The Exploration Continues: Meet Ms. Frizzle - Seatbelts, Everyone!

After loading into the world I've generated for this series of articles, the first task is to assess my situation. All I've got to my name are the components that make up the ship I've started in, the basic engineering and mining tools, and a small amount of uranium ingots in the reactor - just 2kg worth of fuel to keep me alive and flying through space. Next up is to ensure that any systems not currently needed, such as the refinery, assembler and gravity generator, are switched off. This boosts me from twenty real-time hours worth of power at a drift up to twenty-five days. That reading will fluctuate heavily as I maneuver the ship, but the appearance of having extended my life expectancy still makes me feel better.

The Friz has seen some better days.

Speaking of my ship, its design is that of the Yellow Rescue Ship, a standard both for players starting the "Asteroids" scenario, and for those spawning in any world where there isn't a working medical bay available to them. Powered by a single small nuclear reactor, it comes equipped with its own medical bay and gravity generator, as well as the storage space offered by a single small cargo container. While lacking much in the way of creature comforts, it also comes with the machines necessary for any engineer taking his first steps into a new world: a refinery to process raw ores into usable material and an assembler to turn that material into the components needed for whatever construction project its owner decides to undertake.

Now, every ship needs a name. Perhaps taking after Aaron of LastStandGamers, I seem to name a great deal of my ships after people's names. After seeing a few people on the Space Engineers subreddit refer to this ship design as a big yellow bus, I decided to name my ship after Ms. Frizzle, the teacher from the children's show The Magic School Bus. Although other designs may be built in the future, this one will be my mainstay for a long while. As soon as my situation seems a bit less dire, and I have more resources on hand, I'll do what I can to smooth out the dents and make her more worthy of calling home.

Those dents will buff right out, don't you worry.

Ms. Frizzle is still considered a respawn ship, however. This means that if I enable the "Delete Respawn Ship" setting, the next time I save and quit out of the world I'd lose my ship. I've got a few options on how I can work around that. The more time-consuming option would be to grind away each and every block that makes up my ship, replacing and rebuilding each of them as I go. Although this would work for fixing this situation, it's not without its dangers and limitations. Moving the reactor could come at an inopportune moment, while my suit's energy levels are low. And, much more easily, I could simply lose track of where I was in the reconstruction and forget some key part that makes the ship what it currently is.

The faster option, and the one I plan to use, works due to something of an exploit in the game's mechanics. If I were to connect my yellow ship to a space station via a pair of merge blocks, Ms. Frizzle would stop being a free-floating large vessel and be part of that station. Afterwards, once I grind away the merge blocks, I simply change her back into a ship via the button in the Info tab of the ship's terminal. Generally I dislike abusing game mechanics for personal gain in any video game, especially an open-world survival sandbox. This time it would be used to help enforce the immersion to some degree - in realistic terms, your car wouldn't simply disappear after you had gone to bed for the night just because it was a rental (assuming the company hadn't decided to repossess it from you overnight - okay, perhaps this was a bad analogy).

The Exploration Begins: Choice of Settings, Personal Gameplay Goals

I know the post is labeled as "The Exploration Continues," but this is the introductory post, so I've taken a bit of creative license.

To start things off, I'd like to explain my gameplay goals. When game worlds in Space Engineers were infinite in distance but fairly limited in their scope of worthwhile destinations for travel, my only goal was simply to survive. Beyond that, I let my imagination and whims guide me toward building particular kinds of ships or working on the creation of stations as a more permanent base. With the addition of the exploration update, I have a much more defined goal set for myself: exploration itself.

I still may set up a somewhat more permanent home in the form of a space station, but the major goal for my gameplay is exploration. Visiting each asteroid I lay eyes on, and more importantly seeking out the abandoned ships and stations that were included from those submitted to the developers through the Steam Workshop. I've seen a few screenshots that the community has taken of what they've found out amongst the vast emptiness of space, and I'm excited to see just what I can find for myself. And each time I find something new, I'll be sure to record it here as part of my Exploration series.

