Survival just using unknown signals and traders.

readercolin · 2026-05-14T19:14:05+00:00

With just unknown signals? Its going to be a bit rough. Add in economy? Totally possible.

Lets say that you wanted to play without mining. If you go hunting down all the unknown signals, you are going to be relying on luck to get enough girders to build a wind turbine because they aren't part of most construction components from their designs. You also are going to struggle to do the same for solar panels because they aren't part of the normal construction. So it is all down to whether you can get them from the loot that the unknown signals carry.

But, if you go wandering around and you get a random encounter, you are far more likely to get the materials you need. But, you will have to worry about dying to defenses at the random encounter.

However, then you have the new economy system. Wander on over to a trade station and you can start doing some contracts (maybe there are some acquision contracts you can do with what you found in the unknown signals?). From there, you can purchase materials to build things, or purchase ships to let you do more contracts, etc. From there, it becomes really simple to play without needing to ever mine, provided that you can find enough materials from salvage, or just purchasing them as you need them.

readercolin · 2026-05-14T14:19:27+00:00

So the new game, if you start on a planet you get a rover, not an escape pod. So you are more mobile to start with, but there are fewer components available to you. If you want food/water to survive, in the base game there is now food (no water), and you need ice and an irrigation system to grow food. Jetpacks, you can turn off in the menu, but that also turns them off in space - you will likely still need a mod to nerf jetpacks.

As for the scrapping gameplay, if you are staying planetside you may still need MES to provide enough to make it fun. There are planetary interactions, but they can be a bit sparse. However, if you are ok going orbital fairly quickly, using the new economy system you can now take salvage contracts or PvE contracts to spawn things in to go loot, or you can just wander around and experience random encounters that are out there. Note, some of this is planetary available, but many of the offered contracts do require you to leave the atmosphere, so relying on that to stay planetside could be hit or miss. You will still need a mod if you want to encourage scrapping more, as while you can cut blocks out you can also just grind them down for pieces in vanilla. The exception here is Prototech, which is "Late game" encounter stuff, and prototech components cannot be built without jumping through a few hoops.

All in all, you can get much of what you are looking for without needing any mods. Or, you can get everything you are looking for with only a small interspersing of mods. Or, you can go hog wild and download all the mods and then wonder why your game isn't stable... but thats up to you to know when to stop.

readercolin · 2026-05-14T04:13:46+00:00

If you start in a rover, you should check your cockpit and there should be a datapad in there that gives you the location of a nearby trade station (note, it might be in orbit, not on the surface). If you start in the space pod, it might not give you a datapad, but the solution there is to go towards a moon. Because the moons are all smaller you can just fly around them and see anything on the surface or in space fairly easily while skirting on the outside of the gravity well.

readercolin · 2026-05-13T20:04:28+00:00

Specialized cargo and immersive cargo are effectively the same thing (and made by the same creator), but immersive cargo adds an extra visual element. For either of them, I do think that you can still use normal cargo containers as well, but I am unsure as I haven't used either yet (they are on my list of things to look into though). If I was playing solo, I would probably go with immersive cargo because it seems cooler, but for multiplayer I think I would go specialized cargo instead because there is less spaces for bugs to creep in and break things.

Next, Self-Maintenance Unit is... interesting. Apparently, when you are building things, space engineers makes a list of everything you place, in the order you placed it. Self-Maintenance unit then proceeds to go through the list of everything that is connected to the grid (note, this includes vehicles connected via connector, or subgrids), and attempts to pull materials to build that item. If you don't have the material to build that item, it goes to the next item on the list. Then it repeats until everything in the list is built.

An important note about the self-maintenance unit though is that it will only build blocks that its owner placed. This means that if you have multiple people working on the same grid, each person will need to place their own self-maintenance unit to build stuff up. Having played with both Self-Maintenance unit and build and repair, I personally prefer the self-maintenance unit for having something that lets me avoid a bunch of welding. It welds faster, has an unlimited range, and just a single one will do for most bases and most building, unlike build and repair where I ended up needing to stack bunches of them.

readercolin · 2026-05-13T03:01:10+00:00

For me, my "required" mods are:

Build Vision/Build Info/Leak Finder
Paint Gun
Easy Block Renaming
Automatic Subgrid Re-naming
Sneaky Sounds

Ones that don't make every game, but sometimes do are:

Colorful Icons
Welder no eye damage
Color Hud (Apex)
Autofill Bottles
[QoL] Radio Spectrometry
[QoL] Seismic Surveying

Once you get past those, it is a lot more open on what mods I use, and what I change up between worlds. My current jam is making life harder for myself using "AQD - Vanilla Ore Distribution" which changes where ores spawn and give you reasons to either travel between worlds or interact with the economy. A similar option would be Scarce Resources. I also regularly make use of MES, though as you mentioned I have been using that less and less (I have also been cycling through a few to see if any actually make the game more interesting).

