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.