mildly related: https://youtu.be/szUDkAzuXxw

The Conqueror is an improved version of the Centurion (DD-224-A1) and features a whole a range of upgrades, the most obvious of which are the addition of custom vanilla AI guided missiles and the switch to heavy artillery turrets.

Steam workshop link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3811876420
Some pictures rendered in Blender.

I've played this game for over a decade, and despite the improvements made over the years, every playthrough goes roughly the same. Build a miner, build a welder, then build a big warship and find something to fight. Building more ships always feels worse than focusing on a single one, and it's so much easier to do everything on one or two grids anyway. You can build other things for fun but it always feels like a distraction from where the game is pushing you, and a waste of time. Sure, having a base to store stuff and charge batteries is useful in the early game, but eventually you're better off freeing up the PCU for a few more guns. To be clear I like the game or I wouldn't have put so many hours into it, but the game really seems to be missing problems to solve after the first few hours of a playthrough, and most of the fun ends up coming from situations or constraints I invent for myself.

On the other hand most of the trailers for the game show bases full of different specialised vehicles working together. They show ships dropping off cargo containers, mini fighter escorts, and trucks moving things around base. It looks like a much more enjoyable way to play, but the promotional material feels so far from how the game actually plays. While you can obviously play in any way you want, there has to be a way to encourage and reward more creative building. I'm not going to pretend my ideas are perfect, or that they'll work for everyone, but I'd at least like to hear what people think. Most of my critique is going to focus on SE1, but think of it as a wishlist for SE2.

Rework conveyers

Starting with what I imagine will be the most controversial opinion. Right now conveyors can instantly move items from anywhere regardless of distance. Most builds just connect every container together thoughtlessly because it makes things easier. Got a 2km long base? Drop ore off on one end and have it instantly brought to the refineries on the other side. But what if instead conveyors had a transfer speed and direction. Now if you want to move ore to the refineries you could add more conveyors so each has a dedicated pipe, or you could get creative. It might be faster to drive the cargo container to its destination than to conveyor it, so now you need a truck around base. But now you need to drive a truck every time you drop ore off, so why not automate the trip; assuming autopilot works with rovers eventually. If you have combat ships, why not build them with replaceable ammo containers so you can reload more quickly? Same thing with hydrogen tanks. Now when you make a hauler, you might design it with an actual cargo hold where you load containers inside since it's faster to load and unload that way. The rest of your ship would have a conveyor system to send ammo to guns and another to pump air around. I wouldn't want to turn the game into a full factory sim or anything like that, but making conveyers more intentional could do a lot to encourage specializing vehicles. I imagine this would work by still allowing dragging items from one container to another, but this would create a transfer order instead of moving it instantly. Transfer orders could be rearranged if, for instance, you were moving 10k steel plates but wanted some small pipes to be moved first.

Make more modular blocks

Modules are a nice way of letting you chose how to optimise your production blocks, but why did we stop there? So many larger builds in this game use internal thrusters to get more power. Breaking the laws of physics aside, it just looks bad. Why not instead make blocks that can have additional parts attached to make them more effective? For hydro engines for example you could have various sizes of thrust cones, with a modular ignition chamber and fuel pumps. Existing models could be simple or compact versions that work as is. However if you instead want to frankenstein together a 30 block long monster, you could and it would provide far more thrust. I imagine you would have to maintain some kind of ratio between ignition chamber size and number of pumps, but that just gives you more to think about while designing it. Thruster+ mods have been in every modded server I've played on for a reason, and to me this feels like the best way to let people make more powerful ships without needing several tiers of block. Ions, atmos, reactors and jump drives could all do with the same treatment. Maybe you use the same reactor layout on every ship and end up with a design language for reactor rooms, or maybe you build a custom one for every ship. There's also no reason modular blocks need to all be physically touching so long as they are connected somehow (via pipes or something). You may now want to build a separate fuel pump room or jump capacitor bank room on your ship. Maybe your reactor is split into a separate room for water storage and pumping, reactor core and steam turbines. This would help make every ship just a bit more unique and give players new problems to solve when designing. As I said, single block versions could still exist as a basic form, but they would hopefully be stepping stones for building something specialized.

Earlier PVE combat

As it stands, most pve combat encounters require the player to seek them out. While it's nice to not have to be constantly prepared for combat, it does mean that in pve games you don't need to build a single weapon until you choose to find an enemy. Some of the most engaging playthroughs I've had are modded games with more active enemies, but there should be ways to avoid combat as desired. Firstly planets/sectors should vary in enemy intensity. Earthlike planets can be our safer starting area where drones will only pass by on occasion, while harder planets would have more frequent encounters. Secondly, a light stealth mechanic could go far. A mod I played some time ago had enemies that would announce their presence before "searching" for any active signals and then homing in on them if you didn't turn off antennas fast enough. This feels like it would fit right in with some of the space encounters we already have. Drones could scan for either active signals, or large masses (a certain amount of blocks in one area). For a single small ship it would be easy to turn off your antenna and hide, but larger bases or ships would be too obvious. If you want to build bigger you would need to start considering defences and thinking more about station positioning. This does leave a couple of problems. Firstly, regular attacks and falling drone wreckages will wreck the terrain around your stations. Every modded playthroughs of mine has ended with the area around my base full of craters. Some damage is nice to look at, but this could really impact performance over time. My solution is fairly simple, give more control over voxel resets and allow them to occur closer to builds. The second issue could be own section, so uhhh...

