Starbound 1.0 not launching for you? Try these solutions

Starbound is finally out of Early Access today — and true to the game’s patchy beta history, the 1.0 release has its share of optimization issues along with brand spankin’ new features. There’s a ton of new stuff and surprises for returning players who gave up on the game during its extended beta.

Starbound finally making its way into release is great news, but many players are having issues even getting the game open — a frustrating throwback to its first months in Early Access beta.

Some players have not been able to get the game to open since the patch. Often in these instances, the Starbound process will run in the background but the game itself will not launch. At the time of writing there are two potential solutions for this problem:

Solution 1: Run the game from its directory instead of from Steam

This one isn’t entirely obvious but some people have had luck simply running the game via its .exe instead of via Steam. This is a simple thing to do, provided you know where your Steam folder is.

If you have not set a custom install directory for Steam and its games, you should be able to find the program files in:

C:Program Files (x86)SteamSteamAppscommonStarbound

From here the folder you go into differs based on whether you’re running a 32 or 64bit operating system.

If you’re running a 32bit system enter the win32 folder, and if you’re running a 64bit system enter the win64 folder — in any case, try launching starbound.exe directly and see if it works.

If not then it’s time to reinstall.

Solution 2: Uninstall and reinstall the game

This is the most obvious solution that in some cases does work, if Starbound is having trouble after being updated to 1.0 instead of a fresh install.

You uninstall games from Steam simply by right-clicking them then clicking “Delete Local Content…”

It may be a good idea to delete the Starbound folder entirely after deleting local content, then installing it again.

If it doesn’t work even after this step (including deleting the folder), uninstall the game again, reboot, and install it once more.

This won’t necessarily work for everyone, but it has worked for some (myself included). Hopefully one of these solutions works for you, but if not just sit tight and wait for Chucklefish to patch a fix.

(If you’ve gotten Starbound to run but it’s terribly laggy, you may want to try this simple client-changing solution.)

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Hopefully this helps you get your game up and running! Check out the rest of our Starbound guides for more troubleshooting and general tips:

• Starbound Beta: Stuck on the Chucklefish Logo? Try Letting It Sit!
• Starbound: Disc Write Error During Update Fix