You will need those mined materials to create equipment. Your mining skills will come in handy when it's time to craft. Eventually, you can extract more than one block at a time. Mining becomes faster once you upgrade your Matter Manipulator (which sounds far cooler that a pickaxe). When you're starting out, you can only extract one block at a time at a slow rate. In Starbound, mining is a much slower process at first. By upgrading your pickaxe in Terraria, you can increase your mining speed, power, damage, and mined materials. In Terraria, mining is easy: left-click and hold on the block you wish to break to begin mining it with a pickaxe. Mining is essential for gathering crafting materials in both games. In this section, I'll explore the mining, crafting, and combat systems of both games. It also runs on its own custom game engine. Again, this is most likely because Starbound is a newer release. That being said, Starbound 's animation seems to be a step-up from Terraria ’s in complexity.
The animation is as best as it can be for a 2D game. Despite their simplicity, the animation in both games is still good. AnimationĢD games usually have simple animation. On the other hand, Starbound's story must be completed to some extent before you can have the "real" sandbox experience. Terraria appears to lack an official story, which is great for players who want to dive into content. Personally, I like both fantasy and sci-fi. The "better" genre depends on one’s own preference. In Terraria, you fight against evil using magic spells, although how you fight depends on your fighting style. You'll also meet an assortment of alien races along the way. Fantasy and sci-fi are both too different. In my opinion, you can't compare the genres of these two games. This could be attributed to one of Starbound's leading artists, who has also worked on Terraria. There are some similarities in the games' art styles. In addition, the shading adds more depth and shadows, which contributes to a sleeker gameplay experience.īoth games use 2D pixel graphics for nearly everything you'll see: sprites, objects, the foreground, background, etc. For a pixelated game, it's far less pixelated than Terraria. The Visuals GraphicsĪs the newer game, Starbound's graphic quality is superior. To find the answer, I'll break down each game from the soundtrack to combat. So, if you're looking to pick up one of these games, which should you choose: Terraria or Starbound? That's a great question.