Survival or Creative

[Jerry]

What is more worth playing?

[NYVS]

Survival with:
Realistic Skybox mod (makes night night)
24 hour day-night cycle
1x inventory
Good luck, I'm on day 3.5 on Mars...I got maybe 8 hours of air left...

[ShadedMJ]

"What is more worth playing?"
It would help if you declare your definitions, or know what definitions are for Keen.

If you just want to build ships, for the likely goal of destroying them later, then use creative.

Classic survival mechanics are not present in Space Engineers by default. You are more likely to have your character die just from accidentally flying into something. There is no food or water, for example.

[Dan2D3D]

I want to create right away so I'll say > Creative!

Depends on what you like but I recommend to start in the "Lone survivor" world (this one is creative by default) and learn about all blocks by trying and testing.

= it is how to become a good Engineer

[Karmaterrorᵁᴷ]

Survivals good for a few playthroughs. Its also good for learning the blocks as you build what you actually need.

But after a few goes survival can get sort of repetative. Creative is where i live now. I just build crazy contraptions and work on all kinds of stuff.

So they both good and if your learning survival is a better teacher. But creative is where you can let your imagination run wild :)

[cptsavarus]

I like to create survival-friendly builds for the workshop (among other things), so I play in both modes.
Normally I'll rough out my designs in Creative mode, then play some Survival where I build, test & tweak them til I'm happy they're ready for public consumption.
I also use Survival mode to figure out what's actually needed. I'll then go back to Creative & hash out new designs based on those requirements - and finally back to Survival to test them & put them through their paces.

Both are useful & fun but which you'll use the most depends on the overall experience you want to have.

[Baratheon79]

Like a few other people have said, it depends. In my case, I used to mess around in creative when I first got the game, while I was figuring things out. Then I started playing in survival mode and, well, so far I've spent a couple years on the same survival game (I would say probably 60-70% or so my total time played in this game).

I do still go into creative when I want to throw something together quickly, though. Like a couple weeks ago, when I decided to recreate one of my old builds from late 2014, which I no longer had the blueprint for, using just the handful of screenshots I had uploaded to Steam for reference.

[PolecatEZ]

I use creative to make my designs to blueprint, and then survival mode to actually build those blueprints and feel a sense of accomplishment.

[Tiberius Lacedaemon]

Survival only, even if you're only going to build things. Just activate admin mode if that's the goal.

Reason being, survival forces you to pay attention to detail. You know how many workshop ships are out there that looks amazing but once you look inside, it's the most pathetic thing you have ever seen? Trust me, this is the majority.

With creative, you don't know what's wrong. You can only see, but you're human, you will miss things. Always.

With survival, like I said, it forces you to pay extra attention to detail. For example, things like thrusters too close to each other, conveyors not connected, inventory size, etc...

Survival is the only place you should build things, not creative.

People don't want to use ships for looks. They want functionality. If you build ships that don't function in the game mode that is most used online, then what's the point? Looks? Great, after you're done looking at it for a few seconds, now what? Can't fly the ship without it blowing up in several points.

But it is up to you.

[Sanquin]

Imo creative to test out builds and mess around with what's possible.

Survival for actually playing the game.

Unless you just want to build cool stuff or have fights with friends. Then creative as well.