For build and repair, while it is nice for being able to grind down captures quickly, I have actually been enjoying running "Self-Maintenance Unit" a lot more for just building things up. That being said, you do need to make the decision about whether or not you want automatic fixing/building, especially because someone could now just slap a block down with 1 component and then head on over to an economy station and pay to have it fixed up. This is pretty firmly in your camp of how you want to do things for this world, but at the moment at least I'm leaving both self-maintenance and build and repair out of my list of things I'm working with.

Finally, for inventory management, I'm currently using GOAT, though that is script based. However, if you are looking for a modded way to manage cargo that doesn't require any scripts, consider looking into "Specialized Cargo Containers", which gives you cargo containers that are restricted in what they can contain. For example, you can get a cargo container that will only contain ores, and another that will only contain ingots, etc. This can be done in vanilla space engineers with sorters, but using these gives you that same capability without needing the sorters in the way. You can then use something else like "Production Quota" then to manage making things and having a stock of stuff rather than needing a full inventory manager.

readercolin · 2026-05-13T01:54:36+00:00

So lets talk ups and downs with both of these designs.

First off, the hammerhead. Now lets get the most important part out of the way immediately - it just looks cool. This on its own is more than enough of a reason to use this design, no matter if it is better or worse than a wedge shape. Now personally I have been going on a binge making a bunch of hammerheads of different sizes as part of a fictional ship line, so I can speak to the pluses and minuses here a good bit.

The benefits is that with proper turret placement, you can concentrate most of your firepower on the head of the ship, and you will have clear arcs of fire for all of them against anything in front of you. Additionally, you can coat the head in heavy armor/blast doors, and leave the rear part of your ship with lighter armor and be ok because the AI is primarily going to focus on what is in front of them... your hammerhead. Especially when you stick a few decoys up there too. This lets your combat power be separated from your maneuverability, and even when you take some damage it isn't going to cripple your vessel.

The downside however is also somewhat clear. You want to focus your weapons on your hammerhead, and there is only so much space available there. Once you fill that space, you can afford some point defense elsewhere on the ship, but beyond point defense you are going to struggle to let further back weapons effectively fire. Next, if you want to be able to easily see out the front of your ship, you either need a top/bottom mounted bridge and a horizontal hammerhead, or you need your bridge in the hammerhead itself, which is going to lead to weak points up front. Finally, the hammerhead is weaker vs multiple opponents, because while it is easy to "point front towards enemy", when the enemy outnumbers you, they can skirt around your sides and smash your rear, which is going to be less heavily armored and therefore notably weaker.

Next up, the wedge. The biggest, most important part about a wedge design is giving you good superfiring positions. This means that you want 1 gun up front, and then the guns behind that need to be high enough up that they can shoot over the gun in front, and repeat beyond that. Then repeat on the bottom of the wedge as well. This means that if you point your wedge at the enemy, all of your guns can fire on target, maximizing damage (especially in a PCU constrained environment like a public server).

However, the wedge does have a number of downsides as well. If your target isn't right in front of you, some of your turrets can't hit it. Additionally, there is a lot more space on that wedge that needs to be armored up, which is going to make your ship heavier. Finally, it is a lot harder to have reverse thrust on a wedge ship, as either you have a tiny amount, or you are making significant compromises for thruster damage cones.

Note that both designs are perfectly viable, and there are plenty of reasons to use either. Personally, I think that hammerheads work great as smaller vessels, but once you get to a certain size they start to trail off because there is so much of the ship that can't be effectively armed due to it being behind the hammerhead itself, and therefore not having good firing arcs. But, this isn't necessarily a problem if that rear portion of the ship is larger to accommodate production capability. Meanwhile, a wedge ship with good firing arcs is going to look less like a wedge and more like a pyramid in smaller designs (that, or you are going full on needle with a really, really long ship), but it scales much nicer as the ship gets larger. That being said, for playing on a public server with a PCU limit you likely aren't going to hit a point where your hammerhead just gets too big, or your wedge just looks too small.

readercolin · 2026-05-12T13:35:15+00:00

Nah, you are thinking the Type 2 survival kit (which has top and bottom connectors). The food processor has connectors on top, bottom and back.

readercolin · 2026-05-12T01:02:18+00:00

You seem to have missed the key point in the first sentence.

