Planetary Survival and Advanced World Settings

How to start from almost scratch on a planet and then evolve into a gravity slingshot killing machine.

New World

It's pretty highly recommended to make your own custom world rather than start on a pre-made one that you won't like. If you're hardcore, you'll choose the "Star System" map and start from scratch using a starter ship or a creative-built starter base.

Remember when choosing settings for your world:
Realistic sound is comfy and immersive.
Invite your friends if your computer/network can handle it.
While meteors are annoying, it's nice to have another reason to produce ammo and WMD's.
Block limits are for deticated servers.
Flora is literally satan and should be turned off because it's badly coded.
Unless you'd like to make 10 times as many trips to a cargo container to build something by hand, play with 10x inventory.
1x Assembler efficiency is fine: it pressures you to produce more resources.
3x Refinery speed is fine. Anyone can sit around and wait for a refinery to finish chugging through a billion grams of uranium. Even with multiple refineries, Keen's sketchy conveyor logic will ensure they don't cooperate.
5x Welding and Grinding speed will save hours of your life.
Respawn ships are pretty much cheating except for your starter ship.
As much view distance as your potato computer can handle for long range ship shenanigans.
If you're not genociding/salvaging/pirating cargo ships/pirates/spiders/wolves, you are doing it wrong.
Oxygen and Airtightness are comfy.

Unknown Signals give you actual, real money, and are a good way to scavenge small amounts of parts. They can be interesting, and you don't have to go after them if you don't want to anyhow.

Advanced World Settings

We're not talking about Keen's "advanced" settings tab. We're talking about creating a world and then opening up that nice little save file and surgically changing it. This opens up a lot of variables for you to change that Keen's UI does not allow you to modify up front. The world will first have to actually exist in order to modify it. So create a new world, then save it, then close Space Engineers. You should be able to edit these files just fine using Notepad. If you see a bunch of garbage symbols, you're probably in the wrong file and notepad cannot read it. It's strongly advised against changing anything like that and then having the audacity to save it.
Be aware to change these values at your own risk. A smart person who is unfamiliar with the structure of the file (or not confident in his abilities) will make a backup. If you so much as make a capitalization error in a var name, your world will likely end up corrupted until you figure out what you screwed up. The game won't fix it for you, it presumes you know what you're doing.

Planetary Gravity and Vars

Planetary gravity falls off after about 40 Km, which is very lame. Fortunately you can change the variable that determines how fast it falls off for a given distance:
1) Find your new game's save file (search %appdata% in your task bar. Find the "spaceengineers" folder. Find the "saves" folder. Find the corresponding save you just made. Look for the most recently modified file).
2) Open up the document identified as SANDBOX_0_0_0.SBS (or something similar).
3) Each planet has specific variables attributed to it. Most of these are internal, and meaningless to you. Here are the ones you will want to look at:
3.1) Radius: Defines how large the planet is. For a good reason, Keen does not suggest planets above 120 Km or below 10 Km. These planets are good at stretching the game's limitations which will probably make your game more crash prone. In addition, it is best for this variable to be chosen when the planet is generated, and probably not when it already exists. Change at your own risk.
3.2) GravityFalloff: This is what you are looking for. This defines how quickly gravity is reduced based on distance from the center of the planet. By default, it is 7. Realistically, it would be 2. A value of 2 makes a huge gravity field, so use that value, or values lower, with caution.
3.3) SurfaceGravity: Modifies the strength of the gravitational pull of the planet, measured in G's (one G is 9.81 meters per second, per second, meaning for every second you fall, you gain 9.8 meters per second of speed every second). Negative gravities would probably break things, but it might be fun. Very high gravities can also be fun in a 'oh-god-im-going-to-die-in-a-black-hole-this-is-just-like-interstellar kind of way.
3.4) PositionAndOrientation: Modifies the position of the center of the planet in the world. If you set your gravity falloff really low, the starter positions of the planets will probably start having gravity fields that overlap. This is awesome, but at the same time might not be desired. You can manually move the planets further away from one another here.
3.5) AtmosphereTopModifier: I'm somewhat sure this modifies the density of the atmosphere based on its value (1.1 for alien planets) and name. I haven't actually tried that though. There's also the related "AtmosphereRadius" which appears to be how far the atmosphere extends from the center of the planet. Change at your own risk. Atmosphere higher or lower from the planet could affect Atmospheric Thrusters, for example.
4) SAVE a your changes. I'm not going to tell you to make a backup because you should have already done that. If you break your save, that's on you for fiddling with values and not being prepared.
5) Boot up the world again. Either boot it up in Creative or use Creative Mode Tools (or play survival if you're a rebel). Test your changes to make sure they took.

