
I’m realizing that starbound is, lore wise, a little racist. I mean sure it’s just lazy and shallow worldbuilding but. it does feel a little weird that all the races have traits which are innate. like, florans stab things, avians love god, hylotl are nerds, apex are tankies. it gets so repetitive. it’s also weird that, despite this monoculturality, your own knowledge as whatever race you play as can not help Esther with the quest, the only knowledge you can find are from … looking at furniture. would I really not be able to deduce that the hylotl artifact might be in a grand library. many scan dialogues directly mention the love for grand libraries. I couldn’t at least mention that?
speaking of scans, the thing that I believe spawned this thought in the first place was when I scanned something and my character stated that “We Hylotl would never design something so un-elegant.” I may be paraphrasing but the key word here is we, because it means your values and beliefs are the same as other members of your race. and that gives two options, you either grew up secluded from any other culture, or you were born with those cultiral beliefs. everyone is an ambassador for their race, because everyone thinks the same. not very good.
I can much more confidently call it anthropocentric, however. and I’m talking about the fact that only humans were given an interesting and meaningful artifact. you’re tasked with retrieving these seemingly culturally super important artifacts gifted to the people from literal god, and when you get them … well, no one really cares about it. only the florans actually know about theirs because they regularly award it to the winner of their ceremonial hunt, but… it’s just a piece of bone. none of them actually do anything. you can’t use them to help you in anything, the lore never says anything interesting about them… except for the human artifact. why were THEY given this extremely useful piece of tech, the original matter manipulator, and everyone else just gets some bullshit. like they could have at least said something cool about the other ones, have it actually mean something in comparison to “That tool you’ve been Using To Play The Game is a less powerful version of this thing btw.” it just makes them meaningless and the races they were given to meaningless by comparison. kill 7 billion humans.
the worldbuilding is ultimately just shallow, not good or interesting in most regards, and engaging with it is pointless. it’s best experienced the same way you play Minecraft; nothing matters and no one cares, so just do whatever the fuck you want. go in admin mode and craft all the guns for free and run around killing people. build something cool. watch a youtube video in the background. complain about it online. how else do you think I have a thousand hours in this shit?
RULE MY SHIP ALL MUST FOLLOW