Space Engineers
- Thread starter Staxed
- Start date
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The bf gifted me this a week or so ago since a few folks we know are playing. The lack of a dedicated server and the fact that when it arrives it'll be Windows-bound has me kind of leery of getting in too deep. That and my poor toaster isn't particularly happy with even the "Normal" graphics settings.
Has potential. Hoping for good execution on the multiplayer stuff, eventually. =)
Has potential. Hoping for good execution on the multiplayer stuff, eventually. =)
Probably one of the best descriptions is "minecraft in space". Misses a redstone like system, but i heared they working on computers.
I've played it for about 30 hours. It has promise, but it has a series of problems as well.
The Good
The Good
- Numerous starting conditions to suit your style - fully equipped space station with small fleet or crashed ship and some in between
- Good configuration settings - adjustable speed and efficiency of refineries/crafters and welding/grinding speeds
- Crafting system - order components to be crafted like Applied Energistics, hold left-click on block scaffold with components in inventory to build blocks
- Realistic physics and gravity - everything needs specific newtons of force to move based on their mass, gravity realistically manipulates objects. At the beginning you must park your ship near asteroids and use its gravity field to prevent the ore you mine from floating away
- All blocks can be coloured
- Lighting system - fall-off, intensity, blinking, coloured light; blocks appear to be a different colour under coloured light; yellow blocks appear to be red under purple light
- Survival progression - good pacing, mining and welding is tedious with the astronaut, but can build larger and larger mining and welding ships
- Refinery system - raw ore is not refined 1:1 into ingots and different ores have different conversion rates; 100kg of iron ore yields 70kg of iron ingots, but 100kg of gold ore only yields 1k gold ingots. Refinery is also very slow even with the increased speed configuration; encourages intelligent resource management
- Flame damage - flames from thrusters damage blocks; encourages intelligent ship and landing configurations
- Drilling compensation - mining with a ship causes it to violently wobble; need more thrusters to compensate and stabilize the ship
- Creative features - instant placing and deletion of all blocks, click and drag to place several blocks on a line or plane, copy+paste functionality
- Space combat - light and heavy armour, sloped armour, layering armour realistically reinforces the top layer, Gatling turrets, missile launchers, warheads
- Simple redstone-like system with timers, sensors and pistons
- PvP - apparently faction warfare servers, never tried it though
- PvE - randomly spawned NPC ships that can be captured for parts or personal use
- Unlike Minecraft, solar panels are "balanced" - very resource intensive, energy given is based on angle to the sun and energy production is dwarfed by the reactors; 834 optimal solar panels needed to meet output of a large reactor, solar panels are large and thus space requirements limits availability
- Buggy and poorly optimized - early-access game
- Too simplistic survival systems - only basic health and energy
- Tedious astronaut energy - suit requires frequent recharges, but the power it needs is nothing compared to what you produce so it is a meaningless hassle
- Energy is never a problem because uranium is abundant and used slowly; two poorly defended NPC ships have salvageable solar arrays
- No automated welding/salvaging
- Mining is useless compared to salvaging NPC ships - intercepting and salvaging a ship takes much less time than mining, refining and assembling components; most NPC ships also have ore in cargo; undermines resource management from refineries
- Respawn exploit - player can choose to respawn in several pre-built ships, so you can kill yourself repeatedly to spawn new ships to salvage
- No map generation - only up to 16 asteroids generate near spawn but the map size is infinite; the rest is empty space
- Skybox - space with asteroids; no contrast between the skybox and real distant objects, so it is nearly impossible to tell if it is real or not
- Not much content - after playing for about 10-15 hours there isn't much to do except build a giant space station
- No AI - NPC ships fly in a random direction until they despawn after x time, several have weapon blind spots that allow easy capture and thus rapid progression. You can juke the ones that don't have blind spots until they run out of ammo
- Astronaut exploits and is OP - it can accelerate up to 115m/s much quicker than a ship and if you have a medical bay you can infinitely respawn with no penalty; allows players to store everything except the tools and repeatedly try to board NPC ships without any risk; tools respawn on death
- Cannot configure ships to automatically dump cargo contents when docked with a station (except ore); player must manually move between inventories
- "Small" ships have invisible walls that push you back because they cannot have an accessible interior; sometimes makes building difficult and reduces all small fighters to drones
- No air/pressurization systems
- Beacons and antenna are needed to find your ships and bases, but there are no frequencies so everyone can locate your assets
- Windows come in pre-designed sizes and are thin panes that can only be placed on one side of a block, no solid glass blocks, glass transparency is wonky, corners have an ugly repeating dirt texture
- Lighting system is extremely laggy if there are many light sources
- No Gamemode switching - cannot switch between creative and survival in-game, must reload the map in the desired gamemode
- No signs to relay information to other players
- Cannot change the name of several systems at once; for example, must manually change each light's name to "Docking Bay" rather than all of them at the same time
- Cannot automatically evenly divide crafting orders across all connected assemblers
- One of the members on my server was harvesting an asteroid with our large mining vessel. He dug a hole deep into the asteroid, but as he was reversing out to come home, he scraped the hull on the rock. The scrape punctured the armour, cargo and reactor. This left him dead in space with a substantial amount of ore bleeding from his ship. While we sent relief teams to help repair, the various ore rocks drifted towards our glorious home and rained death down upon it. The ore smashed holes cleanly through the station. Our mining ship and station was considerably damaged and we lost all the ore from that operation. It was a tragic day.
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Celestialphoenix
Too Much Free Time
He had his reverse thrusters on when he lost power, so it kept the backwards momentum. It drifted around the asteroid field for a while before we could stop it. It was rather difficult, because it was rapidly spinning around due to gyroscope damage.
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