A post to the Starbound website fill us in on "the future of Chucklefish and Starbound." They talk about how progression will change in the final version of Starbound, going into detail about other plans, including imminent mod support, saying: "We’ve taken steps towards better mod support recently with the implementation of a .pak file system. Essentially condensing an entire mod into a single file. We’re not far away from also implementing a system for servers to share these pak files with clients on connect. This will allow mod authors and server admins to entirely overhaul the vanilla starbound experience for the players on their server." They also lay out general plans for their next project:

We’re going to be producing a second game along side Starbound, with an entirely new development team. We’ll be looking into hiring UK developers for this project shortly (CVs to business@chucklefish.org if you’re interested!) This won’t slow down the production of Starbound at all, worry not, I will be assisting in the design but we’ll be working with entirely new developers. At the moment we’re still in the stage where we’re kicking around ideas, one that keeps popping up is a top down, open world, multiplayer pirate game.