Engineering Log 1

HEY LOOK IT’S A FIRST!

This is the first entry for the game Space Engineers. Now here’s the thing, I’ve played SE for a good while now. Since before I got my current PC. Back when it first came out my laptop could handle it more or less. As the devs added more and more stuff, though…

So when I got my PC the first thing I did was load up SE and lost myself in space survival. SE is a lot like Minecraft in that you craft things you need to survive. You start in a ship that has a bunch of stuff but not enough to sustain you indefinitely. Oxygen is finite and requires ice to be created. So you mine things to create components that you use to make larger things. Like you need iron to create steel plates and you need steal plate to create armor. Motors, silicon wafers, constructions components and other stuff are all needed for recipes to create things like thrusters, oxygen generators, reactors, weapons, the list goes on and on.

You can do some complicated stuff with all the options. There a blocks that can be programmed, blocks that run on timers, blocks that can move stuff around in a series of conveyors…this game gets pretty deep.

I haven’t gotten that deep in the latest release.

I’m just trying to not die.

Here’s what’s up:

SE was updated a couple of weeks ago to include planets. Before this, you had big asteroids to build bases in. Now you have asteroids, moons, and huge freaking planets! This update is part of the reason I got back into SE. I wanted to see the differences. I tried a couple of the pre-built scenarios but they include NPC pirates that I could never get ahead of on account they sent drones with guns to attack my base at random intervals. They damaged things that I didn’t have the components to fix. It was brutal.

So I quit that noise and started a scenario that drops you in a star system with 3 planets. Maybe there’s pirates here. If there are, I haven’t found them or they haven’t found me yet. Just like the space scenarios, you start in a ship. An atmospheric lander that looks like the ship from Explorers.

I was a little disoriented at first cause I was on the night side of the planet at spawn, chasing the sunset. So I booked it to try and set down before it was completely dark. I found a nice flat spot with pretty good elevation and set down.

My first problem was power. The ship was running on batteries that apparently were recharged by a reactor. Batteries aren’t something I used a lot of in the previous version because I could mine uranium for the reactors pretty easily. I made the mistake of not checking the fuel in the reactor and burned through it recharging the batteries. Here I am in the middle of nowhere and now that I’m on a planet, travel time is a factor. The suit has an energy requirement. The jet pack burns out quick (cause now it requires hydrogen…it didn’t before). And then there’s oxygen, which isn’t a HUGE deal cause I can take my helmet off. The problem is when I build a smaller ship. They’re air tight. So without attaching an oxygen generator, you’ll suffocate if you’re not wearing your helmet, breathing the suit air, which is also finite. Without ice, you can’t make oxygen. Without canisters, you can’t store it to replenish the suit…I lost all my ice and somehow lost my canisters while dismantlement the lander for materials.

I’m getting ahead of myself…okay…so I land and make a base. 

This is just before sunrise. In hindsight, I should have turned my flood light on. I’ll make sure I do that from now on. At this point I’ve moved the medical station from the lander to the base (this is key because it gives you a place to spawn when you die) and most of the material in the cargo container.

I had enough components to build a couple of batteries for the base that get charged by this small solar array. After a few day night cycles, I can see that what I have isn’t enough, but I don’t have the components to build more of either…So there will probably come a point where I’m waiting out the night cause I don’t have the power to craft anything. Do make more, I need silicon. To get to a place where silicon may be, I need transport. So I built this:

Realized in trial and error that without a O2 generator behind the cockpit I was going to burn through my suit O2 pretty quick and then realized I had no canisters to replenish it on long journeys. So I build one and put ice in it. I apparently put ALL my ice in it. That’ll come up later…Got stuck the second I tried to drive off the base because the ramps were too steep. So I fixed that. Ramps and slopes are two very different things.

About 2 seconds of “Hey look at me driving” I flip it.

This is a problem. The root cause is the tires. The chassis is too low to the ground for this hilly terrain. So I need to get this thing flipped. I can’t take it apart and put it back together because I’ll lose the power cells needed to build the battery. Those don’t survive the deconstruction process and they require resources I don’t have. So I built a large thruster on one side. It took some doing, but I managed to pull it off.

I needed to fix the tire situation. So I got it back to the base and ran into some issues. You can’t just change out wheels. They need the clearance to be placed. So I had to jack up my rover somehow.

Got it up and put in center supports so I could take out the blocks under the tires. That all worked pretty sweet as you can see:

So now I’m rolling! “Let’s do some mining” I cheer as I head to what looked like a peak with some minerals.

It all happened so fast, guys. So fast I didn’t get screenshots. I got myself stuck right next to the ledge of the peak I was heading to. I was gunning it to get myself free and it took a tumble down the mountain. I died and respawned at my medical station to start building this:

Screw driving. I’ll just fly. I’ll build a little power lifter to go pick up the pieces of the rover, cause you know…waste not, want not. See that red line on my status? That’s my oxygen level in the suit. Cockpits are air tight. I can build an O2 generator for the cockpit no problem. But I have no ice to put in it to generate oxygen….so I’m basically stuck. I wouldn’t survive the trip out the to rover.

So that’s where I am now. We’re all caught up. This was a long one but I managed to screw myself over quite a bit in yesterday’s session!

There’s a lot this game can do and I’ve only really just scratched the surface in both this and the previous version. If I switched to creative, I could just do whatever i want. But I feel like survival forces me to learn how everything works together first hand as opposed to just Googling it. Bases and stations can get pretty elaborate. Ships, too.

Have a question? Have a suggestion to get me through this impediment? Drop a note in the comments….cause I got no flipping clue how to fix this….