How does one return to your spaceship in starbound, without dying?
How to return to your ship in Starbound
starbound
Related Solutions
On the Starbound forums there are several complaints about the lack of this very feature. See a couple here and here (note the forums seem under a lot of stress at this time so you may have to reload a couple times).
It appears that as of this time in Beta Stage 1 - Progenitor on 12/7/13 there is no pause feature, but I was not able to find an official developer response to this.
UPDATE (5/11/14): It appears that this has still not been implemented in the game, but I looked for a work-around when a comment was made. This link led me to a suggestion that you always keep a chair around. Apparently you do not get hungry while you are sitting (or apparently sleeping) so you can wall yourself in and just take a seat. I put this to the test and it seems to work.
I took this picture before going to lunch and ate up to full at 12:29PM (Sorry if that's not readable). I made lunch for myself and ate and came back to see if my little Stitch was still doing alright. I clicked the Alt key to see how he was doing at 1:05pm and:
Still full. I left him a fire so as not to freeze to death, but with this chair and a few blocks I feel this could suffice for a pause-like feature. You might also consider carrying a bed with you so you can not only not starve, but also heal.
The answer, unfortunately, is that there might not be anything you can do. Starbound is in early beta, so right now, it is going to have lots of bugs and is rather likely to crash.
What you can do is go to Starbound's forums to submit a bug report. Hopefully, the devs will address whatever is causing your problem soon.
Best Answer
In the top-right of your screen, there is a button to teleport back to the ship. It's right above the Quests button.
Note that it will only be available while on the surface of the planet, outdoors. Going underground will make it vanish, like this:
Note that the definition of "underground" is a bit crude. All you need to have teleporting available is that:
This means that, for example, in the following image, I am able to teleport:
Even though I'm underground, with ceilings and background everywhere, because I'm not too far down, and because I've punched out the one square of background where my head is, teleporting is possible.
Lastly, while you are onboard your ship, the same button will change to allow you to teleport back down to the surface at any time, without having to actually walk over to the teleporter. It's not much, but it's handy.
1.0 and later
If you are playing on the "casual" difficulty, you can use the button to beam up to your ship anytime, except when you are in dungeons. This means even on Outpost, where on older versions you were obligated to use the teleporters to get back to your ship. If you're playing on the "survival" or higher difficulties, the functionality is the same as described earlier.