Reducing gravity falloff lets you do low earth orbit mining, with some gravity on nearby asteroids. If you get sick of it, you can just fly off into deep space. It's really a win-win.

Additional Hidden Server Vars

These are a lot of background vars that normally are not changed, or can only be changed with coarsely set values from the main game.

1) Find your game's save file (process described above for planets).
2) This time, open the file reading Sandbox.SBC.
3) This file saves information on where players are, their cameras, their toolbars, and more importantly, a bunch of world settings you can play with. I won't list fairly obvious vars here, or vars that already have their full scope able to be changed within the game:
3.1) InventorySizeMultiplier: Normally you can only choose "Realistic (1x)", "3x", or "10x". If you want some finer control, you can use any number you like here. Right now, this also changes the inventory size of any block capable of holding items, not just the player. Also be aware that the total mass of the cargo in a block is divided by the inventory multiplier. Essentially, a 1x inventory full of steel plates will weigh the same as the same inventory with 10x the steel plates in it on a 10x inventory size world.
3.2) Assembler Vars: You have two vars here, "AssemblerSpeedMultiplier" and "AssemblerEfficiencyMultiplier". Normally, these must be the same value and can only be 1x, 3x, or 10x since those are the only values available up front. Here you can independently change the speed that things are completed at, as well as control the amount of resources they take to complete. I personally hate waiting for assemblers but also hate that speeding them up makes them use less material that I painstakingly collected. Change as you wish.
3.3) RefinerySpeedMultiplier: what is says on the tin. Like the assembler, but speed only.
3.4) 'Boolean' vars: a fancy way of saying vars that say 'true' or 'false'. These are all toggles and most of them have a corresponding button on the advanced settings screen.
3.5) Distance/block limit vars: any var pertaining to a distance or block limit (world size, PCU/block limits) can be set to 0 to be unlimited if required, though most of them have up front settings.
3.6) Weld/Grind Speed: "WelderSpeedMultiplier" and "GrinderSpeedMultiplier" can both be independently changed and raised or lowered beyond the normal values of 0.5x, 1x, 2x, and 5x. 10x should have been an option from the start.
3.7) HackSpeedMultiplier: This changes how fast you disassemble a functioning block (i.e non armor) that you don't have ownership of or share permission. By default, this makes grinding blocks you don't own take 3x longer until you pass the "Hack" bar on its progress. Can be raised or lowered as needed.
3.8) SunRotationIntervalMinutes: This is how many minutes it takes for the sun to complete one full rotation around the game world. Essentially, it determines how long a day on a planet is while remaining in a fixed position. Longer intervals mean steady periods of sunlight, but also steady periods of darkness once time passes. By default, 2 hours.
3.9) AdaptiveSimulationQuality: True or false. I included this here because it is an interesting tidbit. If your computer is experiencing sluggish performance because of too much going on in the game (many explosions, for example), this will reduce the quality of physics simulations and voxel destruction to help save processing time and speed up the game. Not extremely noticeable to the untrained eye, but helpful.
4) SAVE your changes. Again, with the backups. Should have already made one.
5) TEST your changes. Enjoy. Modify again as needed.

Starting Ship/Station

Depending on what you took for a starting ship (modded or otherwise), you'll have different resources available to you.

