Space Engineers! Adventures in Survival!

[wonko the sane?]

Acquired this little scifi-sandbox game an age ago and poked at it a few times. The general slowness of the survival start, combined with the learning curve, and a game which generally seems to be working against you in terms of hidden settings and poor documentation, kinda set me off giving it a serious go.

Well, I was in the mood again, and gravitating towards "build 'em" games like scrap mechanic, so I reinstalled.

Dropped onto a mountain top (which is awesome for wind power.), proceeded to begind a platform to work from. Cranked out the usual machines, h2/02 converter, refiner, assembler... Why can I not finish this ******* assembler. It seems to require parts that ONLY an assembler can make... Completely scrap down the drop pod, don't even get enough parts to finish it. Oh, here's why, this is a REGULAR assembler: I need to build the SIMPLE assembler first.

Okay, finally got an industrial base. I need a rover! What few resources I have left go into the basic vehicle. Cargo crate, cockpit, wheels, batteries, ore detector... Don't think I'm missing anything... connector, where the connector? Can't charge the batteries off the base power without it. NOT in my build list anywhere.

Oh, you need to build a conveyor first, which unlocks the connector. Okay. Build conveyor, scrap it down, get back to work on the truck.

Run out of resources, go mining, come back... and the truck is gone. Wasn't even half done. Christ.

Start building a NEW truck. Get about halfway, run out of resources, go mining, come back... and the ******* truck is gone again.

Look it up. Oh, it's the trash settings on the "server". unpowered grids get removed if you move 500 meters away from them. Adjust settings to 500 km, and start a NEW NEW truck.

Get about half way, run out of resources, go mining. Come back and... OH, it's still there. Yay! Finish truck. Tweak out the platform design so that the new truck can connect to base power to keep charged.

Charged the truck, and now we're going on a mining run! Should be able to store a bugger ton of resources this time. Maybe even find a nice flat place I can build something with a ROOF. Get about a klick from the base: flip the truck.

Build a single atmosphere thruster on the truck to act a flip mechanic. Get it back on it's wheels. Awesome. We're working this, problem solving, this is good. Hit up my iron mine, fill the cargo crate, and an unknown signal drops in. Oh yeah, I'm feeling good, we got a full charge, let's GO!

Flip the truck half way down the mountain: lose my back wheels, two batteries, connector, and one spotlight. Remaining batteries are shot so there's no power to move the front wheels. In short: she's scrap.

Decide to finish the run on the signal anyway. Forget to mark the wrecks location, lose it on the way home...

So yeah: adventures in space engineers.

 

[wonko the sane?]

Further adventures!

Decided that wheels are stupid, and set about to build a flyer. Oh why not, a MINING flyer. It'll make docking a resource acquisition easier too.

Get the basic form laid out, start populating with atmospheric thrusters... PROBLEM! It'll only have about 5 minutes of power off the batteries. So I just slap the thrusters on there, just enough to get it to the dock, so it can charge (and be held upright.) while I finish it. Cept it WILL NOT FLY. I got up, down, left, right, back, gyrocope... hug, I missed the forward thrusters. And of course: I am out of materials.

Strip one backwards thruster and flip it round. There, NOW we can forward. Except we can't even take off. We're entirely too heavy. Strip off the drills, and now we can KINDA hover. I'm leaving a trail of sparks as I grind my fat ass over to the connector... BUT! We made it, we locked it. Now there's a magnetic field holding it in place AND upright, all while charging the batteries. I'll need to rework my thruster layout... and volume, but this should be doable... with a LOT of mining runs. I need... everything. I need everything to finish this. Cobalt, nickel, iron, silicon... this would all be so much easier if I only had a mining ship...

Edit: but I did find the wreck of the truck, and actually remembered to add it to the GPS, so I didn't lose my ore, and I can scrap the truck down for parts once I get flying.

 

[wonko the sane?]