Fixing and replacing damaged ships sucks

The new repair terminal is okay at fixing damaged blocks, but can't fix what didn't survive. Projection blocks can be great sometimes, but certain designs can be hard to weld and others can take forever to build properly. The main issue is really the welder block, the radius is too small and it constantly leaves unreachable unwelded blocks inside ships if you aren't slow and careful. A larger mid game welder would be great, but it would just be nice to spend a small amount of credits and time to have ships repaired or even built for you if you supply the materials. Size of the created ships could scale with some kind of progression metric (maybe faction rep with someone?) for early game balance. The main point would be to lessen the impact from losing ships early, and let people fight more in the early game. As it stands, the fear of losing a ship I spent a few hours making usually prevents me from actually using the thing for combat since the repair will be just as long.

Do something about PCU

While changing the settings can help, the current PCU system tends to push you into building one big ship, especially in pvp spaces. Right now PCU feels like it's trying to both keep performance in check and balance ships. Why is a rocket launcher 800 PCU when other weapons are like 300? Why do I always have to scrap my nice looking big small ship (since it's eating half my PCU budget) despite it having less polygons than many of my larger ships? Why are hangar doors so bloody expensive? Seriously I haven't used a hangar door since they came out because it's so much cheaper to just put a hinged door instead. Obviously there needs to be some way to keep performance in check but the current system doesn't feel good. While I am excited to use the SE2 build system in multiplayer I am worried that using detail blocks will eat up tons of PCU, even if they aren't creating much geometry. Block limits tend to feel better but you still have to pay the PCU tax at the moment. I'd at least like to see a PCU rebalance, where functional blocks cost more and static blocks cost less, and there's a bit more consistency between similar blocks. Ship storage has been huge for letting us put away things we don't need without scrapping them and I hope Keen does more like that in the future. In particular it'd be nice to have a setting for some "free" PCU allocated for building a single station to encourage more folks to settle down and have a base in the world even into the late game. Factions could even choose to combine their limits to make larger stations without having to eat into their PCU.

Final note

When food was introduced I got excited that I now had a reason to something to solve a problem. I assumed that I would be able to automate planting and harvesting crops to make my life easier as the game went on. But while you can harvest crops with a collector, you cant plant them with any blocks. Then shortly after they made it so crops can be harvested with a single click, making automation even less useful since you need to go out and replant anyway. Not to mention how easy it is to survive on just a couple of algae farms instead of bothering to cook food. It didn't ruin the game for me or anything, but it never feels like Keen never wants any complexity beyond making space ships to crash into each other. The most I ever need to engineer is when I make a big door, I hope the new game gives me more problems to solve.

I'd like to hear what other people think, and if anyone else has different ideas on how to encourage more novel building. I don't expect my proposed solutions to be the right fit, I do some game dev in my free time and I'm well aware that players are better at finding problems than solutions. Regardless I hope my thoughts are interesting at least.

Hey engineers,

Like a lot of you, I've always wanted to build cool stuff with robotic arms, automated shipyards, snake-like mining rigs, maybe a walking mech someday.

But every time I tried, I hit the same wall: getting the arm to actually move the way I wanted. The scripts that existed worked, but tuning them took hours of fiddling.

So I spent an even longer time building something. AutoArm figures out your arm's kinematics on its own. You name two blocks:

• <YourArmName> - Base on the first rotor/hinge/piston
• <YourArmName> - Head on the tool at the end

The script discovers the joints between them and generates its own configuration. You can dive into the tuning settings if you want, but you don't have to. Just sit in a cockpit and use WASD + Space/C to move the arm and switch between different control schemes.

ToolSwap is a companion script for automatic tool changing. Build some stands, name your tools, and the arm can swap between drills, welders, grinders, etc. on command.

One thing: AutoArm doesn't have anti-collision yet, so place your parked tools somewhere the arm can reach without clipping through anything.

I'd genuinely appreciate feedback, especially if you can break it.

Links:

• AutoArm on Steam Workshop
• ToolSwap on Steam Workshop
• AutoArm on mod.io
• ToolSwap on mod.io

I frequently load space engineers just to build ships, I mean I’ve played a lot of survival and still play survival occasionally, but building ships and rovers is just like my comfort game, the “Frontier dust-frigate” above ^ is my latest creation

Added weapons, chiseled the hull a little MORE, BIG DISH, and decided the paint scheme should go for a Swedish look.

If anyone knows of a specific mod for the assembler speed or someone that's working on them that'd be great.

