Dungeons
(Dungeons may be referred to by other terms, such as settlements, villages, or structures.)
Dungeons are open world structures that players may come across while exploring. Randomly generated quests use above-ground dungeons, microdungeons, small structures, and land features as landmarks. Number of major dungeons on a planet depend on planet size:
- Small Planet: 1 dungeon
- Medium Planet: 1 to 2 dungeons
- Large Planet: 2 to 3 dungeons
Some dungeons, especially hylotl underwater cities, have a shield generator that protects all blocks and furniture in dungeon boundaries from being mined, as well as hiding any wiring in the area. Disabling this shield will allow players to pick up locked objects and blocks, as well as observe and change wiring.
Village dungeons are usually a collection of many buildings on the surface of a planet. They have many NPCs of all kinds, from simple villagers and merchants to guards and kings. NPCs in villages are friendly to the player, but can become hostile if they catch the player stealing.
Contents
Types
Major Dungeons
Most of them are more likely to appear on planets of a particular primary biome. For instance, all four Floran dungeons are most likely to appear on forest planets.
Some planet types have restrictions on dungeon spawning:
- Moons, Asteroid Fields, Barren planets and liquid Toxic, Arctic, and Magma planets do not generate dungeons.
- Ocean planets can spawn only Hylotl Underwater City and Hylotl Underwater Ruins. Because a large world is guaranteed to have at least two dungeons, this means that every large Ocean planet is guaranteed to have both Hylotl underwater dungeons. Ocean planets are the only type of planets on which the Hylotl underwater dungeons spawn.
- Garden planets can only have Mines, and are the only type of planet on which this dungeon spawns.
The bracketed text in the table are spawn codes for the /placedungeon command, with the usual warnings of its dangers.
| RACE | VILLAGES (FRIENDLY) | DUNGEONS (HOSTILE) |
|---|---|---|
| Apex | Apex Rebel Camp (apexcamp) Apex City Apartments (apexcity) |
Apex Miniknog Base (apexbase) Apex Test Facility (apextestfacility) |
| Avian | Avian Grounded Village (avianvillage) Avian Native Village (aviannativevillage) Avian Airship (avianairship) |
Avian Temple (aviantemple) Avian Tomb (aviantomb) |
| Floran | Floran Treetop Village (floranvillagetower) Floran Hut Village (floranhutvillage) |
Floran Canyon (florancanyon) Floran Hunting Grounds (floranhuntinggrounds) |
| Glitch | Glitch Castle (glitchcastle) Glitch Village (glitchvillage) |
Glitch Dungeon Crawler (dungeoncrawler) Glitch Evil Fortress (evilfortress) |
| Human | Human Campsite (humancamp) | Human Prison (humanprison) |
| Hylotl | Hylotl Underwater City (hylotloceancity) Hylotl Surface City (hylotlcity) |
Hylotl Ruined Castle (hylotlruinedcastle) Hylotl Underwater Ruins (hylotlruinedcity) |
| Novakid | Novakid Village (novakidvillage) | (none) |
| (non-racial) | (none) | Mines (naturalcave) Old Sewer (glitchsewer) |
Microdungeons
Many microdungeons can spawn on surface and underground. They are small buildings or landforms, usually only comprising of one or two rooms.
Space Dungeons
The 1.3.0 Update added three types of space dungeons to the game: Space Encounters, NPC Ships and NPC Space Stations. These can be encountered while inspecting star systems in the Navigation Console, with Space Encounters and NPC Ships being temporary. All space dungeons require a mech to explore. With the 1.4.0 Update, some bounty quests repurpose space encounters and hostile NPC ships as parts of the quest.
Bounty Microdungeons
The 1.4.0 Update added bounty microdungeons, a new microdungeon type to the game. These consist of small buildings inhabited by hostile NPC gangs. They dynamically spawn into specific worlds when a player has a bounty quest. Note that these microdungeons spawn only in unexplored world chunks, so players may want to minimise exploring planets in star systems near an active Peacekeeper base until after completing that base's Peacekeeper missions, or alternatively allow bounties to guide the player towards which planets to explore, to avoid the annoyance of having bounty microdungeons spawn into inconvenient places like near the planet's core or in its asteroid layer.
Disabled and Removed Structures
Many dungeons were removed from the game when transitioning from beta to release. The removal reasons were varied, with some removed due to rewritten lore and others referred to as "placeholder content", in addition to unfinished dungeons being simply unfit for use. Other dungeons were disabled from appearing in-game, but their assets still exist and can be spawned using the /placedungeon command, with the usual warnings of its dangers.
| Disabled Dungeons | Removed Dungeons |
|---|---|
Treasure
Dungeons are a great place to get rare and valuable treasures. Dungeons often have a unique pool of items along with a common pool, depending on the type of container. Basic Treasure often appears in non-chest containers such as boxes and crates, while Valuable Treasure usually appears in dungeon-themed chests.
Most dungeons (including villages) also have a single special chest which contains one Large Dungeon Reward.
Large Dungeon Reward
| Large Dungeon Reward | Quantity | Weight | Chance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic Treasure | 2 | Always | Appears |
| Good Weapon | 1 | 0.5 | 50% |
| Unique Weapon | 1 | 0.5 | 50% |
| Total Weight | 1.0 |
Dungeon IDs
Dungeon IDs play an important role in defining the functional aspects of dungeons, including tile protection, breathability, and gravity. Each major dungeon on a planet is assigned its own dungeonid, from 0 to 2, depending on the order in which it was generated on the planet. All microdungeons on a planet, both above and below ground, are assigned the dungeonid 65533.
Generation
Dungeons are procedurally generated by assembling pre-built rooms and attaching them to produce a unique design.
In early development, Starbound used PNG maps, like the one shown below, to determine where the elements were placed in dungeons. The game engine cross-referenced that map against a color key contained in the dungeon metadata file and placed all of the foreground and background tiles, objects, monster and NPC spawns, and other game elements.[1] The game engine still supports PNG maps, and the oldest dungeons that remain in the game are implemented using them.
|
 A Glitch dungeon key. |
In early 2015 Chucklefish transitioned to using the map editor program Tiled for dungeon generation instead of PNG maps.[2] While setting up Tiled to correctly find the necessary tileset files can be difficult, once it has been set up, designing dungeons becomes much easier. An example of the Tiled editor editing a dungeon part is shown below.