So, lessons learned:

1.) all modes of travel are stupid: doesn't matter if it's wheels, thrusters, ion engines. Any of it. All stupid. Pick the stupid you are most comfortable with.
2.) Gyroscopes. Always gyroscopes. Doesn't matter what kind of vehicle it is, slap at least ONE gyroscope on it. They will help prevent you from flipping over uncontrollably even in wheeled vehicles.
3.) Power generation is always scaled against you. The stuff that's capable of making a really small vehicle is is locked behind the most expensive processing and fabricating machines.
4.) Mod the hell out of the game. Barebones survival is a nice sandbox to learn in; but there are enough mods to add some life to the world, including POI's to explore, loot, and conquer and enemies/allies to consider.

 

[wonko the sane?]

So, I've built a handful of flying machines. They have had... limited success. The balance is bad, weight is always a problem, and without uranium (or knowing where to find it on earth anyway...) I'm stuck using hydrogen (boom baby!), or batteries which are heavy and awkward. I don't like hydrogen for atmospheric flyers cause it's entirely too volatile for my purposes which are currently very short range, mostly for mining and chasing unknown signals.

Plus, I crash. A lot.

Turns out: I just suck at building these things. I cobbled together a wee tiny explorer I called "the vulture", and... it's a dream. Sure, still using batteries, so limited flight time and consequently range and no cargo room outside the cockpit. But stable, agile, quick, balanced. I even got clever with a hinge and landing gear so I don't need a dock to stop it flopping around when not in use.

So yeah, bad design ends in crashing. Lesson learned.

 

[wonko the sane?]

The game will occasionally drop "unknown signals" on you. Drop pods will survival stuff like new tools, space credits, basic materials. Plus, you can scrap down the pod for parts, so tiny little gold mines, especially in the early game.

I was out stripping a crashed ship, my wreckers inventory (and my personal inventory.) was full to capacity, and a pod was set to drop right on top of me. So I took advantage of it: managed to get it to land in the open space next to my cockpit, and it STAYED THERE the entire drive home, despite the terrain and my abysmal driving.

So now I'm thinking... shredder pit. Build a little flyer whose sole purpose is to grab stuff like pods, and drag it home and drop it in a purpose built with shredders in the bottom. Mulch the whole thing and drop the resources right into base inventory.

 

[wonko the sane?]

After the events of my last post: I've spent some time fooling around with remote controls. I've learned a fair bit, and gotten quite good with them. That said, I present this happy little abomination.

I call it the turkey vulture, and this flying dumpsters SOLE purpose is to be remoted out to the unknown signals, grab them and drag them home. And it works BEAUTIFULLY. My test run was actually on one of the drop pods that runs away from you when you get close to it. Normally, a giant pain in the space suit waste system. Turns out that the sensors on those are calibrated to respond to PLAYERS, and nothing else, so I was able to drop onto it at my leisure and fly it home effort free. The weight and power of the machine means that even when the pod tried to run away from me when I got close: It barely budged the vulture. And with the bases antenna set to broadcast to 10 kilometers, there's range to SPARE on my remote distance.

Got it hung literally right over the base door, the magnetic field from the connector holds it amply and recharges the batteries while doing it. All I need to do is work on the paint a little, not happy with the rusty green.

Edit: UPDATE! The second drop was one of the ball ones, and it's apprently set to detect vehicles too, so it ran. I slammed the vulture into the ground, lost the "claws" and had to RTB. Thinking of upgrading to a mag plate for a larger surface area, but that means moving cameras and lights and such, and after the crash I had no desire to keep playing for the moment.

 

[wonko the sane?]

ADVENTURES WITH HYDROGEN!

For those who do not know: hydrogen thrusters are the be all, end all of lift in this game. They are also REQUIRED to escape planetary gravity and make it to space. Atmospheric and ion thrusters are fun for tooling around in atmo, but if you want to make it to the inky black (and consequently to platinum and uranium.) you need hydrogen.

So I built a test bed ship: literally a hydrogen roman candle with a cockpit. Nothing but fuel storage and thruster pods. Okay, so there's some solar panels and batteries on there too, but you get the idea. No armor, no nothing but the BAREST PARTS needed to get to and operate in space. Filled the tank with hydrogen, light it off and... flopped over like dead fish. Even the giant ass thruster I put as the primary lift couldn't get my ass off the ground.

So I walked away, and watched a video on youtube about thrusters. Hydrogen lifts man, hydrogen LIFTS. So why wasn't mine?

