Crashed Red Ship: Scenario Guide

Ever tried the Crashed Red Ship starting scenario? Here I lay out a description of the wreckage and how you can go about creating a small base akin to those provided in other starts from what you find around you. This method is optimised for a game with full realism settings, but will of course only get simpler if you change these. I also include a specific list of where the various ingots are tied up, the wreckage provides a great deal of resources for your fledgling base.

Crashed Red Ship

Hey! Who left that asteroid there?!

You will wake in space not far from the wreckage of a ship which has ploughed bow-first into a 'roid.
Take a moment to admire your handiwork, they warned you against surfing Facebook from the cockpit, now look at the mess you've made...

A flickering of digits draws your attention to your HUD where your suit energy has already begun to trickle away. Best we get started, eh?

There are as many ways to play Space Engineers as there are players. In a sandbox game like this its very hard for me to predict what you actually want to do. Because of this im making some assumptions.

I'm assuming you wont be targetting any Cargo Ships or mining, everything you need comes from the wreck. Im assuming asteroids are off, if they are not then you need to get into the shadow of the asteroid and stay there asap, move the wreck. I'm also assuming that you want to establish a base somewhat similar to those provided by the two 'easy starts' and the 'lone survivor'. If this is not your goal then there are still some useful notes for you on what the wreckage contains and where to find it.

Well how do we go about this?

Stock Check and Cleaning House

The Red Ship as you inherit it comprises a central spine with 2 winglike nacelles, the front end is ripped open against an asteroid exposing 3 floors. On the lower a corridor runs along to the bridge with a large reactor and the cockpit. 2 ramps off this corridor lead into the nacelles which also contain large reactors. On the upper floor can be found the gravity generator and gyroscopes. The middle floor is empty.

Get back inside the wreckage, the easiest access points are the crumpled bow or a 1x1 hole leading into each of the reactor rooms, make your way to the cockpit and take control of the ship.
You will find from the control panel that when you fire up the reactors the Red Ship has a lot of systems running, everything in fact. Power down the thrusters, gyros and lights. The ship is fitted with 3x Large Reactors with fuel split equally between them. Power down 2 of these and move their uranium into the third. I prefer to shut-down the 2 in the wings and keep the reactor behind the cockpit.

You now face a choice that depends on how comfortable you are working in zero-g.
I prefer to completely power off the reactor we are keeping and work from here on weightless,
making trips back to the cockpit to fire up the reactor just long enough for a suit charge.
If this is not to your taste then you can leave the reactor running in order to power the gravity generator. This eats your uranium reserves considerably faster, if you follow this route then i highly recommend scaling the gravity generator back to around 0.6g, which gives enough gravity to get around and stops loose material floating away, but lengthens the reactorlife by a good chunk.

If you choose to work weightless then you will need to find a spot to drop excess material where it wont float off. I like to use one of the lateral reactor rooms for this, just block the 1x1 hole in the wall and remember not to tear out any of the thrusters attached to this nacelle as this will breach your 'storage compartment'.

So we now have life support. We know where to go to charge the suit and have done what we can to give us as much time as possible. Make no mistake, uranium is your clock here.
The wreckage of the Red Ship will provide most of the material you need to bootstrap your facility, but theres no more uranium kicking about, sooner or later you will have to sort this issue out.

Moving On and Out

Some videos i've watched online show that often players will begin constructing facilities they need on the Red Ship itself. I avoid this for one main reason, the wreckage provides resources and I dont always know exactly what I will be chopping off it, or when for that matter.

So instead, lets create a New Station. I like to setup a 5x5 platform of light armour blocks attached to the asteroid just below the wreck, I shouldn't need to tell you where to get the plates, you are sitting on hundreds of tons of it. Just be mindful what you cut, dont chop the wreck into pieces, trim the edges. When working with high realism make this platform as close to the wreck as is comfortable.

Note that *below* of course doesn't mean anything in space, if you are still using the gravity generator on the wreck then place your platform as best you can on the main grid and then use the Red Ship's gyros to spin and pivot it in place until the g-field aligns correctly with your new platform.