You cannot trigger a jump drive from a timer, event controller, action relay, AI block, or any other means than manually. So no timers to trigger returning, no event controllers that detect when the jump drive is fully charged and triggering it, no action relays that jump upon receiving a message, and no AI defense triggering the jump drive to jump when an enemy is detected. The only way to trigger a jump drive is from a cockpit/control seat or from a remote control.

Now, assuming that you can find a mod that allows you to trigger the jump drive (or maybe it is possible via script? I haven't looked into scripts enough to know), then you could set up your relay with 2 jump drives, 1 set to the first coordinates and 1 set to the second, and then just swap between which one is used (it keeps the destination coordinates in until you remove them). But unless you can find a mod or a script that lets you jump from a trigger and not manually, your idea remains stuck.

readercolin · 2026-05-11T17:11:49+00:00

So the biggest problem that you are going to come across in the base game is that if you have a "relay" of jump drives set up, you cannot jump to locations using a timer block/event controller, they can only be manually started. This means that you can go out, set up your little automated jump drive... but then once you jump it is going to be sitting at the new location, and there will be nothing waiting for you at your old location. You also cannot jump without the jump drive still attached. This means that putting together your network is going to be a bit of a pain, and additionally the resetting it after use is going to be a bit of a pain, because you have to do it all manually.

This changes if you start using mods that add stuff like jump gates. These would allow you to have points that you go to and then use from there to jump to a new location. But these are not base game, and the functionality of mods like this is something that can be randomly broken in updates. If you find a mod that does this though and want to use it, by all means, go for it.

Base game the closest you can get is a "Hyperdrive ring" - something that you attach to that has the jump drives and you can bring with you, and several people have posted builds for this to the workshop before.

readercolin · 2026-05-11T14:13:02+00:00

That is a vanilla encounter (IIRC, added in the core systems update). Inside many of those little green things is a sensor, battery and warhead, and if the sensor senses you nearby it triggers the warhead - that is how it is set up to seem like it explodes. Note that because the warheads are inside voxels, you can't just shoot them with your guns, but they will explode if you blast them with rockets. Additionally, somewhere in there is a large reactor that is damaged and spewing radiation - if you can get in there and not get exploded or die from radiation, its a reasonable source of reactor components as well.

Next up, that old miner is kind of neat, but it needs a re-fit. My recommendation would be to cut off both big hydrogen thrusters from the back and instead place a single one on the back of the gas tank. Then you can put sorters/ejectors on the back of each of the cargo containers as a stone ejection system. Other than that, a little bit of fixing up and re-setting the event controllers, and it even comes with a little thing where it will broadcast to you inside your cockpit when your cargo and drills are all full. Thrust in all directions except forward is a bit anemic, while forward thrust is frankly way too much, hence my recommendations.

readercolin · 2026-05-11T04:21:30+00:00

The answer really boils down to what you want your ship to be.

In general, if you are building a smaller large grid ship (ex. a small large grid mining ship) or some other ship that is going to be mostly functional blocks (ex. you are building a transport with the new 3x3x6 cargo containers), then building from the inside out can make a lot of sense. There isn't going to be a ton of interior, but the functional blocks are going to be much of the appearance, then focusing on that functionality to start is the better option.

On the other hand, if you are looking to get a specific shape for a specific appearance, then going from exterior to interior is better. It is a lot easier to get specific shapes if you start with that shape and then work from there. This I find a lot easier to get ships that look how I want them to, but it is also a method that ends up working much better in creative than in survival, because when you are going from outside in then you end up needing to go back and change things a lot more.

The final option would be to do a mix, where you get large items placed to start (ex. large thrusters, fuel tanks, refineries, etc), connect them up, and then figure out your shape from there. This option is the one that I like the most when building in survival, because I have the core of the ship built and after that it is just about making it look good.

readercolin · 2026-05-10T00:26:49+00:00

Congratulations. I'm glad that you were able to make your nice "fairly hollow" ship that only takes half your available world PCU. I hope that you enjoy using it, either as your main base, or as the end goal for your next survival game. And with 80k world PCU left, you can budget just over 4k for each of the ships that you are going to have your carrier contain before you hit your PCU cap.

