Remembering Space Engineers.

Once upon a time there was a game called Space Engineers.

It was a fun game that you could waste your life playing but it wouldn't feel like a waste because it was fun.

Creative mode was the cat's meow. You would just plug in your gamepad with six analog axis control and be able to zoom around while panning the camera in any direction you wanted effortlessly. Even while playing with gamepad, you had a full compliment of hotbars to select blocks from. Whatever you wanted you could build.

Engineering was fun too because the HUD gave you >>> NUMBERS <<< that allowed you to calculate your thrust requirements and reactor needs.

Once you had a good fleet built up you could switch into survival mode. Planets were OK, especially when they had lots of >>>URANIUM<<<. There were some good mods for uranium planets that were really helpful. Ofcourse, Uranium is the only energy source efficient enough to run a starship unless you had a vacuum enernergy device or some other scifi power source.

One time I used a mod that gave you diesel engines so, as a joke, I built a ship that could take off from a planet purely on diesel power... What a ridiculous contraption!!! =P Anyway, the ion thrusters being 10% efficient and uranium being abundant, for both power and weapons use, you really didn't need anything else for most designs... I mean a lot of those designs were so beautifully optimized for this fuel cycle that converting them to anything else is simply unthinkable... \

Anyway, in survival mode, you always wanted to go to SPAAACE, this was space engineers after all. Working on planets could also be enjoyable for a while. One of the versions years ago had a system that allowed spawnships to spawn in appropriate locations instead of one fixed location deep in a planetary gravity well... Regardless, some of Jebediah Kerman's special tricks could get you into space with most of them. While the Mun is a fairly good place to set up shop, with abundant easy to find ice, the heart and soul of Space Engineers is Asteroid hopping. What you want to do as quickly as possible is build yourself a camera for your spawnship. In all cases, you want to set your draw distance to 30 KM and since everything within that bubble is, theoretically, visible, and everything beyond that is too low-res to be useful, you always want the map set at 30km.

The reason for that is that bootstrapping from a spawnship is too annoying and time-consuming. What you want is a derelict, not some wrecked ship that is totally broken except weapons systems that are still active for some incomprehensible reason and seem to have limitless magazines to shoot at you... Because they can be spotted from the full 30km, because this is a space game not some lame-ass shooter where things only need to be visible within 3 km, you can usually find a few within 30 minutes of looking and, at the very least, have enough materials to work with.

Because space is vast and there is no freakin way it could be tiled so densely with assailants as is implied, you generally had a reasonable amount of time to complete jacking a ship before coming under attack yourself.

Or, perhaps, you find a cargo ship. Cargo ships always (most of the time) used to have a weakness in their defenses. Knowing this weakness would allow you to board it, usually with just a grinder, and jack the thing. Because these were abundant, you would have abundant supplies of weapons and ammunition. In many cases it would make sense to chop the stuff you collected into sections and reconfigure them using merge blocks and tow-craft into more useful configurations. Basically everything you needed to actually have fun in the game and not scrounge desperately for ice or uranium, or even magnesium for that matter...

Yeah, Space Engineers was a great game, RIP.

 

What is the moral of this story? If it isn't easy, it's not worth playing?

 

Sounds like someone just needs a hug.

 

Complaining because the game is not like it used to be? Most of us are happy about that.