Starbound was released to kickstarters about a month after I lost my Grandfather.

I did 3 things for 6 months after he died. I took care of my kids the best I could, I cried when they went to bed, and I played Starbound.

The opening music still haunts me. I still remember how unique and crazy this game was, and even though most of that eventually got removed, I can go back to old screenshots and invoke a sense of memory, of where I was emotionally while grieving when I took them.

Yeah, Starbound induced a few metric tons of negative energy in a lot of folk's lives. Starbound is a "toxic" game by its own developer's description, because without the community, the people who loved it and wanted to see it succeed, there never would have been a place for any of the hate.

I used to do frequent "Starbound Adventures" series in the forums where I'd detail all the updates. I actually enjoyed doing that in spite of how awful Chucklefish and the Starbound community were behaving toward each other. I got super mad, then decided one day to just dive in and play. It was fun.

Then nothing was updated for a long time, and as more nightly builds got pushed, I started seeing them remove content. This is why I associate Starbound with Trees.

My biggest distraction from tragedy came in the form of Starbound's trees. It became an obsession, something to do feverishly while taking breaks from the swollen eyes and snot. I collected almost 600 unique tree seeds and made an entire planet from top to bottom a farm of them. I'm not sure how many could actually be generated, but they were all different, and it felt like I was playing this epic-level Harvest Moon as I farmed trees and food. I can never rate this game down because the collecting and planet-hopping was some of the biggest fun I'd ever had in a videogame, period.

Then they got rid of the trees. The variety was slashed into fragments, and most of them became these dreadful brown/pastel mixes. All of the color and imagination disappeaered. They became background objects, the junk you ignore while you play any random SHMUP. The farming sense faded instantly, and the wind was knocked out of me. The one thing I was still enjoying in this game, gone.

I haven't played more than 10 minutes since the last time they made the experimental build a seperate library option. I got on, made a character, warped around, I guess they decided the trees were "axed". I don't know if it was a performance decision, but I can vouch that at the time I had my huge tree farm, I had zero lag with around 2000 trees on a single planet, around 500-600 variations among them, on an old 2012 system:

Radeon HD 6970 2GB graphics card
Intel Core i5-3570k
8 gigs of ram, no SSD.
144hz Asus 27" 1080p.

No lag ever, the game just ran beautifully, and it looked beautiful too. Now its just drab and unappealing to me. I'm trying to make sense of why all the color was taken out, all of that art, what a waste.