There's a new post up on the Starbound site's blog, in which creator Tiy outlines the future player progression of the game. It's certainly... interesting.
Tiy talks about planets in the future game becoming inaccessible for players until they have the needed upgrades and technology to land and venture onto them (the example used is one of a planet without a breathable atmosphere), as well as a crucial change to the ship you start in: your fuel hatch will be broken and you won't be able to visit new worlds until you get enough pixels to make yourself another one. A new quest system will teach the player how to farm, how to find trophies in dungeons and how to begin to build settlements... there will even be small 'outpost' settlements on some planets which will be populated by NPCs of all species and should be safe for trading etc.
The biggest change though is the removal of the multiple sectors that have so far been the setting for the game of Starbound, instead trading them for what seems to be just one area filled with planets and stars that you must work your way up to being able to land upon and three different 'progression' paths: farming, adventuring and building. There will also be three different seperate 'sectors' in the game, one for the survival-esque game, a PvP version of the game and a 'creative sector'.
In his post Tiy says that they are doing this to make the game less linear, but at the moment this gamer thinks that the new updates sound almost the opposite, taking away a lot of area from the game and forcing the player to do certain tasks before they can progress. Sure there is no time limit or deadline for completing these tasks, but I for one will miss the multiple sectors of galaxy. As always though, nothing can be fully and accurately summed up through words alone, so we shall wait and see how these proposed changes have an affect on the game.
Blog post is here.