Where to set up

You'll have to choose a staging area somewhere. You will absolutely want to set down somewhere that you can see dark patches in the ground. This is an indicator of ore. These dark patches are a common feature on most planets.
Earth - Prime starting planet. Ice lakes are the best choice for staging. They are extremely flat, offering you good sightlines on teleporting mobs that want to bite your ankles and base, and also offering a good runway/race track for planes or rovers you might make. Also, they're made of Ice. Which means they're made of Hydrogen Fuel. A lot of it. Just what you need to get off a stupid rock fast. In addition, the dark patches on the ice indicating ore are very easily visible. You might also try to settle in the desert or mountains. Do so at your own risk. High gravity does make any kind of heavy ship or impact punishing. Good atmosphere, so oxygen and atmospheric thrust are not a problem.

Moon - The poles of the planet will offer a thin layer of ice to help a spaceman get back home (that is, back to deep space). Otherwise, craters and flat patches will be easy to mine. Rovers will work much better on the moon, since the low gravity makes most crashes less punishing and will allow flight with hydrogen or ion thrusters fairly easily in the event you need to stop moving into a wall at a thousand meters per second.

Europa - The entire planet is literally an ice ball. Which is to say the entire planet is made out of hydrogen fuel. Just let that sink in. If you're not using hydrogen thrusters on this planet, then you have no reason to be on this planet. You can salvage infinite ice just from a short visit to the surface.

Mars - Actually this planet is pretty boring. It's like a budget moon but with an atmosphere. The terrain is less mountainous and steep than that of Earth, which makes rover-travel more pleasant. Unfortunately, it has a very thin atmosphere and heavy gravity, so that makes both Atmospheric Thrusters and Ion Thrusters very inefficient. The poles have a layer of ice to get hydrogen out of. There's still a thin layer of oxygen which you can suck up with an air vent.

Alien - Space spiders will attempt to spook you. While pretty, the gravity is even stronger than earth (1.1 G), which is lame. Also, the atmosphere looks gross. On the upside the atmosphere is pretty thick, so Atmospheric Thrusters see a higher flight ceiling than most other planets. The terrain is still very rough, like Earth's, however. While the atmosphere does not have enough oxygen to breathe without taking damage, it is still very oxygen rich (comparatively). Any air vent exposed to the planet set to depressurize can suck in as much oxygen as your tanks can fit, forever, or until you exit the atmosphere.

Titan - Green space spiders will attempt to spook you. This is the much cooler moon. It has large swaths of land divided by large ice lake rivers, so it's pretty easy to get hydrogen from. No atmosphere, however.

At minimum, you will need a dedicated mining ship. Mining ore by hand will take far too long and is too tedious, mining with a ship is infidently faster. Depending on atmosphere and if power and motors are easily available to you, you may want a mining ship under power of atmospheric thrusters. Otherwise, hydrogen might be a better choice if ice is easily available, as well as parts to construct conveyors, tanks, and thrusters. Ion thrusters are not advised early game as the platnium required for them is difficult to find (unless you scrapped another ship or spawned with it you cheating nerd) and they provide much lower thrust in natural gravity wells. Ion thrusters are best suited for space. Mining rovers can also be a good way to start, but its too difficult to mine large amounts of ores just by driving, you may want to use hydrogen thrusting as an assist or transfer directly to a ship capable of drilling. Any vehicle you make should at least be basically fitted with thrusters for an emergency or for convenience.

Your main base station or ship is where you should move ore for processing and stage production. The amount of ore you'll bring in will be heavy and not suited for anything that wants to move around. Even after refining, a few hundred thousand kilograms of various ingots is also still heavy. Have your assemblers chug along at the essentials-that-you-always-need-but-never-seem-to-have-enough-of: Construction Components, Steel Plates, Tubes, Interior Plates. If you have too much ore waiting to be refined, consider building arc furnaces and refineries. If your assemblers are taking too long, consider constructing more and putting them on cooperative mode. If your assemblers are starved for resources, consider increasing the scale of your mining ship. If you brought friends, consider letting them take your expensive mining ship for a run. That will teach you to build inexpensive and replaceable ships.

