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Single player experience can give you few dozens of hours for fun, until you get into space, when you likely will quit in frustration.
The problem is that someone among developers had not very bright idea of making certain resources scarce and hiding them in small amounts in randomly generated asteroids in space. Those are several kilometers away from each other, and to find if an asteroid contains something useful, you pretty much need to hug it with your ship, because ore detector range is only 150 meters. For example, to make a thruster that requires no fuel and only energy, you need to find platinum, which is rare, takes forever to refine and cost of that thruster is astronomical. To have most powerful power source you need uranium, which is also extremely rare and takes forever to turn into ingots. To make a NORMAL space-faring vehicle you'll need steady supply of hydrogen, which means you'll need to dig for ice, except supply of ICE is limited in space, and it does not appear often. You have to land on planets. The quantities of ice you need to fly are rather obscene too, for example, to fill one large hydrogen tank on large hydrogen ship you'll need 500000kg of ice. And that will be enough to keep one large hydrogen thruster firing for a whopping 19 minutes. Meaning if you have 4 large thrusters, that will be only 5 minutes.
There are also oversights. For example, in the movie in the main menu there are walking vehicles. Except to make such ship you'd need skills comparable to those of a professional programmer, few weeks of scripting work,and once you're done in survival you won't be able to duplicate it easily, because survival does not support blueprints of objects with multiple interconnected moving parts. There are also AI controllers for your ship, except they're glitchy and unusable and love crashing into stuff, which means here goes the idea of having a ship fleet.
ALso, there's no map and no radar.
So, you have empty world, with robot ships, you're alone in there, and can build cars for the heck of it and flying things. Once you get into space, you have a single "wow" moment, but once you realize that you need to hunt for fuel forever, the game starts to royally suck.
You can improve experience with mods, however, but in the end it does not reach its full potential, is lacking in many pieces, unless you only play creative and use it as a virtual lego game.
Mods I recommend:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=599536562
^^ Speed mod. By default space engineers limit max speed to 100 m/s which means reaching moon takes forever, and leaving atmosphere takes osbcene amount of fuel. Upping the limit to at least 500 m/s makes the game more interesting.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1216126863
^^^ Inventory manager. This thing is a bit aggressive, but sorts things into containers and can manage refineries. Useful if you don't want to have a headache building complex conveyer systems and want your station to function in simple way. It also allows you to automatically craft necessary amount of items, which reduces one more hassle.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=857053359
^^^ Automatic nanobot builder. This is a godsend, because you can plop a block and it will finish structures you started within 150m distance from it. This way you can actually concentrate on building, optimizing production change and not running back and forth to nearest cargo container to press a button to schedule more components.
That's the rough idea of it.
Keep in mind that this is mainly a sandbox game with emphathise on building, so creative mode can be better in some case.
Playing with friends highly increase the fun factor of the game, making you laugh at each others terrible creations
There is no real survival aspect for one, and there is no life on any of the planets so the locations feel dead. You may as well just play in creative mode.
The building system is good and engaging, that part is fun. So if you like sandbox building you will enjoy it, but that is it; don't expect it to be anything more than that.
Space Engineers has always been a game with limitless potential hampered by hardware's abitlity to function to the standard the game required and the unwillingness of the devs to add content to fill in for the mechanics removed from those lilitations.
Even so, the vanilla solo will get you a decent amount of gameplay, especially if learning the game from scratch. It can be very rewarding but honestly a lot of fun comes from thing going wrong in various ways and having to work out a solution.
Yes, the essential engineering of things to get to work, trial and error, experimentation, is a good mechanic. As a wise little green friend once said "Failure the greatest teacher is" :P
The problem is the game provides no environment to give a reason to do all that. You may as well be making things inside a big grey garage. The game has zero immersion aspect beyond building things for its own sake.
and the "Survival" is how you can build and keep and eye on your Oxygen, Power and Hydrogen because your character may die if no more Oxygen.
We can play the in-game scenarios or community scenarios.
OR > later on, create PVP and Story worlds to play with friends and/or share on the Workshop.
I create PVP and Story worlds and I reommend to try my "Moon Base Scenario" to see what can be done without using the "Scenario tools" and without Mods/Scripts.
You will be able to test your Engineer Skills building 2 specific ships and conquer all enemy Stations and enemy Mines.
Read the item description to get started :
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1923245080
The current survival mechanic is extremely basic, and reality it means almost nothing. If you want to build you may as well just play in creative mode.
Some of the in-game scenarios do look interesting, but personally I want an open-ended sandbox experience.
Not everyone wants to play PVP and/or looking for combat as a reason to do things, and those things do not make up for a lack of basic game features.
I have asked a member to create a forum discussion about this that I will send to the SE team if it becomes the most talked about this month and I recommend to go post your opinion about it in or go on the Portal to create a "Petition" that is named "Feedback" and add it to your Steam SE forum discussion with the vote Feedback link in and a good Title that shows what is in to have a better visibility to have more votes
Or just go post in the new forum discussion about "Survival" and I will add it to my monthly report.
I did make a printable infinte drill in the end, BUT, you still have to manually reconnect every piston to make this thing work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDSNBLEVZz0
It is completely nuts and greatly limit possible designs.
That would be another discussion, a bit Off Topic imo ;)
That one is close to be added in so I recommend to go add your vote to that existing vote "Feedback" (petition) that is now reaction marked by the Devs as "Under consideration".
Edit
My vote is in for this one cause I would like, too.
Impressive creation you have made there
Build whatever you want, and try to make it work.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yvB9w6gtUM0
Stil tweaking the ride before I post it in the workshop.
Thank you for the response. Much appreciated.
I believe I have already made several posts in the forum discussion about survival.
Presumably the developers sell quite a few copies of the game on Steam?. It's not unreasonable to think they should have a genuine interest in the suggestions made by those that buy the game on Steam.
It was like that in the beginning and for a very long time but not anymore because the community wanted a place to create "Petitions" for all to vote on new shtuff to be added in game and now the participants are A Lot so the Portal is now the best place.
+ the Devs told all they will choose from there if they decide to add more to the game.
Edit
I recommend to create your forum discussion so we will not spam post Off Topic in scarboy17's discussion.