So we have something to build on, it's lame, but it's a start. Make it look slightly less pathetic by placing a small reactor and assembler, you can get everything you need for the reactor from the large ones on the wreck.
Go ahead and transfer a little bit of uranium so that it's ready when we need it, but keep most on the wreck where we charge our suit.


Here comes what I find to be the most critical part of this scenario. Depending on which tactic you use the next little stage has serious potential to kill you if you mess it up, so check and double-check everything before you make your move.

We want to build an Assembler on the platform. Many threads and videos i've inspected folks mention they build a Refinery first. This is probably a fair idea if your next move will be to go hunt for ore, but I'm not going to pick up a drill until our base is practically finished. In addition, the Assembler doubles as our first storage unit.

Now we dont have the Displays to build an Assembler, maybe this is why people default to a refinery and run off chasing silicon for them. If you are moving everything to the platform during this stage then remember to transport the rest of the uranium across once the cockpit moves.

You can do this next bit in 2 ways.

• Dismantle the 'cockpit 2' and immediately build a 'cockpit 3' down on the platform, power up the reactor and move across all your uranium. Move the gravity generator if using it. This leaves you with 6 displays left over, which finishes the assembler and leaves some for storage. This is the sane way and I only just realised the 'cockpit 3' uses fewer displays than the '2'.
  
  For quite a while I didn't know about #1. Never realised the mk 3 cockpit uses less displays so I came up with the following route which you can use if a masochist, just for giggles or if the little voices insist on a cockpit 2 (or even a move direct to a small ship lifesupport).
  
  
• Gather up around 100 computers from the wreckage, computers can be gathered from the gyros, thrusters and reactors, unfortunately they are behind very bulky components in thrusters, so go for the reactors, gyros and small thrusts. From here you gotta be ninja and already have the computers to hand, mess it up and you will almost certainly die. Trash the cockpit. Build the Assembler. Disassemble computers to gather silicon (be extra careful to retain 100 for the cockpit, you cannot use these) and build 4 new displays. Rebuild cockpit 2 (or small ship cockpit, glass is optional remember). Breathe.
  
  This becomes far less stressful with proper planning, have your assembler built as far as it will go, dont leave anything to grind after the cockpit goes down and make sure you know where your fuel is. It will be fine.
  
  With your new cockpit placed and assembler finished you can make a further display for a small storage unit.
  

Profit?

This is the point at which this scenario becomes much like any other. You have a little platform with a cockpit and assembler powered by a small reactor. You can use this Assembler to break down any of the components you have and then recombine the results to make whatever you need. If you have free floating material (which you almost certainly do) then you can store it in the assembler for now. Go ahead and place your Refinery as soon as you can, I like to place things long before I can/want to complete them, simply to give me a place to dump components.

If you have been using the gravity generator a lot then it may be time to look for fuel, working in weightless conditions with reactors off during the earlier stages leaves you with a better buffer.

You will want to extend your platform, theres more than enough material in the wreck we just left to complete it. You'll need more displays for storage and a ship. The main bottleneck in your resources is Silicon, if you are building a ship then be sure to save some for the cockpit. There are a fair number of computers to be harvested however and you should manage to build a small mining ship with ease, I usually have a beacon up too before heading out to mine for the first time. (Uranium, Silicon, Nickel, your 3 weaknesses). You can put a large ore detector on the platform using platinum from thruster components and power it up for a moment to scan your starting asteroid before deciding on how exactly to mine what you want, or activate cargo ships and go looking for uranium, solar cells and miscelaneous loot. Theres even enough resources to completely sever one of the Red Ship nacelles and make it an independant craft to add to your enterprise.



You're an engineer! Go engineer something!

Where can I find X?

The entire idea behind building the Assembler first as we have done here is for Disassembly/Reassembly. Some components you need can be stripped right off the wreck. Others you will have to assemble after breaking down other things.

Note that there is not enough Nickel in the wreck to build a medical room, even if you broke up every motor, which you cant afford to do. There are sufficient computers (and therefore Silicon) to build a fairly extravagant first small ship in addition to a beacon should you so wish, you can even make the glass for the cockpit.

Here are a few notes on where to find certain components and which to disassemble for specific ingots.

