Back-up all your items from starbound with starcheat. Its easy and doesnt require much knowhow. 1. Acquire Starcheat. 2. Open Starcheat and your character. 3. Select the item, open it inside the program. 4. Click export item and then type in a name, you can do it as the item was or do something else. 5. When the new update is released and some items have been altered, you can now import them again through starcheat. After starcheat has been made compatible with the newest stable release ofcourse. Times will vary until this is done, at best its 1-3 weeks. If you have errors of the unknown when trying any of the above steps, feel free to send me a private message and I will try my best to get you settled.
Will the there be a universe wipe with this next update? It seems like previous smaller updates have forced universe wipes.
There won't be any universe wipes, unless Chucklefish somehow broke something and it's absolutely required. They've said nothing about a universe wipe so far and have said previously that they're not planning for any future universe wipes.
Unless they changed the way player files are structured, they should remain. I don't know of any major changes they've made to characters and they haven't said anything about needing to create a new character, so they should be fine.
This is for those who wish to use it a precautionary step. Since last time they revised guns, stuff got re-generated and a lot of things were lost.