The sci-fi sandbox adventure Starbound will be out later this month

It's been a little over three years since the side-scrolling “extraterrestrial sandbox adventure game” Starbound first went up for preorder. The game has come a long way since, through multiple major updates, mod support, and, a couple of months ago, news that it's finally (almost) ready to leave Early Access. Today came the next big step: The announcement of an official launch date of July 22. 

“After ~5 years, the game we set out to make finally exists, and to say that it all feels a bit surreal would be a massive understatement!” developer Chucklefish wrote. “While Starbound will be finished in two weeks, this isn’t the end. We will continue to update and support Starbound for as long as we can. We’ve got loads of cool ideas we couldn’t fit into 1.0 but hope to put into future updates.” 

Starbound begins with players lost in space on a damaged ship, which leaves them forced to travel to the alien planet below in search of the supplies needed to fix it. Get that done, and the procedurally-generated universe is yours to explore. It offers seven playable races, drop-in/drop-out online co-op play, randomly generated dungeons and monsters, crafting, PvP, and all kinds of other stuff that makes the elongated development cycle a little easier to understand. It also has pleasingly light system requirements: 

Minimum:

OS: Windows XP or later
Processor: Core 2 Duo
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: 256 MB graphics memory and directx 9.0c compatible gpu
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 3 GB available space

Recommended:

OS: Windows XP or later
Processor: Core i3
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: Discrete GPU capable of directx 9.0c
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 4 GB available space   

You can find out more about the game at playstarbound.com.