Originally posted by Me:

Since people are asking despite the fact that I haven't touched this game for years, I have reluctantly revisited this review to update purely because people are adding me to ask questions about it, particually about the mod bias on the official forums. Since posting this review i've moved on entirely from StarMade, im too employed to care about a dead game from over a decade ago.

I'm updating this one final time and washing my hands of this disaster of a game for good. Its been 7 years since I posted this review, its time to let sleeping dogs die. Further attempts to contact me about my experiences with StarMade will be ignored.

For those wondering. I was able to refund the game after 500 hours played because I told Steam that the trailer for this game violated Australian Law on deceptive advertising (the trailer had sounds and such not present in the actual game) and Steam agreed. Steam can still refund you even after 2 hours played.

Given the the last meaningful content update to this game was in 2018, Schine have gone on record admitting they are insolvent[i.imgur.com] and they have been forced to open source the game to accept unpaid contributions from the 9 remaining players because they can't afford developers, I don't anticipate I will need to revisit this review.

As I said later in my review, StarMade is not a "no mans sky" success story where a bad game eventually becomes good. It is bad, it has always been bad and it will stay bad.

Play Avorion instead.

StarMade was another early 2010s attempt at "Minecraft but in space" which was sold to consumers like myself as being a game with limitless possibilities for playing and the potential to grow into something that revolutionises the genre if we only gave Schema and Schine a chance. A chance was given and as we approach 10 years after its release on Steam and 15 years since development started, StarMade today has zero content, zero gameplay, remains an unoptimised, buggy and laggy mess while its developers are out of touch with the community have completely abandoned development of it.

Almost 15 years is a lot, a lot of beloved games both indie and AAA have been made in much less time. So what has 15 years of development given us? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Schine spent all these years adding half-complete "features" on a whim and filling the game with and yandere-dev tier code before moving on and never touching the feature again, building up years worth of cruft in the process making the game preform worse as time goes on.

StarMade remains in an early alpha, feature barren state and is plagued with game breaking bugs, exploits, easily methods of cheating and very poor optimisation in addition to a complete lack of gameplay. After 15 years, StarMade could barely be considered a tech-demo with how little there is to do in it. Filled with features that look and feel like were made on a whim, soup of the day style only to be thrown in haphazardly and never touched again.

Examples of the many bugs this game has include chunk errors capable of destroying hours, server wide crashes by landing on planets or attempting to mine them, poorly optimised weapon mechanics (missiles will often go out of their way to avoid their target), balance issues that affect every aspect of gameplay and the games extreme vulnerability to cheating with something as simple as clientside hacks with cheat engine!

For content, there is nothing. You have your character, some surface level resource gathering, basic voxel spaceship building tools and an empty, barren, content-less universe with nothing to explore or do. There are so few things you can find in this universe that you can count all the different, unique things in this "endless" universe with your fingers AND they are all effectively backdrops with no meaningful gameplay associated with them.

In addition the devs are just downright terrible and egotistical. A particular instance that caused me and a vast majority of what was left of the tiny (less than 20 player) community that remained was an incident that occurred after the release of the "Power 2.0" update, an update that nobody wanted, that wiped away years of player creations and effectively required all players to re-learn the mechanics of the tutorial-less shipbuilding system from scratch.

In the community discourse around this update, several veteran players, myself included, fell victim to a series of censorship campaigns and biased moderation conducted by StarMade's official forum and its moderators, including DukeofRealms, one of the games developers and effectively 2nd in command at Schine. It first became obvious when double standards of moderation were observed for players who were opposed and in flavor of the update and eventually the moderation staff adopted gestapo-like tactics to censor criticism including banning any user who expressed any criticism of the game and its devs.

I personally have been banned from the official forums, StarMade's steam forums and the official Reddit for the horrible crime of criticising StarMade and hurting the fragile ego of its developers.

This anti-criticism campaign was confirmed by (now former) Forum Adminstrator Crusade and Forum Moderator Thingie, who became fed up with how DukeOfRealms was ordering his staff to handle criticism that they walked out from their position in protest. Thingie made a quickly deleted expose which publicly testified that moderators were acting out of bias against veteran players alongside revealing other unethical behaviour that was going on behind the scenes, an archived version of the post in question prior to its hasty deletion by the remaining forum staff can be found here.[archive.fo]

Comr4de, one of these veterans and a former member of StarMade's Council of Intergalactic Representatives (a now defunct group of elected community representatives who had direct communication with Schine) had written up an excellent post that summarised how most of those who were censored was feeling about the game at the time, you can find said post here.[starmadedock.net]

In the years following the resulting exodus of player, development has basically stopped and Schine has since gone on record in their discord server admitting that they do not have the funds to continue content development.[i.imgur.com] The last meaningful content update released for StarMade was in 2018. So if you are someone who buys early access games in the hope that they eventually come good, stay away.

StarMade is not a "No Mans Sky" comeback story, its bad and it will stay bad forever.

This game had a lot of potential to be great, the concepts and ideas presented would have been revolutionary but ultimately this game has succumbed to scope creep, dev incompetence and Schine burning what little good will it had with its players.

We are no longer in the early 2010s and other games like StarMade that have more competent developers, larger communities and more content are out there and exist. I suggest you look into Avorion instead. Its a better version of StarMade. Buy it, not this junk game.

In short, I do not recommend this game to anyone, even for free.