Studying the emergent properties of hot and dense nuclear matter is
one of the main goals of relativistic heavy-ion collision experiments.
At the highest energies a Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) phase arises with partonic 
degrees of freedom. Due to the extremely short life time of the QGP, only 
probes which are created during the collision can be used
to study its properties.

I will discuss recent developments at the STAR experiment for two of the most
important probes from soft and hard physics, namely elliptic flow and
jets. I will furthermore give an introduction to the Beam Energy Scan
program (BES) at RHIC, which is carried out to find signatures of a
QCD critical point and a first order phase transition in the QCD phase diagram. 
At the end I will give an outlook to future jet measurements and of BES phase II, 
which is anticipated for the years 2019-2020.