The Exploration Continues: Blueprint Projector, Theodore Begins, Captured Ship

Given that I plan to build a great number of small satellites within close proximity to Ms. Frizzle, I decided to attach a projector block to the side of the ship. Normally, you can't attach small ship blocks to large ships or stations outside of careful placement of landing gear. The "rotor trick," as the community likes to call it, is currently an effective work-around that also allows your ship's energy to flow through the connection.

Ms. Frizzle's very own blueprint projector.

The trick itself sounds deceptively simple. You build a large ship rotor - the standard kind, not the advanced rotor - wherever you want to make the connection. Once the base is completed, you go into the console and tell the rotor to release its head, which you're now safe to grind away. Start constructing a small ship nearby - preferably in a direct vertical line over where you built the rotor. Attach a small ship rotor to the unfinished landing gear and weld its head to completion. Remove the bottom and the landing gear and give the cap the gentlest nudge. When it's in range of the large rotor's base, get back into the console and tell it to attach.

Now you're free to place small ship blocks on the head of this new hybrid rotor. Once I had oriented the projector block correctly, and got the rotor itself to lock into place and stop spinning, I was set. The keypad I added to the side was simply for convenience's sake, as it allows quick access so I can adjust the blueprint schematic being constructed. I simply build a line of small ship blocks out from the projector and I'm good to go.

With this I was able to construct the front half of my Theodore ship. I decided to hold off on construction the auxiliary engine pod primarily because the first asteroid, which I named Palmer's End, is primarily made of iron and stone. The smaller asteroids that accompanied it - the "fingers" to the "palm" - were where the more valuable ore was located, and I feared those would run dry before I finished. My new plan was to build a second satellite marker and fly it over to another asteroid in the hopes of finding some of the more rare ores, or perhaps something more interesting.

My first captured ship since I started this map!

With the newly updated zoom function that camera blocks were given, I had spent a bit of time peering out into the distance in the hopes of finding any hint of something that wasn't another asteroid. Picking a likely direction, I throttled up.. but within a few thousand meters I realized that it was just a distant chunk of rock. While trying to find a more interesting target, a mining carriage drifted over. By the time I noticed it was there, the ship had skirted within a hundred meters of the turret's kill-zone.

At first I was content to count my blessings and watch it slip away. Then I remembered that mining carriages only have a single turret, and that it was placed in such a way that offered gaping blind spots. Deciding the risk was worth it, I cut my inertial dampeners and gave chase. After a great deal of grinding, I was able to cut the power, disable the turret and assume control of the vessel. By then I was nearly 20km away from Palmer's End, and I was sorely glad I had installed the safety beacon on my ship.

The contents of my new haul were fairly standard - a handful of different kinds of ore and a few extra mining drills and handheld grinders. An extra twenty uranium ingots got stuffed into my ship's reactor, which helped give me some peace of mind - every time I had the ship's refinery, arc furnace, assembler, collector and gravity generator running at once, I would get nervous that I was going to run low on power.

Perhaps the best part of the capture was that I now have a great deal of extra large ship components for my own designs. I've already popped back into my creative world to throw some designs together for a long-haul cargo ship, as the storage space on Ms. Frizzle was getting a bit low.

Updated Transmissions: Damage Particle Effects, Ship Tool Shaking and Camera Zoom

Once again it's Thursday, and the developers of Space Engineers have given us an interesting update. Some features that players have been asking for, some that change previously removed aspects of the game and yet another that, as far as I can tell, wasn't asked for but is ultimately an unexpected bonus to those of us who enjoy some of the more immersive aspects of realistic gameplay. As always, the full list of features and bugfixes for the version 1.068 update can be found here.

Parts of your ship, excluding armor, now show particle effects when significantly damaged.

For those of you who try to play Space Engineers in a more realistic and immersive way, the unexpected part of this update might intrigue you. All parts of a ship can normally be damaged by gunfire or through contact with other ships or asteroids while moving at speed. Now, once any non-armor blocks are damaged below the red line that marks their completed state, they'll start to emit different particle effects. These effects are determined by what kind of block it is: thrusters and  turrets spew flames whereas gravity generators, lights, antennas and most other ship blocks will give off crackles of electricity. Reactors instead emit a harmless but radioactive-looking green gas. These effects coincide with the point at which a block stops functioning until repaired.

An aspect of the game that had been removed in a previous update was the shaking effect that came from using the spinning mining drill on a ship. Depending on the mass of your vessel, this shaking could be quite disorienting and was one of the leading causes for parts of a mining ship breaking away from bumping against the wall of a tunnel system. Although many players quite liked its removal, it could also be seen as a loss of game immersion for some. Today's update brings it back, as well as a similar shaking sensation for ship welders, as a single setting you can toggle for each game world you own.

