: Because Steam automatically updates games, players often manually zip their "Steamapps" folder to preserve a specific version. This is crucial if a new update breaks a complex mod list.
: By early 2020, the game was highly stable. Most of the game-breaking bugs from the early beta years had been ironed out.
By March 2020, Starbound had been out of early access for nearly four years. This particular build represents the game in its late-stage development lifecycle. At this point, the core "1.4 Bounty Hunter" update (released in mid-2019) was the primary content set.
: You can typically extract the contents and run starbound.exe from the win64 or win32 folder without a formal installation.
: 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.
The existence of a .rar file for a specific date usually points to a few specific intentions within the gaming community: