Video Game / Frackin' Universe

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Frackin' Universe is a massive overhaul mod for StarBound created by Sayter. It boasts new armors, new weapons, new mechanics, new biomes, new dungeons, new quests, new crew, new mech parts, new vehicles, automation. Essentially, more of everything plus more.

And science. Lots of science.

Get the mod here or on workshop

Frackin' Universe provides examples of the following tropes:

• Abandoned Laboratory: Frackin includes these too, and steps them up in its usual fashion.
  • Cyberspheres are implied to be an entire planet based on this.
• Abnormal Ammo: And How! Frackin guns will oftentimes do all sorts of strange things. There's guns that shoot boomerangs, and even a gun that shoot drones that shoot things. Not to mention there's guns that shoot rock balls that explode into liquid metal, and a gun that shoot projectiles that split apart, go back to the shooter a ways before shooting back in the opposite direction and seek the nearest enemy. Just to give you a general idea.
• After the End: Wasteland planets, which house the remains of once great civilizations.
  • Tabula Rasa worlds are oddly flat, pastoral worlds with an abundance of fruit trees, no settlements, and no hostile life whatsoever on the surface. The descriptions suggest that something caused this, but the specifics are unknown.
• Abusive Precursors: A species explicitly called Precursors exists in the lore. They created the Florans as we know them, and are implied to be the ones who performed a Colony Drop on the Peglaci that killed 3 billion people. They are also the culprits behind the Atropus and Proto World planets. What's interesting is that the Precursors themselves were subject to the same trope, as indicated by the events on Delta Freya II.
  • Precursors can actually still be found in some rarely spawning dungeons. Said Precursors will attack you on sight.
  • One Precursor codex details instructions how to eat a Floran. Alive.
• Alien Geometries: It's not uncommon to encounter Unknown worlds whose undergrounds can lead to entire surface biomes.
• Arcadia: Eden worlds, which other than roaming bandits are very peaceful worlds.
• Artistic License – Nuclear Physics: Neptunium, thorium, uranium and plutonium are all depicted as brightly colored crystals instead of the grey metals they are in real life. This aspect is milder than most because while said metals are all grey, glass treated with them does glow brightly under a blacklight. There are also several fictional radioactive substances like irradium, ultronium and solarium with the same brightly colored crystalline appearance. While the solid versions of these are also safe to handle, liquid irradium is not, as touching it will quickly kill you without protection.
• Awesome, but Impractical: A lot of Armors are this due to Crippling Overspecialization; most can only fit a certain playstyle and/or a certain biome.
  • There's also generators for powering equipment, especially late tier generators. They look awesome but require a lot of materials to make them. And even they also require fuel constantly and you need big, space consuming batteries to store the energy when they're not running. In fact they only really become practical if you automate them using Item Transfer Devices.
  • Subverted with most of the weapons, most of which end up being practical as well as awesome.
• Bee Afraid: Beehive biomes routinely feature hostile sparrow-sized bees... and eagle-sized ones, which spawn swarms of the smaller ones.
• BFG: Many of the later guns introduced in this mod are this, with special shout-out going to the Hailstrike, which is basically a laser minigun. Some of them can also inflict a reduced speed debuff on the player due to their large size.
  • And now the Hailstrike has been dethroned by the Atom Smasher, an oversized gun that's two-thirds bigger than the player and when fully upgraded fires a beam capable of melting through both enemies and scenery.
• Big Boo's Haunt: The Haunted Forest and Haunted Graveyard subbiomes.
• Blackout Basement: Lightless planets, which as their name suggests are completely lightless, and inflict you with "Unbreachable Darkness" debuff upon landing. This debuff dramatically cuts down on vision, even if torches or other light sources are used.
• Bloody Bowels of Hell: Think the flesh and heck biomes of the main game are disturbing? Wait until you encounter Atropus worlds.
• Boring, but Practical: Certain items can become this; in particular, armor sets that don't suffer from Crippling Overspecialization can become this. One great example is Xithricite Armor: offers very little in the form of bonuses, but it can protect you from the atmospheric effects of Aether Worlds, Radioactive worlds, Gas Planets (both gasses and pressure), Atropus worlds, and a large majority of the things found in The Frozen Wastes. The rest can be covered by an EPP with the Immunity Field upgrade.