In my time spent perusing the Space Engineers subreddit, I've seen many players ask for some way to zoom in the view either of their space suits or the ships themselves, theorizing that such an effect could be commonplace in a time and place where lone astronauts could build and pilot their own craft amongst asteroid fields in deep space. Just such a function has now been added to the camera blocks that can be placed on your ships and stations. Although the standard engineering space suit currently lacks such ability, this still opens up some interesting possibilities for reconnaissance satellites or spy drones.

Despite being outside of my realm of knowledge, I'm sure the modders and programmers of the Space Engineers community will enjoy the final aspect of this update. Modding API and programming documentation can now be found in a folder located within the installation point of the game itself. Simply accessing it through the game properties tab inside Steam, and navigate to the Tools folder.

See you next Thursday, fellow engineers!

The Shipyard: Asteroid Marker Satellite, Theodore's Flight Pod and Engine Pod.

When I decided I wanted to get back into playing Space Engineers, I knew my main focus would once again be playing in survival mode, but this time with a world filled with procedurally generated asteroids. But with little in the way of landmarks, it could be easy to get myself turned around and forgetting where it was I had been, or was trying to return to.

Asteroid Marker Satellite Mk.1

In order to combat this, I looked into beacons and antennas, ultimately deciding upon the latter option. The design I wanted would be rather simple and cheap, and something that wouldn't run out of energy if I were to leave it to its own devices. And if it were being produced in great numbers, I wanted some way to be able to transport a number of them at the same time.

The Asteroid Marker Satellite Mk.1 came out better than I had expected. It hits all the points I had wanted for its design while still looking like an actual satellite. With an effective antenna radius of 5km, I should be able to set up a network of them stretching from asteroid to asteroid across my game world. Currently, my only qualms is that a single solar panel isn't enough to power a remote control block, and thus I won't be able to access the information panel on the underside. This means that I'll have to jot down the local ores or abandoned spacecraft or stations in a notepad file before deciding where to fly.

Theodore Flight-Pod Mk.1

Without that remote control access, and lacking any thrusters, I would have to come up with some other way to position these satellites at each asteroid. For that I decided upon a two-stage craft, which I later named Theodore after the titular character in the children's show Theodore Tugboat. Perhaps I'm setting up something of a theme here..

I made sure to set the engines somewhat far to either side; this gives it enough clearance to not damage the satellite while it's being positioned with the help of the front landing gear. An ore detector helps me better scan the asteroid itself to determine what valuable ore it contains, and a beacon for safety. A single small reactor wasn't powerful enough to not overload while the ship was simply performing maneuvers, so I added a second on the other side. Finally, a spotlight is set between the landing gear at the nose - this may seem like a poor choice, but it helps a pilot gauge just how close they are to a target. Once the beam of light starts to be blanked out, you're close enough that you should prepare to lock the gear.

Theodore Engine-Pod Mk.1

The design of the flight pod was purposefully small. It's made to grab one of the marker satellites and nestle it into an innocuous place with its solar panel correctly oriented for maximum energy. But I knew from the start that such a design wouldn't have the power to drag a group of these satellites around the cosmos on its lonesome. So I designed an extension of the flight pod. It sports a large reactor of its own, along with a medium cargo container to keep necessities in case of emergency, or in case I find something too valuable to leave behind. Unlike the front section, the engine pod was designed with the idea of eventually landing it on a station or in a larger ship's hangar for travel.

The idea is fairly simple. Keep the flight pod connected to the engine pod, and attach a number of satellite markers to the rear of that. Fly the whole thing around from asteroid to asteroid, dropping off a marker as I go at each new discovery. Although I've yet to try it outside the confines of my creative testing facility, I'm quite pleased with the look of it. And as with all of my designs, I will upload a sort of "interactive museum" to the Steam Workshop in the near future.

The Exploration Continues: Building a Safety Beacon, So Much Mining

The first thing I decided to do today was to fit Ms. Frizzle with what I call a "safety beacon." Set to the maximum range of 50km, this beacon will show where my ship is regardless of whether it has an antenna or not. I find this helpful for when I get lost while surveying an asteroid to see what valuable ores it contains. The trick is finding a way to utilize this without letting the beacon's information constantly clutter up my screen.

Safety beacon activated. Let's get messy!

Actually, the first trick was trying to keep myself sane while I ferried forty communication components from a cargo container inside of the ship out to the beacon I was constructing, as I could only carry a pair of them at any one time.

I had recently watched a few videos on YouTube where other players had used sensors for some interesting effects - torpedoes designed to home in on enemy ships, for example. But my idea was a fair bit simpler.

Any time the sensor detected a player - myself - within its effective radius, it would turn the beacon off. This would save a small amount of energy while making sure that its green glow and title weren't obstructing me view. But when I got far enough away the beacon would switch back on, making sure I knew where I'd left the ship. So far it's worked beautifully; the only snag being that it fails to detect a player sitting in a control seat within its radius. This means that the beacon is constantly active while I'm flying the ship from place to place in my search for the mysterious of the universe (or when I'm hunting down an elusive type of ore).

