At the time of writing, StarMade's playerbase has been in single digits most of the days, and even on the busiest days the number of concurrent players hasn't breched 20 in years.

Taking that into account one would benefit from understanding, that whoever remained of the original dev team and the community devs helping out, might treat the game more as a pet project that was once loved by thousands, than a typical money-bringing video game venture.

Parts of the game are closer to a technical test site that a fully fledged product because of this, and this is also a reason why the launcher situation looks like it does.
Fear not, we are still here, and we are ready to help.

Solutions below.

Currently, when pressing the green "PLAY" button in Steam, on StarMade page, we're presented with 3 options:


(at the time of writing none of these work right of the bat, but bear with us)

1. Play StarMade - Seems the most straightforward, configured to be launching the file at
also known as the V2 launcher.

2. Play with old launcher (Java) - launching the file at
known as the V1 launcher.
This requires you to have Java Runtime Environment 1.6.0 installed. We wont be doing that.

3. Play beta launcher (v3) - This is what seems to be a community-developed launcher for StarMade. It is NOT bundled with the game when you install it via Steam.

The V3 launcher is open source, and can be found at:
https://github.com/StarMade-Community/StarMade-Launcher

There was also a fork of this, found here:
https://github.com/StarMade-Community/New-StarMade-Launcher
But the repo was archived and discontinued on Apr 26, 2025.

After some changes on May 21 2025, both launcher files bundled with StarMade were renamed:

starmade-launcher.exe -> starmade-launcher_oldV2.exe
StarMade-starter.exe -> StarMade-starter_oldV1.exe

but entries for Steam "PLAY" button weren't changed.

In effect none of the three options presented after clicking "PLAY" launch anything.


This is still occurring as of the date of writing (June 28 2025).

For the bundled launchers, the situation is quite simple.

You have to reverse the mentioned name changes that broke them.
Remove the _oldV1 and _oldV2 parts from the names of the executables,
and they should be found by the PLAY button actions.







Now, when we trigger the PLAY -> Play StarMade we get the V2 launcher properly starting:

DISCLAIMER:
Be aware, that downloading binaries from external sources might expose your system to binary infections. That is a risk you take every time when downloading executable files from the Internet.
Even though we ourselves might trust the developers of this launcher to not embed any malware in it,
and we might trust our system and security software to defeat such attempts,
the responsibility to protect YOUR system is entirely your own.

The V3 launcher is properly connected to the StarMade release news and is displaying updates as recent as 2025-05-10 in the launcher window.
It can also install and run different versions of StarMade, and includes 2 Java Runtime Environments to support them.

This launcher is under active development, having code changes as recent as May 10, 2025.

The repository can be viewed here:
https://github.com/StarMade-Community/StarMade-Launcher/

And the list of releases is available here:
https://github.com/StarMade-Community/StarMade-Launcher/releases

At the time of writing, the latest release is v3.3.9, here:
https://github.com/StarMade-Community/StarMade-Launcher/releases/tag/v3.3.9

The release page should look like this:

In here, you can find files for all supported systems. In case your system is Windows, you can download the file:
https://github.com/StarMade-Community/StarMade-Launcher/releases/download/v3.3.9/StarMade-Launcher-Windows.zip

Then unpack it and place all the files from within the zip file into the directory where the Steam's `Play` button looks for it.

In our case that is in:

Once you do that, the contents of the directory should look like:


Now, pressing the Steam's "PLAY" button and selecting the Play beta launcher (v3) will show you the newest launcher window:


As you can see, this window has the "Update" button, and upon clicking it, the chosen version of StarMade will be installed by default within the V3 launcher sub-directory. The target directory can be configured by clicking "Installation Settings" in the launcher.

You can absolutely set that directory to the same directory the Launcher V1 and V2 use as their main StarMade directory.

Be aware, this is not the main Steam directory of the game
but a subdirectory with exactly the same name:

Once you set that up as the "Installation Directory" for Launcher V3, it will be launching exactly the same copy of StarMade as the Launcher V2, which is probably the most reasonable usecase for most readers.

We'd like to thank Steam user https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/id/globeadue
for inspiring this guide with the analysis of the core issues with file renames that occured on May 21st 2025, elaborated on in this discussions thread: https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/app/244770/discussions/0/594026463740589817/


Even though there are some technical challenges when playing StarMade, and the game doesn't enjoy much of activity, there are still ways to play it and a few dedicated servers with people who didn't give up on this amazing building game, regardless of the difficulties it faces.

We hope this guide helped you, dear reader, to get StarMade to work for you too,
just as it does for us.

See you in the pixel skies o7