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[McTraveller]

I keep seeing SE update itself in Steam... but I just can't bring myself to launch it again.  I had such high hopes... and now I'm just full of mopes 

Because it's probably just a rant:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

What irks me most is the internal inconsistency of construction. Catwalks having more mass than a hull block? Large thrusters material requirements not scaling anything sensibly with size or thrust?  A block started with just a single steel plate ends up having the mass of the entire finished block? Game can't decide if mass/materials scales with volume or surface area? Large blocks being so large... it's fun having a single light or chair in a 2.5 m cube (that's like sitting a single chair in the middle of an 8-foot by 8-foot bedroom... with nothing else in it.

For a game with 'engineer' in the title, stuff like that just made me annoyed.  And I couldn't even bring myself to just get into creative mode, because without material scarcity, engineering tradeoffs aren't meaningful... and then there is the metagame stuff; I don't want to have to write C# code to script my blocks to do basic things!

[Gabeux]

Just mod it to death.

I highly recommend the Exploration Enhancement Mod, along with the Planetary Cargo Ships (and all the encounter mods for it).
Did the combat/warfare start with a fighter ship, disabled, boarded and caputred a silly pirate cargo ship, and in the process of trying to land/attach it to an asteroid I got attacked by a drone armed with gatlings and rockets.
I kill the drone, and as I'm grinding it while EVA, something bumps both my ship and the downed drone violently - as sound is on Realistic, I'm confused.
As I look down, a stealthy son of a bitch of a pirate melee/grinder ship was trying to murder me. With grinders.
But let's assume that pirate was a newbie and couldn't maneuver among two ships properly, so I simply grinded the cockpit and placed my own cockpit. It's a great grinding ship, perfect for capturing operations! Just what I needed, given that I need to grind half of the silly cargo ship in order to land it (and use it as a safe haven).

As I think the action is over, nope. 3 tiny drones with no antennas attack the hell out of me. Took me some reloads I valiantly murdered all three of them, grinded them down with their own grinders, and proceeded to clean up and land my stupid base.
10 minutes later, 2 weird pirate salvage drones came looking for something to repair. I have no idea why, but they were instantly grinded.


This is pretty amazing, it doesn't feel like the derp-master zero-content Space Engineers at all. The mod makes it feel like it's a mix between SE and StarMade.
You can also start as a miner, trader or the default survival-in-a-pod. I always wanted to just start with a fighter and be forced to survive and repair using the remains of battles, and I finally accomplished that. Pretty good. Praise be the modders

[Ygdrad]

The problem with space engineers is the same problem a lot of space building games have. You have nothing to do with your creations, no threatening enemies to take on, no goals. Until there is something to do aside from building and mining and going after some random ship on rails, this game will keep dying.

[zombat]

Is the mp playable yet and do we still have a server?

[BigD145]

Exploration Enhancement still turns my sim speed into a roller coaster, making it unplayable.

[Gabeux]

Exploration Enhancement still turns my sim speed into a roller coaster, making it unplayable.

Have you tried the latest version? It's the first time I use it, but I saw one or two youtubers saying they couldn't play it before and now they can.

The problem with space engineers is the same problem a lot of space building games have. You have nothing to do with your creations, no threatening enemies to take on, no goals. Until there is something to do aside from building and mining and going after some random ship on rails, this game will keep dying.

Currently the only game I have hope for is Empyrion. An actual game might come out of it, and every couple of months I give it a look and they added cool features.
SE is really a "make your own game out of it", kinda like what Minecraft was before Vanilla had a 'story'. It's the same way I see X:Rebirth too, the base game is pretty poor, but with mods it can actually become something fun.

And I spoke too soon, as my first two hours were amazing with the EEM, but after that the derpiness of SE got in the way, launching me or my ships unexplicably far for no reason, stuff spontaneously exploding after coming into contact with small floating resources/parts, and all that. I also got attacked by a frigate and a corvette, and all I had was 2 functional gatling guns on the captured grinder and a stupid gatling turret that would fire on my ship as it still has some non-hacked blocks on it. The amount of reloads it took to win, and the 4 minutes + loading time might make me simply play it in 'ironman' mode.

[BurnedToast]

I've found a new scenario, called Super Engineer Adventures. Ignore the silly name, it's actually pretty good.. at least so far. It's similar to escape from mars - you have to find and attack a series of pirate bases to hack computers and unlock more blocks.

You start out with a basic base and a basic rover and a modest amount of components, so the start is not nearly as much of a grind as escape from mars. Unlike escape from mars, you start with refineries unlocked and unlock ship drills fairly quickly so it's a lot more open ended - you aren't restricted to raiding to get resources which means you can afford to build giant death cubes or inefficient PMWs or whatever you want. Pirate bases all seem to have pretty big amounts of loot, plus the loot from the pirate drones means you don't really need to play space miner if you don't want to though, which is nice.