Speaking of mining, I've taken a closer look at the cluster of asteroids nearest to where I had started my game. The larger of them was fairly boring, save for a few hollows on the inside: iron and stone, along with a small patch of gold. The real finds have been on the handful of smaller rocks. Nearly every one them has had one of the ore types I had been needing. The only vein of uranium in the lot of them had already run dry, but my refinery still hasn't chewed through all I had collected of it. Every possible type of ore in the game is represented amongst these small asteroids, and all of it is sorely needed.

The Friz decides to photobomb my asteroid snapshot.

In order to retrofit Ms. Frizzle in the ways I've described, I had to cannibalize some other parts of her. As you can see from yesterday's post, the front of the ship is just a grid of crisscrossing girders. The only door, on the right side of the craft, is just an empty frame. Even with replacing the single conveyer block with an extra small cargo container - they have the same functionality, while the latter offers storage space for less components overall - I've run out of things like motors, displays and bulletproof glass. Before I leave this cluster, I should have more than enough material to finish building my ship, and hopefully be able to get started on the next part of my plan.

In every open-world sandbox survival game I play, I have this odd need to record my progress as I explore. For Space Engineers, this means I'm going to build what I call a satellite network. Each cluster of asteroids I visit, I'll drop off a small satellite equipped with an antenna, powered by a solar panel angled toward the sun. A text panel on the back will record what kinds of ore I'll find if I decide to return there in the future. Each one should be close enough to the others that I would be able to switch my own ship's antenna on and be able to find my way. This also ensures that I won't accidentally visit the same cluster multiple times just by getting myself turned around.

Although I have future plans to construct a small scout tug to drag a number of these satellites around as I explore, for the moment I'm not sure if this first cluster will have enough material for that. I should have enough to begin the network, however. I've already got a design in mind, too, after spending some time playing in my creative world.

The Exploration Continues: Retrofitting The Friz, Searching for Fuel, Black Gold

Now that the ship is named and some of its systems shut down to conserve energy, it's time to deal with our first obstacle: finding and harvesting uranium for use as fuel. To this end, and thanks once again to the good people over at the Space Engineers subreddit (a link to which is at the right), I already had a plan for easy collection.

Ore collection scoop and spherical gravity generator.

Before I started this blog, the last time I had played Space Engineers was about five months ago. At the time, my best idea for successfully mining was to park a ship with a massive funnel underneath the patch of surface ore I had planned to break into. The funnel led down to a collector, which in turn fed into either an on-board refinery or a set of cargo containers. Because I preferred to mine with my hand drill rather than with a small mining ship, this meant that nearly all of the ore I chipped away would be pulled into this funnel by a gravity generator inside the ship.

The problem with this tactic was that chunks of ore would sometimes rebound along the rim of the funnel and spill out over the side, and the gravity generator would then launch them out into space. Trying to combat this involved trying to create a sort of seal between the funnel and the surface of the asteroid itself, which often led to warped or broken sections of the funnel or endless time lost checking and double-checking the ship's placement. And some areas simply weren't large enough to fit my entire ship right up against.

During my time away from the game, I would occasionally visit the Space Engineers subreddit, mostly to look at the different pictures people had posted of their ship designs. One such design struck me as ingenious, and I felt simple for not having thought of it myself. Basically, a spherical gravity generator would draw the ore directly in toward itself, where it would bunch up against a set of inward-facing collectors. Having never tried it before, I only had the say-so of the ship's designer as proof that it worked beautifully. As you can see in the image above, this was the idea that I decided to bring to bear against my fuel problems.

Technically, I'm already in a space suit, so it's all right.

Now came the actual search for uranium. I knew from past experience that uranium ore is a sort of oily black color, which contrasts noticeably against the other ores that an asteroid could be made up of. I took Ms. Frizzle over to the nearest of the map's large asteroids, hopped out and began scouring it for dark patches. After checking its composition with my hand drill both inside and out, I moved on to the smaller rocks hanging meters away from its surface. I was about to get back into my ship to continue my search elsewhere when I caught sight of a single small field of untapped uranium hiding in the shadow of one of the smaller asteroids.

I had decided to stick to using first-person mode while piloting ships whenever possible. To this effect, I had torn away some of the front armor of Ms. Frizzle, replacing it with the unfinished latticework of glass windows. With a much more open view at front, and together with the camera I had installed on top of the collector, I carefully moved into position. Turning the generator to 0.20g, I got to work.

Let me tell you, the spherical collection method worked absolutely perfectly. Given that I have only the one collector, sometimes ore gets stuck on the wrong side of the generator, but that isn't such a problem. I also have to make sure I check all the nooks and crannies around the hull to make sure I don't have a fragment of ore lodged somewhere before I move the ship, as loose items have a way with tearing through an unprotected hull.

But for now, I've got some sweet, sweet uranium to dig up.