Fringe Science: Storage Options, Cargo Container Comparison

To kick off this part of the series, I decided to talk about the different options a player has for storage on their ships and stations and the pros and cons of each. This may be a topic that most players have already read or heard about, but I still think it's an interesting aspect to consider during construction. For clarity, I'm going to be basing my information off of the standard, "realistic" setting so far as storage capacity goes.

Firstly, let's talk about large ships and stations. There are only two options for cargo containers available, and each has their usefulness.

From a cursory glance, it appears as if the large cargo container would be simply better, as it can hold far more. If you go by a one-to-one comparison of them, that would be true. But, as the image above shows, you can fit twenty-seven small cargo containers in the same space that would allow for a single large one. Not only is this more than three times the total storage capacity of a single large container, but it also triples the number of solid connection points to be used during construction, as well as the number of ports that can be used to access the inventory, either by hand or via a conveyer system.

There are some downsides to using small cargo containers in place of large ones. First and foremost is the fact that building that many small containers takes far more resources, averaging nearly nine times as many components as a single large container costs to build. Using this many small containers also clutters up the ship's terminal with twenty-seven more separate entries, which can make inventory sorting far more difficult. And finally, there are times where using a large cargo container simply has a better aesthetic feel, such as in the construction of ships designed to be massive, deep-space freighters traveling between obscenely long distances. The latter tends to be the major deciding factor any time I have to make this sort of a choice.

Now let's talk about the options for small ships. This isn't as simple of a comparison as the previous discussion, primarily because of the differences in how different items can be moved or stored due to the size of connection points that each size of cargo container allows. I'll explain this issue in further detail, as well as the ins-and-outs of conveyer systems, in a later post.

Small ships have three options: small, medium and large cargo containers. In terms of raw storage capacity, once again the large container wins in a one-to-one comparison of the three. But as far as efficiency goes, the medium can hold more per block of its size. Given that the small cargo containers only have access ports on two sides and cannot hold some of the components that the game considers "large" due to its lack of large access ports, the earlier suggestion of simply building a large cube of small containers simply doesn't work. Each different option still has their uses, however.

Personally, I prefer to use small cargo containers for personal storage; an extra welder, grinder and hand drill to be kept with each small ship I fly, in the event that I somehow lose or misplace my starting tools. A small container can easily hold some extra fuel to be put in a ship's back-up reactor by hand if the craft is designed more with battery power in mind.

For any ship that is going to have its own storage bay, even if only temporarily before it can bring its cargo off to a waiting refinery ship or such, I go with medium containers. They can be easier to fit in amongst the construction in less obtrusive ways. Depending on the design, a large cargo container may simply look far too bulky, giving the ship a strange look. Medium containers can smoothly transition to small ship welders, grinders and mining drills due to their being the same basic three-by-three block size, as well as to the large connectors that allow you to attach to large ships for cargo movement.

A single large cargo container, on the other hand, is the same size as a single block of armor for large ships and stations. For any design that might use free-floating cargo containers, as if for some kind of a freight hauler, these would be ideal. Aaron, of LastStandGamers, suggests just this sort of an idea in one of his many Space Engineers videos, which can be seen here.

The Exploration Continues: The Search for Platinum, Unexpected Damage

In the early game, a lot of time ends up being spent waiting for different ores to refine down into ingots for use in construction. During this time, I've been trying to upgrade my Yellow Rescue Ship with some of the ideas mentioned in the previous post.

My ship's donk just keeps getting bigger...

I had previously removed the collector from the top of the ship for use with the spherical gravity-fed ore scoop design underneath the ship. This gave me more room to move the ship's only gyroscope onto the top, which in turn allowed me to peel back some of the armor covering the slots for upgrade modules that run down the underside of the refinery. Given the amount of ore I have to chew through, and that the world has an almost limitless amount of asteroids to mine, I decided to go with a pair of productivity modules, and one power efficiency module. The latter makes it take slightly less energy to power the refinery, while the former allows it to work through my collected ore faster than normal. This is my first time using upgrade modules, so I'm not sure if any of it will make much of a difference in the long run.

There were still further upgrades to make to the ship, though. I tore away a good deal of the armor at the front of the ship, replacing them with glass panels so I could see things better while sitting in the pilot's seat. The only door - which I had temporarily cannibalized for its displays and motors - was rebuilt. And, all of the other dents and half-finished pieces of armor were smoothed out, so the ship looked less like I had recently bought it from a scrap yard. But there was one thing I had built in the past that I knew I wanted to again.