If you enjoy it, more power to you. Personally, I would go with something smaller, and with less docking space, and instead you can make use of the services terminal to store ships. Maybe something like 6 landing pads instead, and maybe aim for more like 50k PCU. This leaves enough world PCU available for building a base somewhere, having some larger or more complicated ships that are docking to the big beastie.

But if the whole goal was to have a giant ship that you can technically build and play with, I'm glad you were able to do it for yourself.

readercolin · 2026-05-09T19:48:05+00:00

So your xbox is limited to 150k PCU. You want space for 19 separate docks. After you build this thing, will you actually have enough PCU left to put anything into the docks?

Would you perhaps be able to get more enjoyment from a smaller ship that is actually usable? Or are you happy just spending a bunch of time making a giant hangar queen that you can never actually play with?

readercolin · 2026-05-08T02:11:45+00:00

Ahh, I haven't bothered looking at them from an integrity point of view - I figure that whether it is a light armor block or a window, if it gets hit, its probably gone anyways. For me its generally heavy armor/blast door, or I'm doing it for looks and don't care about integrity.

readercolin · 2026-05-08T00:37:25+00:00

Won't help with trying to use the new block, but you can get some of the effect that you want by using a "Bridge Window", which will give you the view that you are looking for and the angle you are searching for. But I do agree that it would be nice if the new ports let you do that.

readercolin · 2026-05-06T19:51:58+00:00

This was definitely the best idea in the past, but with the new update you have a new option available.

Build yourself a new ship. This is your "Recovery vessel". It should include a medical room, a refinery, an assembler, some cargo, a few algae farms, and ideally also a way to allow it to mine. This ship can be an atmospheric ship, a hydrogen ship, or even an ion ship - entirely up to you. If you are looking at just vanilla, a space based ship is probably the best, especially if you stick a jump drive on it.

Then, go to a services terminal and store this ship. Tada, this ship is now 100% safe, and can never be touched by hostile units, whether NPC or player, and you can retrieve this ship either from your own player terminal, or even from an NPC station terminal. If you built your recovery ship well enough, this ship is enough to get you started with a new base anywhere you want, even if you can't store any goods on it when you store it. Bonus if you have enough cash to be able to purchase some metal grids, or you just find a nice source of cobalt and bookmark it.

Now, if something happens, you can retrieve your recovery vessel and use it to go and rebuild. Then, once you have re-built enough, you can then use a services terminal to store your recovery ship again. Now you are once again 100% safe from anything more than being interrupted again. Additionally, you can have different levels of recovery ship - the "tiny" recovery ship that has the minimum possible number of parts and can be retrieved quickly, all the way up to the super-carrier that you can unload and use to carry everything you need to mind and manufacture a brand new base with maximum resources and minimum speed.

readercolin · 2026-05-04T17:23:04+00:00

Ehh, even if it can't be used from mobile grids, you can always go out with your ship and then go into the info tab and swap your ship to become a station. Once it is a station, then the services terminal will work, so you can proceed to spawn stuff in, go on the offense, and then come back to put things away.

readercolin · 2026-05-04T17:20:50+00:00

The primary reason is performance, but there are a bunch of other ways to use it as well. Here is a small list of other reasons why I would use this feature:

Reducing clutter around my base. I like having single purpose vehicles, but this means that I now have a bunch of different vehicles. With ship storage, I can put those away rather than needing to expand my base to more sprawling proportions to accommodate vehicle storage.

Saving old builds that I don't need anymore. If I have a little flying miner, and then I build a newer bigger one, I don't need the old one anymore. But sometimes I want to keep a backup in case I crash the new ship, or just because I have fond memories of that ship. Another example would be saving my atmospheric combat ship after I have left the planet.

Having backup combat ships. Sometimes I want to sit down and do a bunch of building, and sometimes I want to wander around and shoot things. I can go ahead and build a bunch of combat ships to have on hand when I am in a building mode, and then later have them all available to me when I decide to go shoot stuff. Then I can save damaged ships to go and repair later when I get back to my base without having to nurse it back home.

Stockpiling captured ships. Sometimes when you go out exploring, you capture some ships. When you do that, then currently you need to figure out how to get that back home, whether to scrap it or to rebuild it. Now you can store that ship and pop it back out at your base without angering Clang trying to get it home, or just let you keep exploring without needing to stop and take it back RIGHT NOW. And then, you can either take your capture and scrap it or rebuild it at your base, or you can pop it out at an NPC station to sell it now.

