my thoughts after spending 15 or so hours on 1.0(i've played the beta before):
First of all, to me the appeal of this game is to play something like minecraft but with a different flavor. Basically I want to explore, create stuff and have fun with my friends online.
Exploring is fun for the first 15 or so planets but then you feel like you've seen it all and suddenly the universe doesn't look big anymore. They fucked up with the mechanics here. I would have loved if you had to do things differently depending on biome and hazards but the only thing you need to worry about is upgrading your backpack. This results in the the environmental differences becoming a pointless feature that only serves as a progress check. Perhaps worse, the worlds aren't interesting. I never find places that look cool or interesting it's just hills, trees, blocks with different colors, some liquids and the occasional buildings. The excitement of visiting a new planet usually dies within the first two minutes.
Combat is serviceable I guess. Weapons are fun with all the variation but fighting is a chore. The biggest issue with combat is that there's no point to doing it. Why should I risk losing my stuff and 30% of my money for 15 pixels and some useless drop when I could avoid and dig myself into the ground. There should be some incentive to fight beyond surviving, either that it serves its own purpose by feeling great or because it can get you valuable stuff. If that's too troublesome to implement then encounters should be drastically less frequent.
Creating stuff is tedious and annoying. They should have focused on implementing tools that make building fun and satisfying. Even something that should be easy and feel nice like building in a straight line is frustrating and error-prone. In minecraft I would make elaborate designs and have a great time gathering and building but here the whole process is so annoying that I can't bother creating anything sophisticated. Keeping track of your things is basically impossible. Stuff keeps piling on and good luck finding what you're after when you have 73 chest full of things and half of it looks unintelligible from the inventory screen. The game needs some kind of overlay that allows you to draft and snap your cursor to a visible grid. They could balance it by only allowing the mode around a stationary device.
The worst thing with starbound is how progress works. The loop is to get some upgrade that will allow you to progress to a new type of world where you get access to resources for your next level of upgrades.
On the fourth or so iteration through the loop I start to actively hate the game. I don't understand why I'm mining a next tier mineral for the nth time to create items with slightly better numbers just to do it all over again and again. You do exactly the same thing all the time, there's no progress in terms of gameplay. It feels so damn meaningless and empty.
As for questing, the main story line seems half decent but the procedural stuff is mind-numbingly boring.