Salvage (with mods that add more varied random encounters) could also be a worthwhile endeavor. Instead of having to mine, you can simply gimp existing installations and steal everything that makes it up once it has no teeth to bite you with. This does have a downside, which is usually that said installations or ships don't usually have a ton of precious metals around them (compared to mining). On the upside, most of what you steal is ready-to-use, and anything else just has to be melted down and re-assembled into something useful.
It can be wise to carry enough parts for an assembler and some form of power generator with you. This way, you can construct the assembler and power generator for it on site, then deconstruct bulky components instead of hauling them back on multiple trips. Ingots themselves can also be moved around within a small conveyor system on a small grid, making storage much easier and fluid. This is especially useful for huge components that don't take a lot of time to build, like Radio Communication components or Large Steel Tubes.

Ores to Look For

Now that you're chugging away and mining at everything in sight, you're probably wondering, "Why am I even mining this Gold? My ship is literally running on sunlight because my reactor ran out hours ago." Here's why you're mining that thing you're mining:

Iron

You will always need more until you start a larger space mining operation, turn your assembler efficiency up, or start pirating large ships. Iron goes into almost anything built and is quick to refine. On the downside, its heavy. And you'll have a lot of it. If you set up a large mining operaton, expect to have a cargo container dedicated to iron ingots. Arc furnaces will do wonders for chugging through this stuff, and the core of asteroids is almost always composed of iron. If you can make a small mining ship capable of jumping to low orbit, you might find it easier to get some select ores from there.

Uranium

Once you find a vein of this, you should be set for a long time, unless your builds are excessively energy hungry demons from hell. Your refineries will hate you forever, as uranium takes geological ages to refine unless you run one kilogram of uranium through one hundered refineries. The good thing, however, is you'll have power for a very long time. Uranium is also used in some weaponry, namely Rockets. Also on the upside is refined uranium is very lightweight and compact, you can never have too much of it.

Nickel/Cobalt

These two common metals are somewhat like iron, except they're needed in a lot less things. Specifically, cobalt is needed for gravity generator components and medical components, two very obscure objects you generally won't use more than a few times unless you have some choice mods (nanite control factory needs 350 gravity generators, so stock up). Its also a component in metal grids, which if you like to build a lot of things with heavy armor, you will need a surplus of. Nickel is more for motors and ammunition. Both of these metals can be blasted in an Arc Furnace and are relatively dense, and thus easy to store.

Silicon

Sillycon is mostly for electronics and radio-communication components, and is only used in small amounts. Unless you're making anything with glass. In which case it is used in huge amounts (15kg per sheet of bulletproof glass, which you'll need about 30 of for a window). Somewhat difficult to refine too. Fortunately the silicon wafers are easy to store.

Silver/Gravel

Just when you think you don't need any more of this, you'll build fifty more nuclear reactors, which you'll need 5,000kg of silver per small reactor (100 reactor components). Gravel is easily attained by any kind of stone, however you'll 99% of the time end up with too much gravel, throw it all out, and then figure out you need more to make reactor components, the only component that uses gravel.

Gold

While heavy, it takes up almost no space refined. Used in some choice bits of technology like Gravity Generator Components and Superconductor Conduits for jump drives. You'll need a lot of this if you want to become a lord of gravity, space, and time. Also, very very dense, therefore easy to store.

Platnium

The ever-elusive, it's required for Tier-3 tools and thruster components (in turn required for Ion Thrusters). If you started without any of this, be prepared to survive in space off of ice. Platnium is also notorious for taking even longer than uranium to refine, so have a small legion of refinieries ready to deal with this stuff. It is also very easy to store in large amounts, much like the other precious metals. Very valuable simply because it is difficult to attain and refine a large amount of it.

Magnesium

You know what this stuff does? It explodes. Which means you need as much of it as possible to produce ammo to commit genocide with. In addition to just producing rockets and bullets, you can produce Explosives, which can be used on their own or built into warheads, which can be used to start a Lunar Missile Crisis by parking nuclear warheads in low lunar orbit, inside striking distance of the USA's major cities. Magnesium powder is also fairly easy to store. Depending on your world settings or foreseen-combat-ability, you may or may not want this high on your list.

