Starbound public beta starts today, new trailer offers four minutes of awesome

Today is International Starbound Day, or it will be once I've finished scribbling on every calendar in the world. Chucklefish's openworldcraftingsci-fisandbox (phew) game enters public beta this very day, though you'll need to pre-order the game to be allowed in. The team are trailing this momentous occasion with a new video, which shows four-and-a-half minutes of crafting, exploring, jetpacking, dungeoneering, snowball fights and general milling about. It's lovely stuff, and it's awaiting your peepers after the break.

Starbound should land on Steam later today, but if you're too impatient even for that it's still available for pre-order on the site. As we mentioned a month or so ago , the beta will come in three stages, with the first expected to be fairly buggy and changeable (so don't get too attached to your characters or universes).

Thanks, Kotaku .

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.