Starbound [Winter Update!]

Yeah, I just read that in the IRC Q&A thing.

I'm starting to wonder how taxing this game will be now for multiplayer.

From a design aspect, an "infinite" world would only tax the server (I assume by "for multiplayer" you mean for all players). It would only need to load/get data for areas the player is nearing, it wouldn't need to load and update the entire map constantly. I guess for a server it would only need to care about areas the players are in, so a large server might need to be maintained by a dedicated server, but otherwise I don't think it would be that big of a deal.

That's how an infinite map is possible in Minecraft as well, I believe.

As for the game itself...I'm not sure I like the new character models, but I would have to see them in effect to really determine that. Is the guy who was in charge of Terraria also in charge of Starbound? Redigit I think his name was. From what I understand a lot of the issues people had with Terraria in terms of multiplayer were due to him not supporting modding(like custom server software), but also not actually fixing exploits within the default server software. It created a rift in the community that really hurt the game in the long run. If he's still in charge, I fear that the same might happen here, even if the game is better in every way.