I call it a safety beacon. Large ship beacons normally have a maximum range of 50km. While active, the title of the beacon is shown as a point on your heads-up display, so you know where it is at all times. While this can be very helpful, it can eventually come to severely clutter your screen. To combat this, I tend to place a sensor somewhere inside the ship that detects players. Whenever I'm within its 50m radius, it turns the beacon off, both to save energy and keep the beacon off of my HUD. The only problem is that sensors require detector components, which themselves require platinum ingots to create.

I took this screenshot after having started some repairs.

The first asteroid I had visited had plenty of iron and silicon, and the smaller rocks nearby had a handful of the other types of ore, except for platinum. After traveling to another asteroid, I found it much the same, save for the inclusion of magnesium. The third I traveled to seemed composed only of stone and iron.. but it looked strange. Randomly, on its outer surface, were patches that seemed to be missing their textures. When I went out to investigate, I found something even more strange - one of the front thrusters of my ship was missing, and the armor and glass around it were twisted and broken.

I'm not sure what caused it. It's possible that using my inertial dampeners to bring my ship to a stop during my travels had caused damage due to pushing the reactor past its maximum output, but I don't think I've ever seen that happen before. For now, my next task seems pretty evident - try to fix my ship so I can continue my hunt for platinum.

The Shipyard: The Default Respawn Ship, "Yellow Rescue Ship"

Whether you start a new game using the "Asteroids" scenario or you've just joined a multiplayer server for the first time, the respawn ship is likely going to be your first vessel. Easily recognizable alongside the rest of the default ships in the game, this one in particular has become like a familiar home to me with how many times I've owned one. In general terms, I tend to call it the Yellow Rescue Ship, though I've heard others on the Space Engineers Reddit refer to it as a bus. On one occasion, this prompted me to give my ship the title of Ms. Frizzle, itself a reference to a children's television show, The Magic School Bus.

Exterior view, including starboard-side hatch.

Despite its small size, the Yellow Rescue Ship does a fantastic job at its intended purpose. All of the ship systems a player will need, whether new to the world or returning from some potentially catastrophic event, can be found inside of its small hull. The ship comes equipped with an assembler and refinery, collector and connector, one small reactor, and a single small cargo container. And, some time after the game update that gave us oxygen (01.074), the ship was equipped with an oxygen generator. There's even a working medical room, for more immediate respawning needs, and a gravity generator tucked into a corner, to make movement inside a little easier.

What the ship does lack, however, is much in the way of creature comforts. With all of the aforementioned ship systems, the interior of the ship ends up feeling a little cramped. There's room for expansion, but not a whole lot of it. Further cargo containers are best attached to the outside, replacing the conveyer block and tubes in order to offer further storage space without losing the ability to move items between the different machines from any access hatch.

Interior view.

Speaking of the exterior, most of the important and necessary systems for survival, as well as all of the ship's thrusters, are almost entirely unarmored, which can pose a problem when meteor showers are enabled, or when playing on multiplayer servers where player-versus-player is allowed. What armor there is gives the ship a distinctive look, with angles breaking up the otherwise rectangular shape. The half-built catwalks on either side of the single pane of glass give the appearance of an industrial vessel. A disposable mining tugboat, designed to help support near a worksite but be easily forgotten when it's time to move on to the next project. Given that the ship is generally deleted from online servers as soon as the player that owns it logs off, this seems to fit nicely with its design.

For players who want to keep their respawn ship, I talk about a few workarounds in one of my previous entries in my The Exploration Continues series. Beyond that, and the aforementioned suggestion on replacing the conveyer system with extra cargo containers can be expanded on in a number of ways. Solar panels, albeit expensive in the amount of silicon they require, can easily be attached along the sides of the ship. With a few alterations, the connection points for upgrade modules on the side of the refinery can even be uncovered and utilized.

All in all, I've come to love the Yellow Rescue Ship - the thought of tearing it apart, even to use its components to build a more long-term ship to travel in, feels somehow wrong. I'm sure if you give the ship a chance as well, you'll be surprised at just how much you come to enjoy it.

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.

The Exploration Begins: Personal Gameplay Goals, World and Gameplay Settings

I know the post is labeled as "The Exploration Continues," but this is the introductory post, so I've taken a bit of creative license.

To start things off, I'd like to explain my gameplay goals. When game worlds in Space Engineers were infinite in size but empty beyond a field of asteroids clustered around the center of the map, my only goal was simply to survive. Outside of that, I let my imagination guide me toward projects such as building particular kinds of ships, or working on the creation of massive space stations as a more permanent home base. With the addition of the Exploration update, I have a much more defined goal set for myself: exploration itself.