  • Carbon Shortswords: They swing extremely fast and cause bleeding, yet they offer no other effects.
• Bubblegloop Swamp: Bog planets join the swamp subbiome from the vanilla game as the representatives of this trope.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • A lot of Frackin' content is definitely of a darker tone than standard Starbound. Atropus worlds are a fine example of this, but far from the only one.
  • The Delta Freya II mission compared to the vanilla main quest is a fine example of this.
  • Furthermore, one of the recent updates changes the graduation speech into how the Protectorate are already aware of the Ruin's presence.
• Death Mountain: Mountainous planets, which are rich with an ore called zerchesium.
• Death World: Just like regular Starbound there are worlds that can kill you without the proper equipment. Frackin' Universe however cranks this up.
  • Old hazards (freezing, heat, radiation) are now separated into tiers. Vanilla Enviro-Protection Packs won't necessarily protect you from the deadlier variants of these worlds.
  • Newcomers include Atropus worlds which cause insanity which whittles your armor down to nothing and often include toxic pus, Sulfuric worlds with acid that can't be protected against via normal poison protection, Aether worlds which do cosmic damage to you (and their seas which blind you when touched), And Gas planets which can kill you with decompression very quickly without suit protections.
  • Even places that used to be safe in vanilla can kill you now (albeit more slowly), such as jungle or desert worlds with their heat.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The ending to Delta Freya II
• The Dog Bites Back: The Precursors genetically engineered the Floran into a Slave Race that closely resembled their current state for use as servants. Eventually, their trademark Blood Knight tendencies emerged, prompting an uprising that ended with them seizing control of several Precursor ships and forced the Precusors to abandon the system they were in.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Kevin gets one of the Hey, it's That Character variety: You can spot him to the right of your ship at the end of the vanilla intro mission.
• Eerie Arctic Research Station: The mission Delta Freya II has you investigate an abandoned research station on the eponymous ice planet. The entire station is filled with creepy extra-dimensional creatures and you have to fight a Shoggoth at the end.
• Eldritch Location: A lot of Frackin'-added worlds run on this. In particular, Atropus worlds.
• Forced Tutorial: While not exactly "forced" in the sense that you can ignore it, earlier versions would bombard you with tutorial missions fairly quickly that cannot be abandoned, forcing you to build a lot of stuff you might not necessarily want to build in order to get rid of them from your quest menu. Later versions replaced this with a special quest interface that allows you to activate and cancel these quests at your leisure (thus keeping your quest menu free). It also establishes that you're getting these quests from the people at the Science Outpost, either as requests or as homework to prove your ability.
• Fungus Humongous: The Fungal planet, which sports some impressively huge shrooms.
• Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke: You can breed dozens of new plants (as well as the vanilla ones) in your Gene Lab, which often requires extracting genetic materials from certain seeds and adding them to others, as well as other substances depending on the recipe.
• Hailfire Peaks: A literal example appears in the form of the Frozen Volcanic biome.
• Hated by All: Kevin the Mantizi, one of the researchers at the Science Outpost, who spends most of his time pulling cruel and unpleasant pranks on his coworkers. Nobody likes him. Unfortunately, all attempts to get rid of him so far have either failed or made things worse.
• Infinity -1 Sword: Xithricite Armor. It protects you from half of the new effects introduced by Frackin Universe. The rest can be covered by Enviro-Protection Packs and augments for said packs.
• Infinity +1 Sword: Shoggoth Armor. It protects you from pretty much everything the mod can throw at you. But in order to get it requires some very rare materials. Including the remains of an elder spawn that's stronger than Starbound's final boss.
• Jungle Japes: Joining the jungle biome in the original game is the Rainforest planet.
• Level in the Clouds: The Clouds subbiome. There's also the Cloud Forest, which is this trope combined with a forest.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: Due to the massive features of the game, starting the game up could take upwards of 5 minutes of drive read.
