Starbound patch notes and help

Many of us have been consumed with Starbound lately. The game is quite complex. A few threads on the forum offer help to newcomers of the game:

Hi guys, so last night we pushed the major balance update. We’d tested it for hours and at the last minute a bug crept in that broke crafted weapon damage, making them crazy overpowered.
Hence the name of this version.
We’ve decided NOT to wipe characters or worlds. This means if you already have overpowered items or planets they will remain that way. We’d recommend starting a new character to assist with beta testing.
That’s been fixed. It was an interesting bug. The old leveling system used a “level” specified in each swords configuration file. The new system no longer uses “level”, instead each sword is hand balanced.  The bug that crept in at the last moment reenabled “level”. Given that they are now unused, levels weren’t changed from their previous values that went all the way up to level 100, and now that the game is leveled up to 10, they were massively too powerful. 

Also.. 

- Uranium, plutonium and solarium now work as fuels
- You can now REALLY craft a grappling hook
- Boss balance has been tightened even more
- Platinum armor is now unlocked on tier 5
- You can now ‘recapture’ pets
- some more fixes 

More coming ASAP! It’ll take us a little while to balance everything just right, so please hang tight.

Community Guides Starbound Master Thread

http://community.playstarbound.com/index.php?threads/starbound-guides-master-thread.43184/

So what exactly happened with this patch? The description is a long one so rather than cut and paste here is a FULL explanation of the damage changes:

http://playstarbound.com/coming-in-a-few-days-sorry-for-the-delay/