Telling The Legend of Zelda In Starbound

There’s a lot of Link hype coming in 2016. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD will make its Nintendo Wii U debut on March 4, 2016. At the 2016 Winter Wonder Festival, new a Zelda Nendoroid and two new Link figures were announced. A lot of good things are coming, so it might be nice to prepare by adding a little bit of Hyrule to another game. Since talking about SomeRandomPerson’s Smash Characters Costumes mod, an assortment of other mods have come together. Combine them, and you can enjoy a little bit of Hyrule in space.

First, let’s start with a race! There are no Hylians, Kokiris, Zoras, Gerudo, or Gorons, yet, but you can be a Deku! Admas17’s in-progress mod is off to a good start. You get a Deku Tree S.A.I.L. as your virtual assistant, unique codex entries and a starter quest, a Deku Stick weapon, and some unique sounds. Its most recent update, back in December, added unique hairstyles to the race. Admas17 has also plans for Deku-specific equipment, towns, dungeons, ships, and maybe a way for the characters to shoot deku nuts.

Once you have a familiar race in Starbound, then it’s time to get properly equipped. L3W has created a Hylian Weapons of Legends pack. This one has plenty of weapons and armor, some special accessories with additional abilities, unique crafting stations for these items, and even a custom interface for the Hylian Station and Phantom Hourglass. Characters will even use custom dialogue to refer to the crafting station. There are over 40 items, it’s constantly being rebalanced, and the items in this mod will work with your Starbound universe even if you aren’t going for a theme.

Music is a major part of both The Legend of Zelda and Starbound experience. Both games allow you to play instruments, after all. If you happen to grab Lili’s Amazing Songpack, you get a pack of over 400 .ABC song files. About 250 of them are from video games, and quite a few from The Legend of Zelda. You can hop on an ocarina in Starbound and play, “Song of Storms.”

There’s one more mod I have to mention, even though it hasn’t been updated since August 2015. It’s the Tatl Tael Cursor by L3W, who also made the weapons mod mentioned earlier. It includes tons of Legend of Zelda fairy cursors for Starbound. (There are some general Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy cursors too.) Seeing a Navi, Tatl, or Tael style fairy hovering around your avatar while you’re clicking to direct actions is amazing.

To install any (or all) of these Starbound mods, open explorer, and find Steam\steamapps\common\Starbound\giraffe_storage\mods. Drag and drop the mod files into the mods folder and you’ll be all set. Remember, for the custom race, you’ll also need to grab a Race Extender mod like Another Character Creation Menu, so it’ll show up in-game.

Starbound is immediately available via Early Access for PCs.