ABOUT Starbound: Galaxy in Conflict

"Conquer your fears! And I promise you, you will conquer death!"

Galaxy in Conflict is a massive expansion for Starbound with an extremely heavy focus on exploration, combat, and RPG mechanics in various worlds combining fantasy and sci-fi elements.

GIC is heavily inspired by the souls-like mix of melee and ranged combat of Remnant: From the Ashes, the loot system of Tarkov, and the fantasy elements of a grounded and grittier sci-fi Touhou.

This group's primary purpose is to function as an archive for update logs for people who are unable or unwilling to join the GiC Discord. This will help notify people on some matters.

Please keep in mind that there will be no support given here and that any inquiries should be redirected to the GiC Steam Discussions or the GiC Discord (although the latter is significantly faster in terms of response time and helpful info).

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RECENT ANNOUNCEMENTS

V4.3 Catchup Info

4 May - Tengu_Civitas | 0 Comments

Transcripted from the Discord.

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05-05-2026

# A Catch-Up on 4.3’s Dev Cycle, Part 1

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Hey fellas, apologies for the long gap in general announcements. We’ve been focusing hard on the current dev cycle but have finally reached that point where we can slow the hell down both because the scope-creep has been subdued and burn-out has reached its peak. We’ve shown our work in the development channels however, so if you’re curious you can have a gander there too.

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# The Core Concept: A Summary

This update started from a single core concept: How can we make modern guns viable in the early-game, primarily Garden and Eskhatos?

From the surface standpoint, just adding in guns would disrupt the tech growth of the player when it came to melee and muzzleloaders. So the “simple” solution was the addition of scrap guns with ♥♥♥♥-tier performance. Great, these had to be balanced… how? With the loot system as-is, there’d be no gunpowder to make use of them when found. Add gunpowder loot however, and now they’re overpowered despite being “scrap guns”. Can’t be too ♥♥♥♥ either else it’s not fun for gun styles. Scrap guns couldn’t be mere findables, they had to be crafted.

Player-crafting was re-investigated to accommodate for an entirely new system of resource management beyond just “le ammo”. New materials added to loot tables which simulated an early “tech specialization” that was impossible to unlock all of it in one go i.e spend what you gathered in the first hour to tech into a smithy workshop and fletching, or go for modern ammunition and an emplacements workshop. Unique gear both utility and trinket-wise do appear in these tables too, so it’s not just “craft now, find later”. However, that had to be tuned to ensure it wasn’t so hyper-expensive and obtuse that you couldn’t “tech up” much early on, but not so fast that you could unlock all of it in the first 2 hours. The resource economy had to be treated incredibly delicately, as SB+mods has shown that it can be utterly pointless to interact with, or incredibly obnoxious real fast. GIC’s crafting is intended to supplement the diverse loot tables, not replace it. Guns are powerful even in a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ package, but you ought to be ready to spend the materials.

But what good is crafting without the actual materials? While Garden had the overworld initially, there was NO RESOURCE GAIN after that initial “lap”. Once you began Bada’s caravan, everything from that point on gave ♥♥♥♥-all. This horrific revelation forced us to reinvestigate its structuring, leading to revised quests to give material rewards and some new areas outright. An important implementation was a rundown-lite repeatable raid against the bandits of the countryside. While materials are the primary gain, each successful run also unlocks new gear as well upping the difficulty which further improves loot drops from enemies, up to Tier 3.

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Over the next couple weeks we’ll be going over most of the elements that were developed or majorly-tweaked over the last few months, from the addition of once-shunned mechanics like player-crafting, the reduction or outright removal of many penalties to trinkets to improve player-scaling, to the restoration of a myriad of forgotten GIC 1.0 mechanics like Blink-Assassinations and player-deployable/recoverable field guns. This of course also includes a lot of new content gear-wise to fill in what was missing with many playstyles.

Ever since 4.0, we’ve learnt a myriad of new things. Many of these in the search for making the gameplay more fun, as GIC is an Action-Adventure RPG after all, where the modern and ancient uphold themselves to a factor of viability. We pride ourselves on that simple fact: that we play our own project to have fun. It just turns out that simple fact also trickles down to other people’s enjoyment.

These “mini-announcements” are essentially just blogs though not during the exact time. More easily digestible information over what’s been happening rather than barfed out into one gigantic wall of text which arguably could be seen as off-putting to most.

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# Introducing ?̷̟̄?̷͕͆?̵̯̃

In parallel development to GIC, a new channel for ?̷̟̄?̷͕͆?̵̯̃ has been opened, headed by BoredKappa.