Worlds can now be set to a near-infinite size and with procedurally-generated asteroids throughout its entirety. Not only that, but the developers of Space Engineers put out a call, asking the community to submit ship and station designs through the Steam Workshop, a number of which have become a part of the game itself. These creations can be randomly found in worlds with particular game settings, abandoned and waiting to be collected.

I still may set up a somewhat more permanent home in the form of a space station, but the major goal for my gameplay is exploration. I'll be visiting asteroids, but most importantly, I'll be seeking out the abandoned ships and stations of my game world. I've seen a few screenshots that the community has taken of what they've come across out amongst the vast emptiness of space, and I'm excited to see just what I can find for myself. And each time I find something new, I'll be sure to record it here as part of my Exploration series.

The Game Settings

• "Asteroids" Scenario: When I first started playing Space Engineers, I had chosen the "Crashed Red Ship" scenario. I loved that I had a great deal of basic resources like steel plates, but that other things - displays and computers, for instance - were much more rare. When the developers updated their ship designs to include new blocks they had added such as the connector and collector blocks as well as conveyer tubes, it felt like this start became too easy. Playing in the "Asteroids" scenario brings back that sense of a meager beginning, keeping me on my toes for the first few hours, and ensuring that I conserve everything I have.
• Offline Survival: Although I might open the game up to allow friends to look at what I've built - after safely backing up my save, of course - I play to play the game entirely in single player, and with the rules put in place by survival mode. Everything will take time to build, the components themselves requiring resources gained either from salvage or mining, and the ever-present threat of suit energy or oxygen running out keeping me even more careful about what I do and where.
• Safe Environment: Sort of an oxymoron considering I'm to be free-floating in the empty void of space. Instead, this means that there won't be any meteor showers coming at semi-regular intervals. Although it would be another source of danger to contend with, experience has taught me that meteor showers mostly just make me do all of my work on the dark side of the asteroids, and that tends to make for terrible screenshots. This setting may change in the future.
• Infinite Asteroids, Low Density: Procedurally generated asteroids in an infinite map is what's gotten me so excited to play Space Engineers again. I decided to go with "low density" because I want to make sure that every asteroid I find is important, at least so far as resources go. From any one point, I should be able to see four or five asteroids at the edge of my view distance. This may come back to bite me in the rear later on, if I can't find a good supply of uranium or ice, but I'll have to deal with that when the time comes.
• Realistic x1 Speeds: Playing on the standard settings, so far as inventory sizing and speeds go, helps keep things.. well, realistic. Even in space an engineer can't hold a huge amount of components or tools. This setting will ensure that I think about building welding, grinding and mining ships for any project that will be of a decent size or that might take a long time.
• Auto-Healing - Disabled: Although I can understand the idea of a space suit being able to do some light work in helping to heal its occupant, I don't think it's very realistic to be able to heal from all damage. This setting ensures that I'll remember where my nearest medical room is located.
• Cargo Ships - Enabled: There are currently nine different kinds of abandoned cargo ships that will occasionally spawn into the world and drift through space. They can be a quick source of salvaged components for anyone brave enough to try and capture one, as they all have some manner of defensive weaponry in place. It might take a while for me to feel confident enough in my designs and tactics to try and do so myself, but it will happen sometime.
• Weapons - Enabled: This goes hand-in-hand with the above setting. Without weapons being enabled, the cargo ships would be far too easy to snatch up and repurpose for my own ends. Plus, if I ever decide to turn the meteor showers on, I'll need functional turrets to help defend against them.
• Oxygen - Enabled: One of the more recent updates to Space Engineers was the inclusion of oxygen as another factor to deal with in survival mode. Much like having to find and collect uranium to power my ships and supply my suit with energy, I'll need to collect ice to turn into oxygen.
• Tools Shake - Disabled: The main reason I have almost exclusively stuck to mining with the hand-drill in Space Engineers was due to the way that rotating drills would cause any ship I was piloting to shudder and twist all over the place. Doing so in the confines of an asteroid can cause important parts of the ship to simply be distroyed after taking enough impact damage. When the developers added this option to the game, they also caused ship grinders to shake when in use. For both of those reasons, I'm going to start the game with this setting disabled. Like some other choices, it may change in the future.
• Thruster Damage - Enabled: This makes sure that any ships I build will realistically have to deal with the damage that comes from thruster exhaust, helping shape the designs I make. Also, any ship that I upload to the Steam Workshop will be sure to work in other worlds, whether they have the thruster damage setting on or not.
• Spectator Mode - Enabled: This time around I plan to try and use only first-person mode whether inside of a ship or not. The only time I'll be taking advantage of spectator mode is when I want to take an interesting screenshot for this blog. Otherwise, if I want to see how my ship is oriented or whether it's got clearance to fly around a structure, I'll have to install a camera.