Ice

This stuff goes into Oxygen Generators. It makes Oxygen and Hydrogen and is very nice. Oxygen stops you from dying and hydrogen makes you go fast. If you're planning on going somewhere in space on Hydrogen, make sure you have a sum of this stashed away in case. A mod that adds different sizes of hydrogen storage containers is pretty much required for good looking builds that run on hydrogen. However, storing a lot of ice is very heavy. Make sure to also have plenty of Oxygen Generators to keep up with your thruster consumption.

Typically, it is a waste to produce oxygen with ice if you need that space for hydrogen. A single spaceman on his lonesome will never, ever, ever, consume an entire large grid oxygen tank by himself, the game would surely crash for some unrelated reason first. You can avoid producing oxygen by turning off any storage tank for oxygen when turning on your generators. The generators will only produce oxygen (and consume ice from producing it) when there's places available that can store it. No, producing just hydrogen does not 'waste' the oxygen split off as far as I know. Keen just made ice produce the gases only as needed, and ice will only be consumed when either gas is produced. Oxygen can also be stolen for FREE from Druidia's air shield with the code 12345 almost any planet with atmosphere and a vent set to 'depressurize' that is exposed to it.

Better Stone Mod

This is a nice mod I play with. Instead of having to run between sixty different asteroids to find veins of a specific resource, this mod adds many ores that can refine into multiple resources so you spend less time asteroid jumping. These minerals are based upon real-world minerals, which are usually separated (either chemically or physically) into their constituent parts. Examples: Olivine that refines into Silicon, Iron, and Magnesium Powder, Icy Iron that gives iron ingots and small sums of Ice, Electrum that contains gravel, gold, and silver, and a ton more. Most ores give small sums of gravel that you can pocket away instead of needing to find stone, and a few others have some ice with them, allowing you at least a little return on hydrogen fuel or oxygen.

Your Main Base and You

So now that you're mining everything and destroying the local ecosystem, it's time to expand on your base some.

Your main base's function should be enabling you to build whatever you need to get to space. This means it should be stacked with refineries, arc furnaces, assemblers, and reactors. It should also have some areas to service your ships. An area to produce new mining ships in the event of clang an unfortunate accident, connectors to charge them and exchange resources, and an area to store them when not in use so they don't get lost or struck by an errant meteor (or eaten by a wild robo-pupper).

As for when to expand production, follow this simple guide:
Not enough space for parts? Stick more cargo containers on that thing.
Not enough ore for your refineries? Build a bigger mining ship.
Not enough raw material being produced for your assemblers? More refineries. Simple.
Not enough components being produced? More assemblers.
Typically you will move between these steps at random until you have built what you need.

If you happen to be using a Nanite Control Factory mod because you don't like wasting your lifetime welding things, you'll need lots of minerals to build one and lots of power to sustain it. Then you'll need more minerals to build whatever it's building. Project your fully atmospheric death star and let it build while you do the lifting of attaining and processing ore. Once it finishes, reverse the roles and have your Nanite factory deconstruct your base for preperation of going into space (unless you're going to keep that base there to blow it up later from the moon to demonstrate that you weren't kidding about the Lunar Missile Crisis).

Sorters and You - How to Make your Base Less Spaghetti

A highly recommended feature of your base (or any ship really) is a resource flow system, ensuring resources only flow to where they should be allowed. This is achived by useage of sorters or scripts. Scripts from the workshop might feature ways to automatically sort all of your posessions into particular cargo containers, but can take some setting up or weirdly specific naming schematics. Some other scripts might help manage your base's workload like a Russian Officer who makes sure all of the peasants are working at a proper pace.

