How to play Nimbatus in co-op

A brief tutorial about the basics to manually add multiple local players to the game, and even make it online by yourself. Created for version 0.5.7 Early Access.

Local co-op basics

Decoupler

Location: 6th tab (Mechanical Parts), 3rd item
The central piece for a local co-op experience. You can build a ship attached to a decoupler, and upon activating the decoupler, this ship will be free from the other parts, as an independent drone.

Multiple inputs

When you add Thrusters and Weapons, you'll notice you have to bind the keys to activate that parts. So you can easily design multiple ships, prepare them for decoupling, and use different sets of inputs for each independent drone.

For example, if two players will play on keyboard, one can use WASD to move, while other can use arrow keys.

It's also possible to bind joystick as inputs for pieces, but with some limitation for now: you can only use about 8 buttons on each joystick and no directionals.

Weapons

By default, weapons follow the rotation of the mouse cursor and are activated by clicking. At best you'll leave the mouse control for one ship to use, and the rest might need to set the Rotation for its weapons to Fixed, and enable them with a separate keybind, close to their set of keys.

Camera

Location: 9th tab (Sensors), 4th item
Another very important part to add on each ship is a camera, so when they're activated, they'll zoom on each ship and follow them.

When two activated cameras get distant from each other, the game will try to zoom out a little to show both, but there's a limit: if they get too distant, the game will show the middle between them, effectively showing neither.

Required pieces

Each ship will need its own Batteries and Fuel to supply its parts as soon as it's detached from the rest.

Advanced co-op

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1531478337

Switch

Location: 10th tab (Logic Parts), 10th item
To have multiple stuff activated with toogles (like camera control, shields), you can place a Switch on the Drone Core to Enable/Disable a constant key press.

For example, if you Decouple with F1, and set Camera/Shields to F2, then add a switch Switch with Toggle F1, Activate F2. As soon as you Decouple with F1 to separate the ships, F2 will be pressed all the time (until you press F1 again), so the cameras and shields will always be active without the need for a press of each player.

Factory Part

Location: 6th tab (Mechanical Parts), 8th item
You can make each ship "respawnable" by using a Factory for each ship instead of a Decoupler, then build the ship over it. It'll have a Decouple key as well, and a separate Print key to make it regenerate.

Mind you there's a cooldown for Printing, visible by the orange filling of the Factory box. This cooldown depends on the amount of parts of the ship it produces: the more parts, the longer it takes to respawn.

Flying Drone Core

You can use the Drone Core on one of the ships, but you can also just ignore it. If you want to work with Factories for each ship, you'll need to keep the Drone Core with its Factories flying all the time. Add Fuel and multiple Thrusters to keep it up, and Directional Sensor to trigger Thrusters on its extremes to keep it stable.

TNT

Location: 7th tab (Weapons), 4th item
You can add explosives near the cameras of each ship to make a button that will explode the ship cameras, useful before respawning it, otherwise you might end up controlling multiple ships. It's useful to forfeit a ship that lost key parts.

Symmetry versus Asymmetry

You can make all ships the same with all desired capabilities (fighting, digging, mining, barrel-carrying), or you can make separate ships with unique roles if you want as well. It's your call.

Playing it online

Parsec

While the game doesn't support itself online play, you can use Parsec[parsecgaming.com] to host an online session of it for others.

The host will need the game opened, the Drone with mutliple ships ready. A good upload bandwith is recommended.

The clients will connect to the host, can use their own controllers, and will require a good download bandwith.

Basically, the game will stream video/audio from the host to clients with a very low latency, while the clients will send their keys, mouse movements or clicks, or joystick inputs to the host.

Joysticks won't even be needed: while you can repeat the same keys for different ships, you can use small keygroups for each player you require: WASD for 1, TFGH for 2, IJKL for 3, Arrows for 4, Home/Delete/End/PgDown for 5, Numpad 8/4/5/6 for 6. You can even make a full mouse-controlled ship for 7.

Parsec works with any local co-op game on its own. The latency will depend mainly on the ping between the players.

If you don't have a good upload bandwith, try lowering the streaming resolution, or reducing the streaming framerate to make it stable.

[Rotaredom]

And if you want custom PVP, use TNT with 0 range in place of decouplers

[Rocketeer]

Also, a hivemind design using massproduced factory droids, some sensor rigs and weaponry/explosives can be used for the cursor player to have a supporting fighting roll.

[Rocketeer]

Another useful thing that could be potentially made for coop is a large mothership, and let them manage recreating rockets, handle shielding and things, while you handle the controls of the missles and drones under your control, also i mean having some robot grabber arms in there too can be pretty useful, i use grabber arms with grappling hooks to grab things i need or move ships. Also, you dont need two drones, you can split up sections of a drone for seperate control. I could see how this could be useful with two trained players using remote coop to win sumo fights by using seperate drones, which would be normally hard to control with advanced controls. But if you split it up you could tag team with smaller drones.

[Darkness]

Back when I did this, the game was just released into early access, so it lacked many sensors that were added later.

[Darkness]

Awesome job!

[joemama1512]

Using this guide, I went with engineer with a core with logic/battery/fuel, factory to one lander-style ship with guided rockets and flamethrowers and magnet using arrow key controls and mouse. Then a second mouse-controlled ship with diggers front (g), wasd control, a "laser pointer" front with some snipers so you can aim better with no mouse, and automatic "butt blasters" that detect enemies behind and fire spread weapons. Plus automated resource collection. Works great!

[joemama1512]

I would also point out a few other ways to play, especially with smaller kids:
-- Let them be the gunner while you fly around transporting barrels,etc.

-- Even before factory but especially after, build missile racks that they can launch and control filled with TNT. be sure to include a camera tracker and bind it to their movement keys or constant On tag once missile is launched. camera reverts after it blows up.

-- Let them control Heater/Cooler as well as Shields and Magnet. You can automate heat/cool somewhat, but it gives them something to do.

-- let them launch autonomous craft (after factory). Basically a simple falling spinner, or more likely 2 TNT with 1 vtol set to nearest enemy and 1 proximity sensor to blow up the tnt. Those can be spammed quickly enough to keep them entertained.

[Darkness]

Glad to help, hopefully you'll enjoy it!

[joemama1512]

Appreciate this guide! I never really thought about this, but my kids love playing it with me. I make some kind of factory-cruise-missile contraption they can play with or whatever. But making an entirely separate drone is genius!

[Darkness]

Yeah! I'm honestly surprised the devs enabled Steam Remote Play Together on the game, I've never seen it enabled for non-local co-op games before, wasn't even sure it'd be possible! Regardless, Parsec still does this job better, hehe.