Long story short, seems I had the hydrogen tank set to "stockpile". A setting in which it will hoard all available hydrogen perpetually. Turned that off, turned the thrusters back on, and then jive my pants as I was pressed into the seat at a near instant 100/ms.

I now need to rebuild, or rather build an entirely NEW ship with more features to make exploring space and the resources there in more feasible and easier.

 

[wonko the sane?]

Year and a bit later: back in the spacesuit!

Was once again the mood for a "build 'em" game, and having built a very complimentary mod list (seriously: if you play this game; use the smooth voxels mod. Makes literally all the difference in the world.) so loaded up a new survival world and off we went.

I dropped onto a mountain range, built the usual starter platform and started constructing... well, a behemoth. A giant, wheeled aircraft carrier-ish machine to use as a mobile base. It's slow, but it works. And with hydrogen gennies running it: electrical power to spare. With full batteries, and full hydrogen tanks: I decided to set off to the ISSB base ( a location added by the economy update.) because I had nothing better to do.

Problem: I need to drive over a mountain. Second problem; the wheelbase DOES not have the power to haul my 540 ton land whale over the top. My solution was... MORE WEIGHT! HAHAH! Specifically, weight in the form of two giant ass thrusters on the back. It took about an hour for the assembler to crank out the parts (2200 motors alone took an age.) but hoo boy did I climb that mountain. Gonna make good time to the ISSB base.

My next step is: on the way there (since I've got another 66 kilometers to cross.) is to try to find another gold ore deposit (and hopefully some associated metals, like iron, nickel, and cobalt.) and use the hover engine mod to convert it to a field effect vehicle. I hope the hydrogen gennies are up to that, otherwise I might need to make a spaceship and go fishing for uranium in near earth-like orbit.

 

[wonko the sane?]

Oh hey, keen dropped a new cosmetic DLC. Some of this stuff looks pretty good too.

But... I dunno. I haven't played in a while, and with starfield in a few days, I probably won't play for age either. I don't really need it

Steam: thank you for your purchase!

God... damn it. I know it was only like 7 bucks but how does keen do that to me?!?!

 

[wonko the sane?]

Alright, with signals DLC dropped, and my boredom rising (I'm waiting for the steam summer sale to see about a few titles.) I figured it's time to play space engineer again. I've been wanting to build stuff anyway.

So the normal things happen. Load the mods, select the game settings, and drop in on the earth like. I managed to hug up the deployment of the parachutes, but still landed perfectly fine (thank the maker wheels BOUNCE.) and set off to find resources.

Now, I run a fair number of "encounter" mods. Mostly to add content to the world like abandoned outpost and random raids (keeps ya on your toes.) but I never got them to work quite right. I would see ships, and they would be registered as "enemy" (so red on the HUD.) but they wouldn't do anything other than float around. But I think I finally figured out the modding thing for SE, and got all the encounter and their requirements at the top of the list, and the comestic and scriptless content at the bottom. So opposite of bethesda.

Anywho: I come across an iron rich rock, and pull over. I look around and notice I'm right in the flight path of an ember corporation ship heading to an ember security base 6 klicks to my left. NBD, they never did anything anyway.

*WHOOSH*

The hug was that? *waits a beat.*... okay, it was nothing important? *switches from welder to drill.*

*WHOOSH WHOOSH*

Is that an audio error? *switches back to welder, silence.*

Oh yeah, I should fetch my weapon from the cockpit! *access cockpit inventory. WOOSH*

Well, alright, seems harmless enough, I can live with it.

*Struggles to remember how to add the rifle to the hotbar. *WOOSH WOOSH WOOSH. Sees a bright light from the sky hit the ground.*

The hug? I'm under fire? *looks up at ember ship*

*WOOSH WOOSH*

Oh yeah, he's shooting at me.

*WOOSH WOOSH WOOSH*

Good trigger discipline anyway, but terrible aim.

*WOOSH WOOSH*

I guess I should leave?

Drove in literally a straight line, but he never hit me once. I liked the ambiance the ember corporation added to my games, so I never paid them any mind. But this requires retaliation. I suppose I should make a nice missile once I get a base going.