10x Displays are only found in the cockpit.
Computers: Thrusters, Reactors, Gyroscopes, Gravity Generator
Small pipes: Ramps in the reactor rooms and main corridor
Large pipes: Landing Gear
Motors: Landing Gear, Gyroscopes, Reactors (motors in cockpit not counted as they end up somewhere you cant use them no matter how you do it)
Interior plates: Corridor floor, replace with light armour if still in use.
Metal Grids: Ramps

Iron: Really? Everything is iron... The wreck even leaves a smear of iron on your starting 'roid after the impact if you really have to mine.
Silicon: Your only source of silicon is disassembling computers.
Silver: The only source of Silver is the reactor components, but thankfully you got 3 large reactor's worth
Cobalt: Thruster components, Motors
Nickel: Motors
Gold: Thruster components
Platinum: Thrusters again

Author Comments

Scenario Difficulty: Moderate

It's easier than starting in just the yellow recovery ship by some way since you have so much to work with. Its somewhat harder than the various platform starts however since it takes some time and effort to convert the wreck into a basic foundation and starting uranium is not particularly great.

Still, there is sufficient resources to create a platform with cockpit, assembler, refinery, storage, gravity and beacon in addition to a small mining vessel and a basic large ship (i saw off a nacelle and mount a cockpit 3 in it) The basics of your very own empire.

v0.1 - Document Created
v0.2 - tweaks, screenshots
v0.3 - edit acknowledging re-write of scenario

edit: Note that this guide was written for the original version of this scenario. When conveyors were made functional the red ship was reworked and the crashed version used in this scenario gained the benefit. Thanks to this you have more to pillage than listed above. Solar panels and conveyor tubes will yield much silicon, and you have some partial fabrication systems in-place too. Scenario is now a cake-walk.

[TheZerotje]

@vetinarii83
i have a question about the red ship my friend and i like to explore and just start to fly away
so we found this unmanned ship is that put in the game or was just luck and if so cords we lost the ship so we need to find it back :/

[Arsenic Flask ]

@vetinarii83 do you have a guide for the current star system scenario? everytime i either die during the landing cause i ran out of fuel or some vital parts of the lander get ripped off. or if i manage to stick the landing i find nothing but ice and rocks everywhere.

[celem]

Yes, this guide is incredibly out of date, it was written for a very early Alpha, and was infact obsolete within about 4 days, since they added a whole bunch of extra equipment to the Red Ship once they got the conveyor system into the game. Theres not actually any real need for a guide for the scenario these days, since theres not much challenge to it. The original layout was genuinely challenging to survive in.

[Arsenic Flask ]

on my red ship there were 2 assemblers and 1 refinery plus a medical room. so i just repaired the ship kept it stocked with uranium from the asteroid and started building a station next to it. when i needed some parts i couldn't get anywhere i just stole a pirate ship.

[YissnakkJr]

my favorite technique is to detach one of the engines, put all the uranium into the reactor of that engine, and pick and asteroid so i can begin building elsewhere

[celem]

good call, those ingots also store in the refinery outputs if you are that storage-strapped.

[Jakesnake5]

Something not too well known.

If you have a bunch of items in storage not being used for anything anytime soon, disassemble them.

Reason for this is that the ingots you extract for each item takes up less space than the item itself. You can assemble what you may need later, but for now, you don't need quite as much storage for all those parts.

[Jakesnake5]

They had also remove computers from thrusters. This comes in play when you hijack a ship, and you don't have to hack the thrusters just to stop/move the bloody thing.

It does, however, mess up with build proceedures just a bit. I use the old pre-1.030 ship design in my CRS worlds, as a mod, so I have to get the Assembler built from reactor bits.(You only need 1)

[celem]

Been a while since I swung by here. various comments regarding extra silicon, panels, second assemblers...

This guide was actually written just a day or two before the scenario was patched to what you are describing. There is very little challenge in the current version of this. The original CRS was pretty hardcore as described above.

[Yngv4rr]

Good guide, but as I remember on this wreck there are two assemblers in front part on deck 2, one unfinished. So for building them on platform we just need to take their parts an bring to the platform, where we can build new one, fully functional.