Unfortunately it's still space engineers, so you have all the baggage that comes with it. Specifically, you have to build everything by hand for a while (ship welders not unlocked) which is incredibly tedious. Wheels are also problematic as usual, but at least you unlock atmos thrusters pretty quickly. It also means the whole thing is pretty easy to trivialize using traditional SE "exploits" such as turret sniping or just digging under the bases and coming up from below to avoid the turrets but it's singleplayer/co-op so it's up to you if you want to use those or not.

It's less focused and arguably less balanced than escape from mars (not that less balanced means much for SE) but it's still a LOT more fun than I've had with the game in a long time and shows off the potential the game actually has if keen ever decides to do anything with it.

[Sensei]

Is the mp playable yet and do we still have a server?

The netcode is decent and client performance is getting better all the time, but servers still chug when too many large ships are moving at once.

I'm afraid I'm not longer hosting a server as I can't port forward where I am now. Not sure if anyone else is.

[BigD145]

I've found a new scenario, called Super Engineer Adventures. Ignore the silly name, it's actually pretty good.. at least so far. It's similar to escape from mars - you have to find and attack a series of pirate bases to hack computers and unlock more blocks.

You start out with a basic base and a basic rover and a modest amount of components, so the start is not nearly as much of a grind as escape from mars. Unlike escape from mars, you start with refineries unlocked and unlock ship drills fairly quickly so it's a lot more open ended - you aren't restricted to raiding to get resources which means you can afford to build giant death cubes or inefficient PMWs or whatever you want. Pirate bases all seem to have pretty big amounts of loot, plus the loot from the pirate drones means you don't really need to play space miner if you don't want to though, which is nice.

Unfortunately it's still space engineers, so you have all the baggage that comes with it. Specifically, you have to build everything by hand for a while (ship welders not unlocked) which is incredibly tedious. Wheels are also problematic as usual, but at least you unlock atmos thrusters pretty quickly. It also means the whole thing is pretty easy to trivialize using traditional SE "exploits" such as turret sniping or just digging under the bases and coming up from below to avoid the turrets but it's singleplayer/co-op so it's up to you if you want to use those or not.

It's less focused and arguably less balanced than escape from mars (not that less balanced means much for SE) but it's still a LOT more fun than I've had with the game in a long time and shows off the potential the game actually has if keen ever decides to do anything with it.

It's not bad but with the way a lot of enemies spawn you kinda need to run this coop. Half the time you'll be kiting them away from a base so you can zip back to take out turrets outside their range and destroy spawn antennas.

[Gabeux]

Specifically, you have to build everything by hand for a while (ship welders not unlocked) which is incredibly tedious.

Aw.
SE is incredibly time consuming just by doing the cool stuff. I just can't play it anymore without the Nanobot Build and Repair mod, that welds/grinds stuff for you automagically.
Although I think the way welding/grinding is handled is pretty cool, I'd constantly break vanilla welders, and building basic bases would take too many hours.

I now steal a pirate ship, bring it home and turn down my turrets from a distance, merge it on my base and paint it bright red, which is the "Grind Color" for the nanobots. They go nomnomnom while I repair and gear up for the next heist. Love it.

[Sensei]

I think that the game itself, as it stands, has enough mechanics to be fun. There's still things people want and still some bugs, but if lack of features is still what's holding you back from enjoying it then you'll probably never be satisfied. What it really lacks is goals, like Minecraft or Terraria has, just some basic motivator of a challenging task that gives some kind of reward. Unless you're fighting other players or using mods which create a scenario, all there is to do is build stuff and kill a few pirates before doing so gets repetitive.

[Sensei]

Well the loot crates (I have to read up on how they work still to decide whether or not I hate them) might be a step in the right direction. If they're willing to just, say, lock the blueprints you need for better quality tools inside a pirate base, it would make an enormous difference on how the game plays, and they can expand on it from there. I think they're been focusing on finishing all the mechanics they want before they try to create goals for the player, but this could indicate they're getting more interested in goals.

[BigD145]

Empyrion still has more to do, it just has the worst interface in all ways. The mods that add some life to space engineers tend to bring the simulation to a grinding halt. The Mars escape mod/scenario was great. A breath of fresh air. I recommend starting right there. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=873858780

[Gabeux]

Just a heads up that Empyrion UI was improved. It's definitely worth a try to anyone who enjoys Space Engineers. It lacks the physics and the complexity atm, however, but at least the physics won't grief you to death like SE does.

[Egan_BW]

Hmm. Remove assemblers, make the requirements for building blocks lower, so each individual part matters more, make it so that you need schematics to build some things, make grinding things down not give you all the resources back, let you merge grids together with just the welder rather than merge blocks only. That would make for a pretty interesting space survival / scavenging game, right? I don't care much for mining or planets.