what year does starbound take place in?

Completely forgot about the gifts from the Cultivator. This would explain their rapid evolution in technology.

 

Technology is limited to the physically possible and is constrained by laws such as conservation of energy. These technologies would require the energy equivalent of entire stars or more in a package you can hold in your hand. There's no amount of scientific knowledge you can attain that will allow you to do that. It's magic.

Also mechanical computers are a lot older than 500 years. Modern computers are incredibly powerful by comparison but the logic behind them would be comprehensible to a person from the distant past.

 

Again, no amount of knowledge will allow us to create technology that breaks fundamental physical laws like conservation of energy. It's fantasy.

 

Telluric Interchanger. Theoretical/slightly improbable to us, but possible in starbound's universe.

 

I like how this went from "What year is Starbound in?" to "What are the fundamental laws of physics?"

 

It's possible that something might be discovered that upends our understanding of physics to that extent, but it's really, really unlikely. Any new discovery that does replace it would also need to explain how, for instance, nuclear physics works despite being based on fundamentally flawed premises, so it's not a get out of jail free card, either. Just as relativity is a refinement of Newtonian physics, any new explanation will be a refinement, not a total replacement, of our existing theories.

And to be clear I'm not saying Starbound should be a physics simulator. I like the magic just fine. I just don't think it's useful to speculate about what year it takes place in because it's clearly not rooted in reality. Any answer you can give will ultimately be arbitrary.

 

Basically it is just a game. Not all parts of the game must be based on logic, although a little logic is needed in a game.

 

Well, one thing I know for sure, it is past 10417-10419 year. The Warning Poster https://starbounder.org/Warning_Poster has that number and this is the only number that looks like a year to me. Considering how people from 1980s saw the future in 2010s with flying cars, robots and teleportation devices it's safe to say this number seems quite real. Our technologies develop fast, but not fast enough. I'm pretty sure we in 2077 will be laughing at what we can see in Cyberpunk 2077 now. Too bad there is no info anywhere about this topic and the number 10417 might either be one of those "abstract art pieces" Hylotls make (the Poster is usually found in Hylotl cities, but I remember finding it in Novakid villages too, so I don't stick to that theory much) or it might mean basically anything else: "10417 - the amount of people injured from a recent accident, be careful!" or something like that.

 

the warning poster sprite is too vague to really be a string of numbers, those large symbols likely are hylotl characters for the word "warning" anyways. Now, I don't think you're that far off in how far in the future SB is set. If one asks me, it's at least a thousand years into the future, especially since the apparent failed human colony on aurania had been there for at least a thousand years in wargroove's lore, wargroove being part of a shared universe with SB.