Getting Started the Lazy Way

Getting started in space engineers the lazy guide

Step 1 - Landing and getting started

Firstly pick a faction or no faction and get in a drop pod - I recommend the "earth like" drop pod.



- If by chance you do land badly just grind off your survival kit (located at the rear of the pod (press F to leave your pod when it is landed) Press 2 to operate your grinder and grind it to nothing - then press backspace to respawn.




OK you have landed, and you are the right way up 👍 good job engineer !
now hop back into your seat (mouse click the seat) and press I to bring up the inventory, on the left you will see a helmet (your personal inventory, and a box the ship inventory) - you will see there is a data chip under the seat, right click this and select copy GPS LOCATION, this will provide you with a local trading post, hopefully it's not too far away. Under the GPS tab you can select this location to always be visible.

Step 2 - Stripping the Pod and unlocking Blocks

OK so i lucked out there is a trading station nearby, but i am going to show you how to jerry rig your pod to make it a flyable ship / mole.
Firstly on the ship you need to grind / rebuild to unlock other blocks. the landing gear and small cargo container, so start grinding down most of the ship but only grind the gear down past functional / hack then rebuild to unlock, then grind them to nothing - see pics.

use 1 to switch to welder to re-weld




As you grind the ship down, this thruster is very important it contains mettle grids to allow you to make a couple more thrusters, the Small cargo container is just to the right of this thruster, make sure you only grind it past functional / hack then back up again to unlock blocks, then you can grind it to nothing.




notice i have left connected the 2 conveyers that connect the survival kit to the h2/o2 generator

Step 3 - Getting ready to fly the Pod

Right, now we need to make this thing fly and function, we are not going to build a cockpit, instead we are going to fly this by remote control - press G to bring up your build menu and start typing REMOTE in the search bar, you unlocked this block when you re-welded the landing gear. Place (drag and drop) this into the bottom hotbar - doe's matter which one but i would recommend not the first 3 as 1,2 and 3 are you welder, grinder and drill.



use insert/ del /page up / down to move and rotate untill the remote is facing front with the big light pointing forward (this is when you use W,S,A,D it's pointing the right way - and this is also how we create drones)



press 1 and weld that puppy up, this will unlock more blocks - 🥳
now you can place and weld up a Gyro, do the same as you did for the remote and place one next to it
TADA ! now you can technically control this tin can but we need to make a few adjustments



next grind down the 2 front thrusters here



and using X to use your jet pack, fly above the pod and place them here where the red arrows are, do 1 at a time, because you can only hold so many parts and again use the G menu to find atmospheric thruster (small) to place and weld them up. I have grinded the canter part down so the thrusters fit flush in the pod - my attempt to make this frankenstein monster neat.

!!! make sure the jets point outwards, this will be your left and right control.



Remember if you are running out of energy or H2 (for your jetpack) go to the back of the ship, you will see this panel which is your survival kit - press 0 so you have nothing selected and point at the panel and mouse click - all your energy / health and h2 will restore



Right unfortunately this next bit goes against my lazy ways but we need a few more resources to build 1 more thruster. press 3 to get your drill, press C to crouch, point at the floor and left click to start mining, as you see stone press or just hold F to collect it



do this until the blue bar above your hotbar fills up showing your inventory is full
ok filled up with stone, go to the rear of the ship (the survival kit as it acts as a basic refinery too)



drag and drop the stone into the survival kit



then under production you need 16 motors, but you need to refine the stone so hold down CTRL and select "ignots" this will start to refine the stone.

Hint - mouse click = 1 item, CRTL+Click is 10, Shift+Click is 100 and Shift+Ctrl+Click is 1000

you may need to go mine some more stone to get the full 16 motors 😩



right once you have enough motors made drag them to your personal inventory and lets build the last thruster on top giving us forward thrust



awesome now we have forward right and left thrust



now we need somewhere to sit, i grinded a flat surface on the left of the ship and using G i added passenger seat to my hotbar and welded one for me to sit on



Good Job engineer !



ok we are almost ready for flight, on landing the computer turned off the landing thrusters, of which we still have 2 at the back giving us upward thrust, so we need to turn them back on Press K to bring up the control panel and select the eye logo showing items not in the list



select all the greyed out items and select "show in terminal"



find the 2 UP thrusters and turn them back ON



next select all the thrusters and create and add them to the block group "Thrusters"



do the same with the landing gear



right nearly ready for take off ! at the top select Remote Access and select Control to control your ship - you are now in control of your ship bt it's locked to the ground via the landing gear



you will also notice that your hatbar is blank - this is for ship / drone functions to which we are going to add some now. Press G and select groups - add the landing gear and thruster group we created to the hotbar
Landing Gear - Switch Lock
Thrusters - On / OFF
keys 1 and 2 now control that on your ship, so press 1 to release and then spacebar to go up, C to go down and WSAD to move thou we have no reverse thrust at the moment - we have to spin 180 to slow with the forward thrust - But hey this gets you moving in about 10 min from landing right ?
so we can head over to the trading station

Step 4 - Converting the Pod to a miner / swapping between flying and mining

OK, I will show you one more quick thing you can do with the pod but it's not easy to control

If you unlocked blocks with the small cargo continer as described above then you have access to the conveyors. add small conveyor curved to your hotbar and Drill

Grind off both of the UP thrusters at the rear + the seat and place the small conveyors and weld them up like this



grind a hole in the roof and place the drill so it connects to the conveyors like this



OK you are missing 2 large steel tubes to finish the drill, if you got to the trading post you maybe lucky to buy 2 or trade to get them, but just in case you can do this - grind down the O2 / H2 just past functinal as you have to "borrow" them for the drill and but them back when you need o2 / h2
make sure you only grind down just so you get the 2 large steel tubes



ok grind off the landing gear so it falls to the ground and stand back - it gets a bit wild here XD



press K and click at the top REMOTE ACCESS and when in control press G and add the tool "DRILL" to replace the landing gear (now gone)



now mouse click will use the drill on this monster and when you tun the jets on you can move the mouse and try to get as much stone as you can
experiment with 1 up jet and 2 sides maybe but you can get lost of stone to then make something much better to mine with, what i do is this first when i start swapping them 2 steel tubes when i need H2 and then build a small base to then build better ships



12k of stone in 1 min - enough to build a refinery / wind turbine and assembler to them make my own steel tubes




Hints

When welder selected right click to add items to "build que" use G to see this que, it's at the bottom right - right click to remove items when going up to anything that is connected to production shift+click will auto make the missing items to build.

When using a drill left click it to drill and right click to move dirt leaving a hole

P brings up paint menu to colour blocks, middle mouse click to colour blocks CTRL+middle click to colour connected blocks, SHIFT+P to match colour of blocks on paint picker.
and that's how to kick start in Space engineers

[gigamaxell]

Great bootcamp! All skills covered, quickly.
If i may add my 2 cents, i prefer to keep the landing gear, as the battery will drain faster with the added weight of mined ores. Landed and with thrusters turned off, i save some power for processing ore in the survival kit.

After building the drill, I also build a connector, so I can dump the stone to the BasicRef/BasicAssembler and recharge the ship battery.

[blindmouse]

Excellent, really helped me startup the game