Sorters, on the other hand, are a pain in the arse to set up and get functioning correctly, but when set up right can help push resources around to the right place. Example:

Have two conveyor links only to your refineries or arc furnaces, and make sure that they are all connected. The first link, you should sever and replace with a sorter pointing into the refineries. Set this to filter *ORE* as a whitelist, so it only allows ores to go into the furnaces instead of trying to store ingots into your refineries. Do not turn on "Drain All", unless your refinery area has storage space for overflow of ores before they can be processed. In the event you want to change your refineries, you'll have to drain all the ore out of that system in addition to anything else in it. The processors will automatically take ore even in Drain All is turned off, and refinery balancing scripts can help make sure ore is distributed as needed.

After that, sever the second conveyor link. Replace it with a sorter going out of the refinery area. Optionally, place a cargo container directly in front of it so any ingots pushed out of your refinery will be deposited into it for easy access. Set this sorter to whitelist only *INGOTS* and to "Drain All", so it grabs anything produced by your refineries and pushes it back into the loop. If you're using better stone mod and want to extract the ice produced as well, you'll also need to add a second filter to your input that blacklists Ice. This way, the loop won't constantly try to grab ice from the main storage and put it back around endlessly.

The same can be done for a group of Assemblers. Your input will only allow ingots through. The output can suck out all components, ammo, tools, ect produced. Just be aware that this setup will not allow the assemblers to pull components into themselves for disassembly, so it might be preferable to keep one or two disjointed from an assembler setup to disassemble things if needed.

Components to Produce

If your assemblers are not chugging away at SOMETHING then you're probably doing something wrong. You will almost always have too little of one thing or too much of another, requiring assembly or disassembly either way. Basic assembler logic tips:

Set the first assembler that shows up in your "production" tab to not use cooperative mode. Assemblers on "Cooperative" mode will fill their job queue with excess jobs from assemblers that are not on cooperative mode. This allows you to use one assembler as a master, while other assemblers simply alleviate backup caused by a high amount of items queued on your main assembler. If you prefer, you can have more than one assembler off of cooperative mode. All assemblers on cooperative mode will attempt to pull jobs from assemblers that are not cooperating, so you can queue two different kinds of items at once.

If you're stretched thin for resources, ingots might get caught up in your assemblers, as they're not automatically cleared out if a job fails. Setting up a sorter system or clearing out your assemblers by hand every so often may be needed. Likewise, assemblers disassembling will try to pull as many objects as they need to disassemble at once. If you're disassembling 1000 metal grids (and playing with 10x inventory), the assembler will only grab about 650 grids before being full. Canceling the job will stop the machine from disassembling or producing most items until cleaned out, as the grids will stay in the machine (though it may sometimes clean itself automatically). Again, sorters or clearing your machines out periodically can help manage large numbers of assemblers.

Unfortunately, you cannot set an assembler to cooperatively diassemble items. The best guess for this is having a scrap yard of sorts, deticated to disassembling common bulk components and extracting the ingots resulting.

The Big Few

Construction Components - Take some time to produce and you will always need more of them since they're usually required in almost everything in small amounts, especially in interior armor/walls, conveyors, catwalks, and machinery. Cheap on iron, but the sheer number you'll need might complicate things.
Steel Plates - Take less time to produce but you will always want more. Used in almost anything, especially armor, gyroscopes, and refineries. Costs a decent amount of iron to produce, and given the number you need, will put strain on your resources. Examples: Refineries and Gyroscopes will take a minimum 1,000 plates each. Light armor requires 25 for each full block, heavy armor requiring 125 for each full block in addition to metal grids. A MexPex modded industrial drill takes 22,000 steel plates. Always keep a large sum of these on hand if you want to build stuff.
Small Steel Tubes - Like construction components, used in small amounts in most interior machineries like conveyors and catwalks. You should keep a few thousand around if you can.

