Sleep or time skip?

Single player woes, sitting about at night is boring particularly in early game when everything is scraping by on solar power. In minecraft you go to bed!

If a cyrochamber sleep unit or a wait functiom could let us skip on a few hours it would be pretty cool. Or even actual beds, I love fleshing out ships and stations to seem habitable.

Less useful for multiplayer unless you're all on the same hemisphere though I guess but can't have it all right?

 

I've heard rumours about minecraft being played multiplayer. Minecraft has beds that work in singleplayer. How do they work in multiplayer?
I've also heard rumours about multiplayer in Space Engineers. Why couldn't beds work / not work like in minecraft in Space Engineers?

I'd like a bed. Would be good for immersion. I don't really mind working through the night, but it'd be cool to feel like a cryopod had a use.

 

Sleep is useless in SpaceEngineer.

Nothing to do at night in the beginning - go mine some ore.
In the beginning you will not have BIG ship.
And underground it's night anyway all the time.

Build small cargo ship. fill it by mining with handdrill.
When not flying turn off engines.

your first mining sites will be quite close to your station most likely. there are unlimited ways to mark your safe flying zone.
use GPS waypoints. use ligts, use antennas. just memorize the directions with some landscape points. (lake is that way, mountain is that way. ok I see that silouette = my base is that way...)
As an engineer its not possible to get lost in this game, specially on planets, even in complete darkness there is always a solution.

Build up your base from small to large, don't start your megamonstrum builds right away.
Evolve over time

Dave

 

I go mining during night.

 

I think that would make players rich too fast. The only resource that you have to stockpile at this moment is oxygen, and that is pretty easy to do. Maybe, somewhere in the future, when they implement a hunger system (like in ME), an option to "skip time" would be better balanced and challenging.

 

In Minecraft, if everyone on the server is in bed, then it will become daytime. Works well when everyone you're playing with is in the same house, and not stuck down deep in some dungeon.

 

In order for the cycle to work every player must climb in bed. This works in mc because mc for the most part is a flat world.
However, in SE you may be on the dark side, player b is currently on the sunny side, and player c is in space. Player c is unaffected by the issue and has no real need to sleep, and player a and b would argue over who gets the sun.

 

But there is no "night/day" cycle, it's the sun revolving around the game. So what you are really asking for is a "skip time function." If you asked the game engine to wake me up when it's daytime, it would be like "ugh?!? It's always day somewhere." For single player, maybe this could work, but it's not necessary and if you have any moving parts, I doubt the engine would handle that. Plus it would need to calculate your power usage and refining periods, I guess THAT is a possible easy calculation, but the what if you have pirates enabled, would they just turn off and not attack? There are plenty of things to do in the dark. I focus my early game work by functions depend on light levels. If it is light outside, I work on framing out station expansions or small rover building (it's more planning oriented so I can visualize it better with light), and mining with a mining rig (cause you don't want to break it). When it is dark, I hand-mine (as stated before "it's always night underground"), weld, and grind. I work each cycle to prep for the other cycle. A few small projects at first, then add more and expand slowly.

 

I'm still fine with this idea (mainly because I don't play multiplayer in the first place but still), since it would still be helpful if you are a couple of friends working on the same base, in the same general area. Hell, you could just make it a single player only feature; cryopods are nothing but decoration in single player as is, while they have a legitimate use in multiplayer.

 

In single player why not just stop the sun until you're better prepared?
And in mp it's ok for friends but we can't just indiscriminately toss aside servers that may have factions. It's a half measure that would only please a portion of the player base. As soon as it's put in we would see a dozen threads railing how it's broken for groups.

 

Personally, I don't really have an issue with night time; I just feel it would some times be nice skipping to the next day. My current base is at the pole, meaning I always have some sunlight, and stuff like that. Plenty of things you can do to get around the problem without resorting to disabling it completely. Other than feeling like I'm cheating, turning off sun rotation would remove the possibility of watching the awesome sunsets / sunrises that are in the game. I mean, in singleplayer (and only in singleplayer, this would obviously not work in multiplayer) there could be a wait system, set up either so that all days are 24 hours, scaled to your sun rotation time, or just have it as "wait for this and this many minutes" instead of hours. Either way would be nice, and I don't see why that would be a difficult problem to solve. Hell, this would even be nice in space where sunlight doesn't really matter, have a bunch of ore to process? Cryo sleep for a week. Boom, done, and you can go back to crafting. This could be used as an alternative to higher refinery speeds.

 

This is where dedicated servers work best, and is a route that dayz took. On a DS time never stops when you log out so on my server I always made sure the refineries were loaded and the assemblers were mass producing parts when I logged off. Log in the next day and all that stuff is still chugging away. You can plan your play time around it.
Now the reason why I brought up dayz was because they ran multiple servers that were set at different schedules, so if you wanted to keep playing you could leave the current server at sunset and log into another at the start of a new day.

The best solution has already been mentioned though. Go mine at night. It's what my friends and I did in mc before beds. It's either that or start placing lights everywhere so you can see what you are doing. Or temporarily stop the sun and watch sunsets later. But putting in a half measure just to please a few doesn't seem real beneficial.

Edit: the only real solution is to do what mc did which is light up the night to dark shadow overlay. Kind of takes away the immersion of night travel but it will allow all parties to still function.

Side note: in my short time of being an OTR driver I've found that gas refineries are actually really nice to look at during the night hours because of how lit up they are.

 

Thinking about it, the single player wouldn't be so bad. If it's your game you can do what you want with it.

With the cryo chamber a slider can be put in skyrim style where it simply fast forwards the game and calculates what would be processed in that time (meaning the more things you are running the longer the pause while the system thinks and places and whatever else). If it's opened to multiplayer or DS the option would be greyed out.

 

If you're going to skip time. Why not simply turn off the sun rotation in options? Obviously wouldn't work in MP, but neither would skipping time.

I do like having another function for Cryopods though. Just unsure how useful it would be.

 

A way to manually move the sun in spacemaster would be really nice.

 

I think for single player at least this would be very good. But like in minecraft, multiplayer servers would not sleep much at all. Even there where it is night everywhere at once you get people who won't go to bed quite a lot. It just interrupts whatever they were doing, be that mining or working inside, hunting the night time beasties or whatever.

I see no issue in having a feature that is only useful in singleplayer though. Cryopods are only useful in multiplayer at the moment anyway, would be nice to give them a use while playing solo.

 

I agree with the OP. A simple sleep/wait timer that moves the sun on x number of hours would be welcome, by me, in single player.

Although most of the problems with the long, dark nights can be alleviated or avoided as you progress into the game, becoming almost negligible later, the start of a game can be pretty boring over the first few nights, until you build up enough infrastructure to make it possible to work at a base through-out the night.

I do think that this should really only apply to single-player, as in multi-player you will generally have other players around to keep things interesting during the night. Even guarding your base against unexpected night attack, whilst reading the server chat, is more interesting, game-play wise, than just sitting for half an hour to an hour in single player mode, staring at a black screen, waiting for the sun to rise, and unable to to do anything productive at all.

I also think that it would be of benefit later in the game too. I've frequently found myself having similar wait times, awaiting re-entry, as the sun rises slowly over my landing site so that I can safely set down with out fear of inadvertently running into a mountain in the dark.

 

I would really like to see the same concept from minecraft in space engineer. When all players are in the cryopod then time would skip to the morning. But this can't be really made if players are in different hemispheres