install Starbound and Join a Server

The most common Starbound multiplayer experience is not exploring a planet with a friend. It is being refused entry to their server because your files do not match theirs.

The message is about assets. What it means is mods — yours, theirs, or the gap between the two — and it is the single largest obstacle between a new player and a working game of Starbound with other people in it. Nearly everything else about getting online here is straightforward.

Starbound is a two-dimensional space exploration game with a very deep crafting layer underneath it. You have a ship, the ship goes to planets, the planets have things buried in them, and eventually you have a colony full of people who pay you rent. Listings collect on the game's hub.

What you are actually playing

The loop is exploration first and building second, which is the reverse of how most people expect a game like this to work.

Your ship is your base and it moves. You fly to a planet, dig into it, take what is worth taking, and leave. Planets have threat levels that are stated up front, and the difference between a starting world and a dangerous one is not subtle — the monsters hit harder, the weather actively tries to kill you, and the ore worth having is deeper down.

Progress runs through materials. Copper and iron early, then titanium, then durasteel, then the rarer things, with each tier gating better tools and better armour and the next stage of the story. The main quest is a chain of missions that unlock more of the universe as you finish them, and each mission ends with something large that needs killing.

Seven playable races exist and the differences between them are largely cosmetic — the look of your character, the aesthetic of your ship, some flavour in dialogue. Pick the one you like looking at rather than agonising over it.

Colonies are the bit people stay for

Build a room that meets the game's requirements, place a colony deed in it, and somebody moves in.

What kind of somebody depends on what the room contains. A room full of weapons attracts a different tenant from a room full of books, and tenants give you quests, pay rent, and occasionally follow you off the planet if you ask them to.

This is where a shared server gets interesting. Four people building a town together, each responsible for a district, produces something no single-player Starbound world ever does — and it is the reason the game's server communities skew towards building rather than combat.

Crew, and why recruiting matters

Some of the people you help will follow you back to the ship and join the crew, and your ship gets larger as the crew does. That turns recruiting from a flourish into a progression system: a bigger ship means more room for everything, and the route to a bigger ship runs through being useful to strangers on planets.

Crew members also come along on away missions and do things while they are there. A good one is worth more than an equipment upgrade, and picking up a few early makes the middle of the game noticeably less lonely.

Agreeing the rules before you share a planet

Everybody on a Starbound server has the same tools, and those tools include something that removes terrain extremely quickly. A shared world without an agreement is a shared world with a hole through the middle of somebody's house.

Three things are worth settling on the first evening.

Where is shared and where is not. The simplest arrangement that works is one planet everybody builds on and a rule that nobody touches anybody else's plot without asking. It sounds bureaucratic. It prevents the argument that ends servers.

Who digs where. Mining under a build is how foundations end up floating. Agree on a depth, or agree on a separate planet for stripping.

What happens when somebody stops playing. Their buildings stay. Whether the rest of you may take the contents is a question with a right answer only if you decided it in advance.

None of this is specific to Starbound. It is the same conversation every shared building game requires, and the servers that skip it are the servers that last three weeks.

Sorting out the mods problem before it happens

This is the section to read properly.

Starbound checks that your files agree with the server's. If a server runs mods and you do not have them, or you run mods it does not have, you are refused or you see broken content. Server owners can turn that check off, and many do, but turning it off does not conjure the missing content — it means you connect and then cannot see items that other people are using.

Two rules avoid nearly all of it.

Match the server's mod list exactly. Public servers publish their list, usually as a Steam Workshop collection. Subscribe to the collection, launch the game once so everything downloads, and then connect. Do not add extras of your own on top and assume it will be fine.

Play vanilla if you are not sure. An unmodded install joins an unmodded server without any of this. If you are new, spend your first twenty hours there and add mods deliberately afterwards.

The large overhaul mods deserve a specific warning. Several exist that rework crafting from the ground up and add hundreds of items, and they are excellent — but they are not compatible with a vanilla server, they are frequently not compatible with each other, and a server built around one is effectively running a different game. Join that server's community and follow its instructions rather than improvising.

