: Starbound is known for being DRM-free. Simply zipping the folder allows the game to be moved and played on other machines without needing the Steam client active, which is a common practice for personal backups.

: You can typically extract the contents and run starbound.exe from the win64 or win32 folder without a formal installation.

: By early 2020, the game was highly stable. Most of the game-breaking bugs from the early beta years had been ironed out.