The Game Settings

• "Asteroids" Scenario: When I first started playing Space Engineers, I had chosen the "Crashed Red Ship" scenario, and I loved that I had a great deal of basic resources like steel plates, but that other things - displays and computers, for instance - were much more rare. When the developers updated their ship designs to include new blocks they had added such as the connector and collector blocks as well as conveyer tubes, it felt like this start became too easy. Playing in the "Asteroids" scenario keeps me on my toes for the first few hours, ensuring that I conserve every ounce of energy I have while I scrounge for resources.
• Offline Survival: Although I might open the game up to allow friends to look at what I've built - after safely backing up my save, of course - I play to play the game entirely in single player, and with the rules put in place by survival mode: blocks take time to build, their components themselves requiring resources gained either from salvage or mining, and the ever-present threat of suit energy running out, as well as gunfire from hostile ships, keeping me even more careful about what I do and where.
• Safe Environment: Sort of an oxymoron considering I'm to be free-floating in the empty void of space. Instead, this means that there won't be any meteor showers coming at regular intervals. Although it would be another source of danger to contend with, experience has taught me that meteor showers mostly just make me do all of my work on the dark side of the asteroids, which tends to make for terrible screenshots. This setting may change in the future.
• Realistic x1 Speeds: Playing on the standard settings so far as inventory sizing and speeds go helps keep things.. well, realistic, in my eyes. Even in space an engineer can't hold a huge amount of components or tools. This setting will ensure that I think about building welding, grinding and mining ships for any project that will be of a decent size or that might take a long time to weld into place.
• Infinite Asteroids, High Density: Procedurally generated asteroids in an infinite map is what's gotten me so excited to play Space Engineers again. Although having it set to "high density" might seem like I'm playing on an easy setting, in-game the nearest asteroid is still nearly at the edge of my viewing distance. I like being able to see an unmoving point in the distance and wonder what I'll find when I get there.
• Auto-Healing - Off: Although I can understand the idea of a space suit being able to do some light work in helping to heal its occupant, I don't think it's very realistic to be able to heal from all damage. This setting ensures that I'll remember where my nearest medical room is located.
• Thruster Damage - On: This makes sure that any ships I build will realistically have to deal with the damage that comes from thruster exhaust, helping shape the designs I make. Also, any ship that I upload to the Steam Workshop will be sure to work in other worlds, whether they have the thruster damage setting on or not.
• Cargo Ships - On: The nine different kinds of abandoned cargo ships that occasionally show up to drift through the map are more dangerous than they once were, but are no less enticing. They can be a quick source of salvaged components.. if you're brave enough to try to catch them. It might take a while for me to feel confident enough to try myself, but it will happen sooner or later.
• Spectator Mode - On: This time around I plan to try and use only first-person mode whether inside of a ship or not. The only time I'll be taking advantage of spectator mode is when I want to take an interesting screenshot for this blog. Otherwise, if I want to see how my ship is oriented or whether it's got clearance to fly around a structure, I'll have to install a camera.

Updated Transmissions: Voxel Hands, Weapon Actions and Exporting Models

Once again it's Thursday, and the good people of Keen Software House have brought us another interesting update to Space Engineers, bringing the game up to version 01.067. A full list of the new features and fixes that make up this update can be found here.

Sculpting asteroids with the Voxel Hands tools.

The biggest feature added by today's update is something I had seen talked about on both the Steam forums and the Space Engineers Reddit. Previously, players had found something called "voxel hands" listed amongst the tool and object tab in the toolbar configuration menu. Although nobody was really sure as to what it meant, theories abound that it had something to do with a feature showcased in the gameplay video of Keen's up-coming sister game, Medieval Engineers. As you can see from the image above, today's update confirmed those assumptions.