If your game has become slow or unstable, the cause is almost always the subscription list. Unsubscribe from everything, verify the files through Steam, and add mods back one at a time. There is no gentler fix and there never has been.

Installing it

Starbound is a paid Steam game and installs from the Library.Making the account is its own small job — our Steam guide covers it.

The install is small and the hardware requirements are trivial. This game runs on laptops that struggle with a web browser.

Launch it once before you go looking for servers, make a character, and play far enough to get off your starting planet. Two reasons for that. The first is that the opening hour teaches you the controls, and doing it on somebody else's server while they wait is unpleasant for everybody. The second is that your character is yours — you create it locally and you take it onto servers, so the character you arrive with is the one you made.

Connecting to a server

The multiplayer option is on the main menu, and it wants an address.

Take the whole address, port included. A host running several Starbound worlds on one machine cannot give them all the same number, and copying only the part before the colon is the most common reason a working server appears to be down. If a listing gives you a port, use it rather than assuming the default.

Some servers also want an account name and a password, and there are fields for both. That is how whitelisted and private servers control who gets in, and the details come from whoever runs it rather than from anything you can work out yourself.

The listings on this site are queried directly rather than repeated from whatever an owner typed into a form, which is the difference between a measured player count and a claimed one. Our notes on what makes a listing trustworthy go through why that gap exists.

Playing with a small group instead

You do not need a dedicated server to play with two friends.

The game will host from inside the client — one person starts a game and opens it, and the others join them. That works well for an evening, and it has the obvious limitation: the world exists only while the host has the game running. Nothing anybody built is reachable when they are at work.

For a world that persists, you need a machine that stays on. Starbound ships server software alongside the game itself, so running one on a spare computer is a realistic option for a small group, and renting is the option for everyone else. Our piece on what game server hosting costs covers the sizing question, and Starbound is a light load compared with most of the games on this site.

What different servers are actually for

Server types in this game sort into a few recognisable categories, and knowing which one you are joining saves an evening.

Vanilla survival is the game as shipped, shared. Everyone builds, everyone explores, nothing is changed.

Overhaul servers run one of the big content mods and are effectively a different game with a much longer progression. Expect to be told what to install.

Building and roleplay servers turn the combat down or off and exist for the colonies. These have the most active communities and the strictest rules, because a shared build is easy to ruin.

Anarchy servers have no rules at all and are exactly as durable as that suggests.

That taxonomy will look familiar to anybody who has picked a Minecraft server, and for good reason — our guide to Minecraft server types describes the same categories with more examples, and the reasoning carries across.

Problems

"Assets mismatch" or a refusal on connect. Mods. Covered above, and it is nearly always this.

You connect but items are invisible or named oddly. The server has the mismatch check disabled and you are missing content it uses.

Your character is not the one you expected. Starbound keeps your progress on a server per character. Join with a different character and you start again there.

You cannot find your ship. The beam-up is a specific key and it does not work everywhere — some missions and some depths block it.

Everything is dark and you die repeatedly. You have gone to a planet above your tier. The threat level is displayed before you land, and it is not decorative.

The game takes minutes to launch. Too many Workshop subscriptions.

Where else to go

Terraria is the obvious comparison and the more combat-focused of the two. It is tighter, harder, and much less interested in letting you build a town of tenants. Both games are frequently owned by the same people for exactly that reason.

Minecraft is the other side of the same coin — three dimensions, a far larger server ecosystem, and every kind of community imaginable running on it.

Core Keeper and Necesse are the newer entries in the same category, both built for small groups on private servers rather than large public ones.

And if the space half is what appeals rather than the two-dimensional half, Space Engineers does ship construction with real physics and a much steeper learning curve.

Starbound is at its best with three or four people, a shared planet, and an agreement about who is allowed to dig where. Get the mod list sorted first and the rest of it is easy.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Starbound servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.