• Mad Scientist: In order to conduct metaphysical research, you need Madness, indicating this trope is in play.
• Magikarp Power: Because all weapons can be upgraded, even tier one weapons can be viable for the endgame. That said, there are some particularly powerful weapons that start off as very weak.
  • The wax sword is explicitly characterized as a Joke Weapon by the wiki and has the stats to prove it, with one of the lowest damage outputs in the game. However, it can be upgraded to the appropriately named God Cleaver, which is one of the strongest swords in the game.
  • The core rifle is a primitive energy weapon with low damage output; its only benefit is that it does not use ammo or energy, instead being limited by the weapon overheating. It can be upgraded to one of the strongest rifles in the game, firing a two-round burst of explosive projectiles that fragment and inflict a nasty Damage Over Time debuff. And it still does not use ammo or energy.
• The Lost Woods: Haunted Forests.
• Not the Fall That Kills You…: This is bound to happen, especially on Super Dense planets which have increased gravity.
• Obvious Rule Patch: Several of them.
  • Strange Seas could originally spawn multiple oceans composed of any fluid, but they were patched so that elder fluid/essentia obscura oceans could no longer spawn as this was intended to be a rare resource.
  • Strange Seas were further patched to only have oceans of alien juice/plasmic fluid after people exploited them for infinite fuel and/or infinite resources via centrifuging or extracting various liquids, mixing liquids and then processing the end products of said mixing.
  • Liquid physics were patched so the Martinus Transformation no longer worked after people exploited it to get infinite amounts of otherwise rare liquids.
• Overheating: The core rifle and Kirhosi Blaster do not use energy or ammunition. Instead, they will overheat and require some time to cool down before they can be fired again.
• Perpetual Beta: The mod is continually in development. Things are added and cut on an almost daily basis.
• Pokémon Speak: Greg.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Delta Freya II mission is one big shoutout to H. P. Lovecraft fans.
  • Atropus worlds are a shoutout to Forgotten Realms.
  • Certain weapons and items seem to be shoutouts to certain Mods from other franchises. Namely the F4 energy rifle (to Energy Visuals Enhanced's version of the laser rcw), micro-rocket launcher (Lamprey Mini Missile Launcher by Ruadhan2300), and the CT-4 Mining Cannon (CROSS PlasRail by Niero)
  • Greg? Greeeeeg!
• Solid Clouds: The cloud blocks in the Cloud subbiome are treated just the same as any other block in the game.
• Strolling on Jupiter: Unlike in base game Starbound, you can visit gas giant planets personally. Also unlike most examples of the trope:
  • Gas giants do not have a truly solid surface. Instead, the gas giant biome consists of disjointed islands of Solid Clouds submerged in ocean-like layers of various precious gases.
  • The insane pressures and conditions inside gas giants are a genuine threat. All giants have the "Extreme Pressure" hazard, which requires lategame armor to resist at bare minimum, and individual giants may be extremely cold or hot. Then there's the aforementioned layers of precious gases, which are typically poisonous. All of this is balanced by the fact gas giants are full of rare ores and have no monsters other than the occasional easily-avoidable Living Gasbag.
• Take That!: There's a quite a few references bashing My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and its fandom.
• The Thing That Would Not Leave: A book found at the Science Outpost reveals that the other scientists have tried to get Kevin to leave (with increasingly hostile and lethal methods), to no avail. Even killing him doesn't work, as he's set up countermeasures for it.
• Underground Monkey: Variations of Vanilla enemies with different behaviors, stats, and attacks show up everywhere. Some examples include Glarps^note Red Gleaps which regenerate health and leave behind healing zones when killed, Knifetops^note Armed Poptops which throw their knives at you, and Rot Anglures^note Green Anglures which have their glow-critter attack replaced with poison gas.
• Viewer Name Confusion: The name of the mod is Frackin' Universe, not Fracking Universe or Frackin Universe.
• Villain Respect: Upon completing Kevin's questline, he begrudgingly admits that you're not as stupid as he thought.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The Delta Freya II mission is a Whole-Plot Reference to At the Mountains of Madness.
• Womb Level: The Atropus worlds, moreso if you go underground.