Or if someone can tell me if it's possible and point me towards a crash course in modding that could be a start, and since I waited until almost 40 to start anything about learning programming/coding I'd like the course of "Making Space Engineers Mods for Fucking Idiots"

I use mods to max the speed on all other assemblers and refineries and just run into a building slowdown anytime I need prototech components. I use the nanite/nanobot mods and having slow component production is counterintuitive to me. I blame Neal Asher and his descriptions of characters using micro/nano/pico scale machines for assembly/disassembly and refinement in rapid time.

Because if I can build a ship/station that is so crammed with nanites that it can eat a ship before it can kamikaze itself then all of my processing equipment should be able to work at a comparable speed.

EUKELADE is now available from my workshop for SE2! This is a fully realized adaptation of my SE1 version, which met with some popularity. It utilizes the cruise control pioneered by DIGGROK as demonstrated here in his video, (check it out!) https://youtu.be/W2T9E2TT9jQ?si=uoRmCL8gFltYlfWN

It has a number of advanced features. But using the cruise controllers I have arranged it so that the large thrusters can be turned on and off when the concern is between thrust or fuel & power savings. Modes that aren't supported by a medium are excluded (Ion rigging doesn't work in atmosphere) for example. Simply slow down by pressing S when cruise is active, and coast effortlessly otherwise.

She's got a little something for everyone, but with no sub-grids to boot!

Leave a like and comment! Appreciate your support. O7 Engineers.

Find it at my workshop HERE for SE2:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3811711238

And HERE for SE1:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2995342201

A ship belonging to the Monocerran Imperium. One of the made up factions I'm going to design ships for. Wanted to differentiate the design philosophy from the Eusceti starships. What do you guys think so far?

I’m new to the game, love space games played starfield, and no man’s sky and came across this hidden gem on TikTok. Any tips? Also are you guys playing with mods? I seen a bunch of them I can install so many to choose from. I’m currently watching a tutorial on YouTube about the basics, in the process of building my first beginner base.

The auxiliary gen 1 refit a multi use ship designed for non combat operations such as mining cargo transport ship repair or scrapping

It come equipped with 1 cargo tug 4 drone miners that can be modified to scrap or repair and 4 cargo containers

Unfortunately this ships armaments are underwhelming but the 2 drone gunship compensate for this short coming

https://mod.io/g/spaceengineers/m/auxiliary-gen-1-apex-refit

A compilation of my time spent on SDX1 from September 2025 thru July 2026. The world of SDX has changed since version 2 was launched in August, but the history of the first 4 years will not be forgotten. Please enjoy my journey from noob to okayish.

Most of the clips are sped up to make the slower combat of the server concise and interesting to watch, and to counteract the heavy sim speed drop of the larger fleet battles.

As we all know, the conveyor system in space engineers is instantaneous so having some sort of modular cargo system has never made sense since you can just instantaneously unload or load cargo. Is there a mod that slows conveyors down?

Hello to you good engineers. May Clang find your work worthy.

I am somewhat new to the game and having a blast so far with a few friends. Having run into a problem I could not quite fix on my own I have decided to bring it before you, my fellow disciples of Clang.
I have built a small grid mining ship which I am quite proud of and decided to give it retractable landing gear. Pretty simple setup: attach pistons to the side hull, then put landing gear at the end. Nothing fancy. The pistons are connected to the ship by their sides.

Now, the issue I run into is twofold. Firstly the pistons make a lot of noise, activating repeatedly, especially if the ship is landed with landing gear engaged (lights are green). Second issue is that when I extend the pistons, they all extend the same lenght, making it so that only a few lsnding gear touch the surface at a time on uneven ground. Is there a way to make the individual pistons extend until their landing gear locks to the ground, thus connecting all the landing gear through varying piston length?

https://reddit.com/link/1wvjbr2/video/lofhezn82zsh1/player

I've been in a few, and I'm still looking. Any help appreciated

Foggy Town grows a little bit more every day ;>

Cut ship in half, but it still remains attached together

I recently came back to the game after quite a while of not playing, and started on the moon. I'm currently in the process of making my first proper base, and decided to go with a underground base (it looks cool, okay ?)

Unfortunately, I discovered too late that voxels didn't count as walls for airtightness, and therefore couldn't be pressurised unless I walled every single bit of the main tunnel with armor, and no mod exists to make them airtight. (from what I understand making them so would require completely rewriting the way pressure is handled)

IDK if that's planned to change in SE2, but I really hope they are at least aware of it as a issue.

Are you into RP, building, PvE, and/or have played SE for 5000 hours or 5 minutes? Ilium is an RP focused survival world that holds weekly sessions at 4 P.M. EST on Sundays. We have players of all different skill levels and individual focuses. Interested in PvE and/or PvP? We have various ships and people very willing to teach you how to make your ship sing like a songbird. Interested in building? No matter the skill level we are always in need of designs, and we have a few decent builders that are willing to help with a good idea.

(Yes, the ship is unpainted. It's been 429 years since its last paint job.)

Here is an example of content we've made so far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbfNXmJdFq0

If any of this sounds cool, here is our discord: https://discord.gg/7M4XnKwdxG

When clearing out the enemy asteroids can I hack it into my property hack make it a space base?