Dealing with spiders/wolves in the super-early game.

[Cutesune]

I'm a survival fan, veteran Space Engineer, and masochist. I want to play a stupid armageddon playthrough in survival mode, with spiders enabled and meteors dialed up to 11!

The meteors are fine. However, I can't actually see how you're meant to survive with wild critters turned on right out the gate. You get started off with 3 magazines and an assault rifle, which is fine. But the survival kit doesn't craft ammo and 3 magazines is going to last about 3 or 4 waves of spiders if you're lucky.

What strategies do people have for spiders without needing ammo?

Melee with an angle grinder doesn't seem to go well, a lone spider you can sometimes kill unharmed, but if there's more than 1 their buddies like to tunnel up behind you mid melee. Solutions using industrial grinders are pointless; if you can build an industrial grinder you can build an assembler and thus build ammo.

The jump from starter pod to assembler just seems a little too long to be reasonable:

-> Starter pod (Small grid)
-> Large grid foundation
-> Solar or wind turbine [Depending on presence of atmosphere]
-> Assembler [use spider drops to supplement construction]
-> Pray to RNGesus for magnesium drop from spider
-> MOAR DAKKA!!111

* Complete this chain with 135 bullets.

Would a connector work if the large grid is unpowered? (Use the starter pod's power supply to run a large block assembler), or did they disable that? (I remember they flipflopping a few times in development).


Thoughts?

[cptsavarus]

Yes, you can definitely still power a large grid from a small grid connector.
You would need to find a way to power the large grid initially so the connectors can connect - but once they're connected it doesn't matter if the large grid has its own power source or not.
There should be enough time to get yourself a wind farm up & running before you run out of bullets.

In my planet-start survival games I always begin by using my first rover to supplement the power to my base in order to run everything until I can get more power going. As soon as I have a rover I build a connector dock for it. Apart from anything, it makes transferring cargo to your base that much quicker.

I agree with you that survival is nigh impossible against mobs when they spawn right from the start. This is why I never play with spiders & wolves enabled.
I don't like playing wave defence games at the best of times but when you're not even given the means to defend yourself for long enough to not run out of options, resources and time... well that's not what I call fun - more like getting your @ss handed to you for the sake of masochism.

Then usually by the time I'm built up to the point where resources for ammo & weapons isn't a problem, I've lost interest in fighting anything anyway and am too busy thinking about cool things to build next to be bothered with playing base defence.
I also get hacked off when I want to build something but there's no Magnesium because my assemblers constantly need it for making more ammo.

I just leave spiders & wolves turned off and roleplay that I killed them. The end result is the same... no spiders and I get a cool new ship!

[jhax]

I hate to necro a thread, but I was searching for this recently, and after playing a while and figuring it out I thought I'd comment for anyone who comes by and finds the same thread I did:

If you enable wolves and/or spiders, in early game I've found their AI to be quite dumb - so what I've done so far is this:
In early game you have to mine a lot, so just get started mining
1) make sure mine is only escapable from one direction w/o jetpack
2) put wall around the one entrance
once you have a trench, use your first couple steel plates to build a wall around the entrance to the mine
go on about business as usual
if you get attacked, drop down into mine, if wolves/spiders follow you, use jetpack to get back out
Here you have 2 options:
1) use the provided starting gun to kill assailants (as you can't build ammo yet, this only works for a limited time)
2) leave them in the hole, use this as a "trap" and start digging another mine