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V4.2.3 Micro-Update

26 January - Tengu_Civitas | 0 Comments

27/01/2026

What was meant to just be a small maintanenace patch ended up involving some new equipment to play around with as a creative outlet for some new ideas I had and a desire to flex some of that code and art skill a little with what I've learnt over the years. In a way this is a slow dipping of the toes back into the water as the shelved Occultist starts to get some plans drawn up again. Of course there's a lot of things that need improvements, but it's whatever we feel like getting to as should all creative outlets lest we make each update an unpaid obligation that ultimately burns us out and makes us want to slam our heads into a brick wall. GIC isn't finished, but we're on track for new content and less reworks going forward.

New Content:
- Added Weight of Guilt - Hammer that was once the miracle mallet of another world, now only left with manifestations of guilt. Summon a giant inchling to hammer down foes. Sacrifice HP Regen to reduce the cooldown of its ability. Found under the ||Abandoned Belltower area|| on Garden.
- Added Lament for Alexander - A Censer-Mace combination of the orthodoxy. Slam the mace into the ground and call upon ancient soldiers to attack enemies in melee with the bearer, calculating MAX HP for duration. Found inside the ||Cathedral of Light|| on Khurtovyna Overworld. New Khurtovyna must be generated to appear.
- Added Ancient War Banner - Flag of an ancient empire. Special backwear that grants buffs to self and player-allies dependent on the actions of the Banner-Bearer (Advancing, Skirmishing, Engaging). Found in a secret room ||in the Bazaar Betwixt Realms.||
- Added Ribbon of the Mother-Protector - Relic of a distant realm, summoning Hina to protect you. When under 100 HP, drain 30 Ability Mana per hit, resisting MELEE & THERMAL DMG | Only partially resists ballistic DMG (80%) | Restores 5 Mana on parry whilst defended if above 30 mana | Found in a new side-path at the ||Smuggler's Fortress|| on Eskhatos.

Other Changes:
- Removed weapon tags from NPC guns, which should give a performance boost to the game. It no longer constantly refreshes the addition of weapon tags onto NPCs as they are not utilized in any capacity. Weight tags remain with the exception of "lightweight" (increase speed and +10 dodge). This got removed for NPCs because it gave enemies dodge chances which while minimal, could still feel ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ when a killing shot is "dodged" out of nowhere (especially with very slow-firing weapons, and same reason why cavalry no longer have dodge chance).
- Fixed stagger remove proc not working, meaning staggers would still stunlock before this update. Lmao.
- Added Sloped Gold Leaf Tile - Can be purchased from the Bowerbird Store on Wildlands.
- Added a handful of objects.
- Void-Marking Spellbook reduced debuff -100% > -33% DMG RES. Duration 5s > 15s.
- Fixed Wildlands Officers from dropping credits.
- Fixed Wolf-Tengu having the incorrect species tags | Only used in the current placeholder intro for their gear locker.
- Fixed serverside crash with Dollmaker's Grimoire.
- Infinite Ammo stat no longer affects underbarrels. The system itself isn't really intended for direct use outside of hyper-tuned cases due to it being very jank already, and this change is necessary to help prepare for the redrafting of the Occultist archetype who strongly relies on "infinite ammo" (with penalties) with magic weapons for one of his main abilities. At least, for now.
- Underbarrel reloads no longer output gic_base_weaponreload_modifier tag (no longer triggers On-Reload effects). Instead they now output a gic_base_weaponreload_underbarrel_modifier tag (not used for anything yet. Intended specifically for Underbarrel On-Reloads).
- Forlorn Umbrella-Spear (Backwear) now has a 1s cooldown between procs | DMG 50 > 100.
- Changed shield bleed-through damage type from SLASH to BLUNT.
- Slab GS stagger 3s > 2s.
- Removed block anchors for space station hatch doors.
- Fixed Duellists having a global -15% proficiency penalty for no reason. Short-sighted penalty now works properly when holding archetype weapons.
- Christmas Decor taken down and seasonal beverages no longer sold.

Donors:
- Added "Yong" to the Bazaar's donor list as a major one-off donor.
- Added "MrPisar" to the Bazaar's donor list as an active donor.

A continued thank you to those donating out of their pocket that could be spent on anything else in their own personal lives. You choose to donate to this little niche overly-ambitious mod for dead game despite it conferring no material benefit beyond unwavering gratitude. Thank you.