The things to disassemble if you have too many

Metal Grids - If you don't make your builds with a lot of heavy armor and happen to salvage an NPC ship (which is undoubtedly some ridiciulous proportion of heavy armor, like 75%), you will end up with several cargo containers full of these things. They're big, bulky, and unless you constantly build heavy armor, you won't need a lot of them. Disassembling them is a good source of Iron, Nickle, and Cobalt.
Radio-Communication Components - These take up about 200 Liters of space and you should only ever need about 1,000 of them over the course of a game unless you really like antennas. Disassemble if you find yourself with too many as they can easily free up space. A good source of Silicon and Iron, as well as Vitamin C.
Large Steel Tubes - Easy to produce and easy to disassemble, however they take up a lot of space. It may be more efficient to disassemble these into ingots and rebuild them when you plan on constructing something.
Medical Components - You should only need a few medical rooms at most, so these can be constructed on-demand as needed and are not required in high amounts.
Gravity Generator Components - Unless you are using the Nanite Factory mod, you won't need many of these unless you plan on building many gravity generators. Has a lot of valuable metals inside it.
Thruster Components - While not excessively large, large numbers of these are typically salvaged from enemy ships. They contain platnium, which may be more valuable on its own than in a component. If you plan on building lots of ion thrusters, hang onto these. Otherwise, deconstruct a few thousand.
Solar Cell - This is entirely on you. If you are king of uranium or just like solar power, hang onto these. They take some time to build and are only composed of nickle and silicon. They'll be needed in large amounts if you want to set up a base with a meaningful amount of solar power.

Those other components

Bulletproof Glass - High cost in silicon. Hang onto it if you plan on building a lot of windows. Otherwise, the silicon wafers are easier to store.
Girder - Nearly identical to small steel tubes, but used mostly in windows and very few other builds. Can usually be constructed on-demand.
Display - Only used in cargo containers or cockpits and LCDs. You shouldn't need to keep more than a hundered on hand at a time, as they can easily be produced quickly and cheaply.
Explosives - Up to you. If you like custom-made rockets with warheads or explody things in general, 1,000 of these only take up 100 liters of space making them extremely space efficient. If you need the Magnesium for something else, disassemble them. These are VERY dangerous if the item is dropped on the ground and shot (more dangerous the more explosives present in the stack).
Interior Plate - While you won't need to keep thousands on hand like Steel Plates, these lightweight versions of them can be good to keep around and they're required in most "internal" station components like conveyors, catwalks, cargo containers, and interior bulkheads, in order to keep internal systems lightweight.
Motor - If you build lots of Atmospehric Thrusters, keep these on hand. Otherwise, keep a decent sum on hand for conveyors and mostly anything else.
Power Cell - Space hogging, but can be used in a pinch for some extra power. Keep some on hand just in case.
Reactor Components - Since your power needs might fluctuate, keep extras on hand if you plan on building another reactor. Also keep them on hand because gravel is a pain to get when you actually need it and are in the middle of deep space.
Superconductor Conduits - These will require lots of gold to produce in large amounts. A critical component in large reactors and jump drives. Keep these on hand.
Computers - Cheap to produce and very easy to store in bulk. For how comparatively cheap they are, they can be a pain to manufacture in bulk. Since it takes so much time to disassemble them for so little resource, you might as well hang onto them.

How to Get Off This Dumb Rock

So when you're planning on how to get off your space rock, you'll need to see what kind of locomotion you have available:

Atmospheric Thrust

Will only get you so far vertically, and nowhere if you're on the moon. Some planets have denser atmospheres than others, which will help you get more thrust out of these. If you have enough power, you might be able to generate enough upward thrust with many engines to generate an escape velocity within 10,000 meters of ascent, but from there you'll need hydrogen or ion to get around. The other fact is those thrusters become dead weight in space, which might be something to consider if you have a lot of them.

The other option here is to pull a classic NASA manuver and travel along the ground. If you can get enough horizontal speed going, you can eventually escape gravity simply by virtue of the planet's curvature no longer being parallel to your direction of travel. You can also get more speed by performing a very ghetto gravity assist - Travel to about 10,000 meters or where your atmospheric engines cut out. Angle yourself so that traveling forwards, you won't hit the planet but will come damn close to it. Then apply forward thrust until you can't. The gravity pulling your ship down will give you a little more thrust than normal, allowing a little bit of a slingshot effect.

