End-game content for a lot of games is usually some tossed-together after-thought, such as a New Game+ with some difficult enemies and some other non-noteworthy content. However, for Starbound, developer and publisher Chucklefish have taken a very different route to their end-game content, opening up a whole new world of exploration and content with their 1.2 Vault update.

As detailed over on the Steam community page, the changelog reveals that the Ancient Vaults are now available for discovery, and you can dive deep into the new procedural dungeons that house gateways to ancient procedurally placed bosses.

The post points out that you can only access these Ancient Vaults after you beat the main storyline, and then after that you can visit the mysterious trade on the Outpost to get the quest to enter into the gateway that leads to the Ancient places.

The more exciting bit of news, however, is that they have world terraformers in the game now. These are acquired from beating the Ancient Vault dungeons. You can use the terraformers to expand a planet’s biome or completely change the planet’s biome.

There’s also another smaller form of the world terraformers in the world of microformers, which can also alter the world through single-use actions.

They’ve also added the ability to upgrade the stats on old weapons by using an anvil acquired from an Ancient Vault in order to give your old weapons a nice coat of paint.

Monsters have also been updated with elemental damage and resistance, so not every monster can be killed with the same weapon. This should vastly add some replayability and gameplay diversity to the mix.

They spruced up the process of modding, making the API more modder-friendly by allowing modders to edit and configure more aspects of Starbound, along with fixing some performance and loading issues with the game.

The game is available right now, and it’s fully graduated from Early Access, so you don’t have to worry about whether or not you should buy the game because you don’t like throwing money into the void due to a game being in Early Access. For more info don’t hesitate to visit the official website.

(Main image courtesy of OriginalNickName)