Voxel Hands can currently only be accessed while playing in creative mode, and with good reason. A range of five different tools is available, and what they do is allow a player to sculpt with the varying materials that the game's asteroids are made out of. The first four tools are simply different shapes: box, capsule, ramp and sphere; the fifth is used to smooth out a flat plane of material. Their orientation is changed via the same controls used for changing the facing of blocks placed by hand, but each comes with its own special menu, accessed by default through the same key that enables or disables the heads-up display. This menu allows you to change the distance of the voxel hands icon, as well as change its size. Alternately, you can enable the "project to voxel" option to keep the cursor connected to the base asteroid being pointed at. Currently the voxel hands can only generate or carve portions based around a bounding box that surrounds each asteroid; thankfully, there's an option to enable a visual representation of that boundary.

Also added in this update is the ability of sensors and timer blocks to trigger certain commands for weapons such as the gatling gun and missile launcher. For instance, this means that weapons can be set to fire upon the detection of enemy ships or players. This also means that players who enjoy scripting with the programmable blocks will be able to control their weaponry from those scripts, opening up the possibilities of things such as automated combat drones. Speaking of programming, code editor performance has been boosted while the number of characters per script was set to a maximum of 100,000.

Being able to export ship models was a feature that had been part of the game since previous updates, though it was perhaps overshadowed by the addition of blueprinting your creations for use with projectors, sharing with friends or even uploading to the Steam Workshop. As part of this update, simply pointing your cursor at a ship and hitting CTRL+ALT+E allows you to export one of your creations as an .OBJ file type, useful for players who want to make 3D prints of their ships.

And, as usual, this update - and any following hotfix within the next few days - has done what it could to help deal with some of the bugs and issues that had been plaguing players recently. For a full list of such fixes, see the link to the thread for today's update on Keen Software House's official forums at the top of this page.

See you next Thursday, fellow engineers!

Hello and Welcome to Enduring the Void!

Whether you're entirely new to the game or simply looking for another venue of related entertainment, you've come to the right place. This blog will include a number of screenshots and pages dedicated entirely to several aspects of the game Space Engineers.

So, what exactly is Space Engineers? Developed by Keen Software House, Space Engineers is a voxel-based sandbox game set amongst asteroid fields in space. Since its initial release on Steam in late October of 2013, the game has seen many exciting updates, ranging from the addition of multiplayer to in-game programming, and my personal favorite, survival mode. Players can collect resources in a number of different ways to build their own space ships or stations while dealing with and avoiding the hazards of the environment and other players. Those who want to create without dealing with the aspects of survival can also do so in the game's creative mode.

After extensively playing games such as Minecraft, Terraria and Starbound, gameplay footage of Space Engineers was more than a little intriguing. It wasn't until the developers had included a "survival mode" to the game that I finally decided to purchase it for myself. Within my first few hours of play, I was hooked; Space Engineers is now my most played game on Steam by more than one hundred hours. I quickly wanted to add to the community in some form; thinking back to a blog I had made to follow along as I played Minecraft, I felt that doing something of the same for Space Engineers was a good fit.

So again, welcome to Enduring the Void! I hope you enjoy your visit and make sure to check back for future updates.

What You'll Find Here

• The Exploration Continues: The meat and potatoes of the blog, so to speak. These are the pages that will continue to chronicle my progress through my single player game world. I'll try to take interesting screenshots of my travels, and do my best to post at something of a regular interval. If I ever feel that I haven't made much of an impact in any given day, I'll effort to post something of the following few categories.
• Updated Transmissions:  So far, nearly without fail, the developers of Space Engineers update the game every Thursday. These pages will do what they can to explain what the additions and changes are, and their possible impact on future gameplay.
• Fringe Science: This series will talk about different concepts and ideas that may or may not have occurred to most readers. Anything you've considered and wondered about the logistics of it, or whether or not it could actually work, can be found here.
• The Shipyard: A series of posts detailing some of the design choices I've made for my own ships and those I've found while exploring my little corner of space. Eventually I'll start dipping into the Steam Workshop to highlight some of the more interesting or unique ship designs to be found.
• Fellow Engineers:  The community for Space Engineers is vast and growing by the day. Sometimes another player stands out above the rest for his contributions. Last, but certainly not least, this series hopes to introduce you to some of your fellow engineers by offering a glimpse of what they've given of their time, imagination and ingenuity. You'll also find applicable links to their YouTube channels or websites.