Chucklefish have been beavering away behind the scenes working on Starbound for a while now, but it seems they've finally spotted the fabled version 1.0 somewhere over the horizon. There's still a lot of work to be done before they'll apply that label to the game, however, and they've outlined what's left to achieve in a new dev blog . It's all a bit complicated if you're not familiar with the game, but essentially, expect new missions, biomes, pets and the like in 1.0.
Chucklefish caution players about spoilers in the blog post, so if you'd rather remain blissfully unaware of the new biomes, missions and features in the full game, now's the point to exit this article and resume pretending to fill in that Excel document for work.
But yes, they've detailed the tech tree, the biomes you'll encounter as you progress through the procedurally generated universe, and the new missions you can take part in, including the rather ominous-sounding "tentacle mission". Also lots of fixes that won't mean anything unless you're knee-deep in Starbound already.
The devs are planning at least one more stable update "once the tech tree can be progressed through from start to finish", but after that they're going to be chipping away at that big to-do list. They're aiming to release version 1.0 later this year, but it could slip into 2015—if you want to try out the new features before then, you can always opt in to the less stable nightly builds of the game.
If you want more Starbound in the meantime, Phil collected this list of the top 10 Starbound mods .