Ion Thrust

Opposite of atmospheric thrust. Becomes weaker with more atmosphere, up to only 30% effectiveness. If you have plenty of power and these are on your ship anyways, you might as well use them to generate extra lift if needed. Otherwise, these are a poor choice to use on their own for landing or taking off of a planet with atmosphere. On the moon, you can get away with only ion thrusting.

Hydrogen Thrust

While it requires heavy ice and a conveyor system, you'll get consistent and insane thrust every time as long as you have ice and an oxygen generator. These are usually the best option to get to space unless you've found enough uranium to make some atmospheric engines that can give you escape velocity before you've left the ground.

Bear in mind that even if you have no hydrogen tanks attached, you can still use the gas produced every tick by an oxygen generator to provide a minimal amount of lift to your thursters. While it is much weaker than normal, it may provide enough lift to manuver out of the way of a hazard, like an asteroid or the ground (probably not the second part). It can be beneficial to designate some "Main" hydrogen tanks for casual usage, and desginate some "Emergency" tanks for when you need full thrust to avoid crashing into something (or to get away from something). Keep your emergency tanks on "Stockpile" so they'll take priority to fill over anything else, then take them off stockpile when the emergency commences.

I also like to use a tiered hydrogen thrusters mod. While it is not explicitly what I may call balanced, it still makes some sense. You can install more expensive hydrogen thrusters which consume x amount times as many hydrogen for x times as many thrust. There's 2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x thrust versions available, however the latter variants can provide far too much thrust to control effectively, or may drain your tanks too quickly. Try to be modest about your speed, or not at all. God hates people who can't make up their mind.

Maglev

If you're an insane space wizard and you're not on a planet with a lot of natural gravity, you may try building an unholy number of gravity generators and sticking some artificial mass onto your ship. While this is undoubtedly an awesome way to shoot ships into orbit, you'll have to leave all those resources where they are unless you attached them directly to your ship to make a gravity drive, in which case you win science. Also cool is a mass-driver of sorts, or some form of carrier-based catapulting system for aircraft. All of those are a good idea.

Jump Drivers

Hah, these don't work in natural gravity, nice try wizard. You can't even so much as look at them while you're under any influence of natural gravity, and the game won't let you jump into natural gravity fields with them (which is kind of lame).

Space Elevator

I don't know how you think you'll escape clang by building something several thousand meters long but go for it. Given recent stability updates, you might not awaken him, but that's exactly the kind of thinking clang yearns for.

Your Spaceship and the Future

Congradulations, you win and are in space. But the battle against the bugs has only begun. Now you have to travel to Klendathu and eliminate the bug menace at its source. Would you like to know more?

Now that you're in space, you can start building really big things that don't need a million newtons of thrust to stay in the air, because there is no air. You should now build a main SPACEBASE and rev up those asteroid coring machines to get rid of those pesky neighborhood asteroids, while also getting more resources to throw at things. From here you can blow up your planet, go back to your planet, or conquer new planets and exploit them for resources.

By the way here's a bunch of mods I use in survival:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=874136305

[scorpnoire]

All hail Clang, devourer of builds!

[Alienslayer2406]

"Some other scripts might help manage your base's workload like a Russian Officer who makes sure all of the peasants are working at a proper pace."
As of April 2022, this hits different.

[Miles1109]

Yea same

[Dat]

Ith don't insult clang he is a force of mass destruction remember that giant space station you just built... well now its spinning past 100m/s right toward a planet what a coincidence

[Ith]

Awaken clang... lol :)

[tmantheheman]

so I haven't thought about making gravity drives yet. I just read that section and laughed. I am going to see how epic this can truly be

[M200Chan]

"invite your friends"
Hahaha good one

[Skeleton Man]

mostly because I prodded around in the files myself after picking up spagno again

[Skeleton Man]

took the liberty of adding some other, more advanced world settings to the guide just for funsies

[BaǹKer Śchwartz]

Skeleton man are u just a wee bit of a soviet sympahiser