Updated Transmissions: Improved Ship Auto-Navigation (v01.085)

Another Thursday rolls around, and that means another update from the good people over at Keen Software House. Although most players on the game's subreddit had their fingers crossed that today would be the day that we were given planets to play around with, instead it was more of an improvement on a previous update.

Two weeks ago (in the 01.083 update), we were given the ability to remotely send our ships to various GPS coordinates we had set up, working something like autopilot. Most players were intrigued by this notion, but many of them had additions or tweaks they wish would be added at a future point. They wanted further levels of control, such as setting a maximum speed when traveling, or switching inertial dampeners off to allow for energy-saving coasting between points. Today, we were given just that.

Each GPS waypoint on the list can now be given up to nine actions to be performed. Also included was a precision autopilot mode, which makes a ship do its best to stop directly on a waypoint. Ships can now be directed between points in different directions as well. All of that sounds a bit confusing when explained separately, so I'll cut to the quick - this means that ships can be directed to remotely fly to a an outpost, land and take off again. This allows for things such as automated cargo systems.

Say you're off at some asteroid, far away from your home base. You've been mining for an hour or two, and the cargo hold of your storage vessel is full. You'd rather not spend the time to fly it all the way back and drop off its goods - maybe you have a second storage ship ready and waiting for more ore. With this new update you can send the first one back on its own, have it attach to your base via connectors to offload its cargo, and come back all while you're still digging away.

And, as always, this update also involves a number of bugfixes and small community contributions. A full list of the changes made by this update, including an embedded video explanation, are available at the Keen Software House forums here. In addition, this time the developers added a few examples of the new improved autopilot navigation systems on the Steam Workshop in both small ship and large ship flavors.

Welcome to Enduring the Void!

Whether you're entirely new to the game or simply looking for another venue of related entertainment, you've come to the right place. This blog will include a number of screenshots and pages dedicated entirely to several aspects of the game Space Engineers.

So, what exactly is Space Engineers? Developed by Keen Software House, Space Engineers is a voxel-based sandbox game set amongst asteroid fields in space. Since its initial release on Steam in late October of 2013, the game has seen many exciting updates, ranging from the addition of multiplayer to in-game programming, and nearly infinite, procedurally generated game worlds. Players can collect resources in a number of different ways while trying to deal with energy and oxygen management in survival mode, or avoid the hazards altogether and build their own space ships or stations in creative mode. The game features an extensive destruction engine, allowing for every part of a construct to be deformed by impacts and damage, all in a near-future setting with realistic physics like mass, inertia and velocity.

After extensively playing games such as Minecraft, Terraria and Starbound, gameplay footage of Space Engineers was more than a little intriguing. It wasn't until the developers had included a "survival mode" to the game that I finally decided to purchase it for myself. Within my first few hours of play, I was hooked; Space Engineers is now my most played game on Steam by more than a hundred hours. I quickly wanted to add to the community in some form; thinking back to a blog I had made to follow along as I played Minecraft, I felt that doing something of the same for Space Engineers was a good fit.

So again, welcome to Enduring the Void! I hope you enjoy your visit and make sure to check back for future updates.

What You'll Find Here

• The Exploration Continues: The meat and potatoes of the blog, so to speak. These are the pages that will continue to chronicle my progress through my single player game world. I'll try to take interesting screenshots of my travels, and do my best to post at something of a regular interval. If I ever feel that I haven't made much of an impact in any given day, I'll effort to post something of the following few categories.
• Updated Transmissions:  So far, nearly without fail, the developers of Space Engineers update the game every Thursday. These pages will do what they can to explain what the additions and changes are, and their possible impact on future gameplay.
• Fringe Science: This series will talk about different concepts and ideas that may or may not have occurred to most readers. Anything you've considered and wondered about the logistics of it, or whether or not it could actually work, can be found here.
• The Shipyard: A series of posts detailing some of the design choices I've made for my own ships and those I've found while exploring my little corner of space. Eventually I'll start dipping into the Steam Workshop to highlight some of the more interesting or unique ship designs to be found.
• Fellow Engineers:  The community for Space Engineers is vast and growing by the day. Sometimes another player stands out above the rest for his contributions. Last, but certainly not least, this series hopes to introduce you to some of your fellow engineers by offering a glimpse of what they've given of their time, imagination and ingenuity. You'll also find applicable links to their YouTube channels or websites.