Space Engineers

[intrinsical]

A couple of us bought Space Engineers during the Steam summer sale, so I figured a separate thread would be nice.

So far plays a little like Minecraft, except (A) its in space with full 360 degree rotation and inertia (if turned on) and (B) it uses a volumetric engine instead of blocks.

I recommend starting in creative mode as survival mode is brand new and has a very harsh learning curve. In general, its a 4 step process to build any ship or station:

1) You mine resources, either by hand drill or via a ship with drill heads
2) Bring the mined ores to be processed by a refinery. If your ship and refinery has a properly designed conveyor system, its as easy as docking with connectors. Otherwise, its a lot of manual carrying around of ores.
3) Assemble processed resources into components such as steel plates, computers, thruster components, etc...
4) (Only for survival mode) Take your assembled components and start build your next ship/station, wielding it together block by block. In creative mode, its just a matter of plonking blocks together, no need for components or wielding.

What's fun so far is being able to design your own space ships. So far, I am quite bad at it. All my designs have either broken apart because I accidentally removed a sole block connecting two parts of my ship together, or exploded because of thruster damage

 

[Jono]

I played it last weekend with a friend in survival mode. The start mode was with just a platform. As I wasn't hosting I started in a rescue ship and had fly to join up with my friend. We did a bit of mining before things got silly. There was much killing each other with mining tools, I tried to squish him with my ship and rammed something that exploded, destroying his medical bay. Once we both had ships there was more ramming.

In all that we did get an idea of how things work and next time we'll probably aim to do some proper mining and construction.

 

[publiusr]

I think I might have included Roche limit mining. Why bother breaking something up? Bag everything as gravity gradient does the work.

 

[intrinsical]

I really like that each week's update adds a whole bunch of new stuff that makes Space Engineers more and more interesting. In just 3 weeks since the Steam summer sales, they've added a conveyor system that automatically transfer resources and products, a faction system that allow players to fight in teams and this week, working wheels! I'm enjoying myself figuring out the best way to build a mobile driller.

 

[Jono]

Finally got a proper game going...after one reset. Our first game we went with realistic inventory and I think normal meteors. We started again because we couldn't carry enough and my ship got slaughtered by an impact and so did our platform/space station we were working on.

Second game we went with realisticx10 and no meteors. Much better for mining and we've used one of the ships to provide a gravity field to keep the ores from floating away. We just started on our platform before we stopped.

 

[intrinsical]

Public games are harsh, I have not been able to make it past the 10 minutes mark.

In my first attempt, my ship was blown up by an automated turret while exploring the interior of an asteroid. Second time, someone flew away with my ship while I was drilling for urgently needed uranium fuel. Third time, I caught someone grinding away at my ship. I managed to escape but he had already managed to grind out my assembler so I could not manufacture anything. So I followed the little bugger back to his base and rammed my entire ship into it at high speed. He got the better end of the deal as the remaining half of my ship was still quite valuable and all I did was take out a couple of his light armor blocks.