The Exploration Continues: Getting Started, Conserving Energy, Searching for Fuel

With the survival world for this series finally loaded, the first order of business is to assess the situation. All I've got to my name are the parts that make up the ship I've started in, the basic engineering and mining hand tools, and a small amount of uranium ingots in the reactor - just 2kg worth of fuel to keep me alive and moving through space.

That's a lot of silicon.

Getting into the ship's systems through the command chair, I quickly started shutting down any unnecessary equipment that I won't be needing active in the immediate future. This includes the refinery, assembler, collector and connector, and even the gravity and oxygen generators. The latter already comes equipped with a small supply of unrefined ice and three filled oxygen canisters. Having the gravity generator running, even with only low acceleration, would help when entering or exiting the ship itself, but right now I need to try and conserve what little energy I have. Turning off all of these different systems boosts my remaining power to thirty-five real time days while idling. That reading will fluctuate heavily as I maneuver the ship, but having that much of an extended life expectancy still makes me feel a little more safe.

Speaking of my ship, I started with what I like to call the Yellow Rescue Ship. It's a standard design both for players starting their game with the "Asteroids" scenario, or for those spawning (or re-spawning) into any world where there isn't an active medical bay available to them. I plan to give a more detailed run-down of this ship in a future edition of The Shipyard. For now, just know that it's a rather compact large ship designed primarily to give a new or returning player all of the ship systems they'll need when starting fresh. She'll serve me well, and likely be my home and base of operations for a significant part of the start of this series, albeit with a few alterations.

In the event that I ever invited a friend to come to my survival world and see first-hand what I've done, I planned to go into the world's settings and enable the removal of spawn ships once a player had logged out. This would ensure that I wouldn't be tempted to harvest the forgotten ships for free resources, which would somewhat circumvent the whole survival aspect of my game. The only problem with this is that my current ship is considered a spawn ship as well - if I don't somehow change that, it and everything I've collected in its cargo containers will disappear the moment I decide to take a break and stop playing.

One way around this limitation is to tear apart and rebuild the ship entirely, piece by piece. This would take quite some time, a lot of energy and oxygen, and is more dangerous than it seems. If I'm not careful of what pieces I take apart and when, I might end up with small sections of the ship slowly tumbling into the emptiness of space, or I may remove my only means of recharging my suit energy when I've got too little left to replace them. I opted for a much simpler, albeit something of an exploit of a game mechanic. Using merge blocks, I can fool the game into thinking that my entire ship has become part of a space station. This can easily be reversed through the info tab in the ship's system menu. The end result being that my ship is now an entirely new entity, and one that hopefully won't be swept out of existence the next time I save and shut down my game.

The ore scoop and spherical gravity generator.

Once I've got my ship set up how I like it, I turn my attention to the world around me. I was lucky enough to spawn next to a large asteroid with the most silicon ore I've ever seen in one place, and a handful of other useful ores in the smaller ones nearby. I was a bit anxious about being able to find more fuel until I noticed that one of the smaller asteroids had a shiny black patch of uranium half-hidden by the shadow on its dark side. Bringing my yellow ship up nearby, I set to work making some quick alterations to the ship's layout.

In the past, I would mine entirely by hand, using a gravity generator to cause the ore to fall into a large funnel made of sloped armor blocks, guiding it all into a collector at the bottom. This was a useful way of collecting the falling ore, but sometimes chunks had a way of bouncing out over the edge of the funnel. After happening across a useful image on the Space Engineers Reddit, I've changed this tactic. Now I use a spherical gravity generator to pull ore in from all directions, drawing it toward a pair of collectors whose mouths are pointed toward the generator itself.

This new design seems to work much more efficiently for ore collection, though occasionally I do have to make sure I don't have small chunks caught in the many nooks and crannies my starting ship happens to have. Thankfully, a spherical gravity generator and a standard gravity generator both require the same amount of components, which means I'm able to make this part of my basic set-up at the start of my survival games.

Now that I've got it all set up, I've got plenty of mining work to do.