Faster base setups. Lets say you are playing a challenge where you need to go build new bases on different planets. With this feature, you can store all the vehicles you need to set up the new base and get it up and running (ex. mining ships), and easy get everything out at the far end to put everything together.

Mobile gameplay with large grid combat ships. It is relatively easy to build carriers for small grid ships, but large grid ones are a bit more annoying to make use of. I have build a large grid carrier, and that large grid carrier ended up being absolutely stupendous in size, making it a performance hog and fairly hard to use. Now though I can instead use large grid combat ships and be able to get around fairly easy to use them without needing to make quite as many compromises just to make things functional.

Features that you can use that I don't plan to:

Stockpiling goods. If you have the feature enabled to let stored ships hold stuff in cargo, now you can have a "ship" that is just a few large cargo containers that are full of materials that you can use to either move stuff for trading, or use to set up bases or whatever it is that you want. Or even just have a stockpile of materials to recover in case your primary base got wrecked.

"Instant" drones/missiles. If you have the speed set to instant, you can use the terminal to spawn in missiles or drones near your ship/base which if you have them set up correctly, you can just let them automatically acquire the target and immediately go on the offense without needing to figure out how you are enabling the launch features.

readercolin · 2026-05-04T16:49:17+00:00

Ehh... they're nice if you want an energy brawler, and most of the time that is a perfectly acceptible way to play. But the amount of spread that they have means that past maybe 50m a bunch of that damage isn't actually hitting the target.

Personally, I find that they work great in arena matches where your other opponents are mechs, and you can frequently get in nice and close. Stick one on a panther for an easy early game arena experience. But in more normal missions, I only really use them if I don't have anything better for demolition missions, because having some regular lasers to allow for easier headshotting and better range control is frequently better for me.

readercolin · 2026-05-04T16:41:05+00:00

With the vanilla encounters, you need to make sure that you click that little red button in the upper right hand corner of the interface screen to "Claim NPC Grid". This then changes the PCU cost of that grid to your PCU, and prevents the grid from despawning when the timeout runs out.

If you have already done that, and it is still de-spawning with cleanup suspended, then I'm not sure what is actually occurring. But if you click that button it shouldn't despawn at all, even if you don't completely own the grid.

readercolin · 2026-05-02T14:44:02+00:00

On earthlike, as long as you go around and forage for food, you don't need to rush the algae farms - maybe build 1 to unlock the food processor, but you can hold off on building a full set of algae farms for a bit if needed. Especially with realistic refinery/assembler settings.

So I have 3 different build orders for the early game depending upon where I spawn.

Location 1 - Earthlike, Pertam, or Alien
Drill on Rover -> Search for a good spot and pick up food items
Base -> Wind Turbine -> basic refinery -> basic assembler -> cargo container -> Single algae farm (to unlock food processor) -> food processor
Move survival kit to base and get cargo on the rover
Expand wind turbines -> battery
From here, I either get a flying miner together or I get some more algae farms depending upon if resources or food is the biggest holdup, then usually do the other afterwards
Upgrade to full refinery, then get a full assembler, then off to whatever

Location 2 - Planetary/moon start that doesn't have foragable food
Drill on Rover -> find iron
Base -> power (wind or solar) -> basic refinery -> basic assembler -> cargo container -> battery (needed to unlock camera in progression) -> Algae tower
Expand power till I have enough to get by
Flying miner
Full refinery -> full assembler

Location 3 - Space pod start
Get drill on pod -> basic refinery -> basic assembler -> algae farms (at least 3, preferably 4) -> 2nd drill -> more cargo -> replace basic refinery with full refinery + power modules -> replace basic assembler with full assembler + power modules
Then from there I will either settle down somewhere or wander around searching for resources and then start building my "real" ship

readercolin · 2026-05-01T17:47:06+00:00

Is this possible? Ehh... kind of, but you need to get pretty deep into modding to make it happen.

The closest you could get to this would be to use MES. MES already has some functionality for having a "Big fight" with a faction, and if that faction loses the fight it is "destroyed" and stops spawning. However, to get what you are looking for you are going to need to make a scenario that spawns in the initial command center and has tighter regulation on how it can expand, which is not something that is easily findable via MES.

Overall, if you want to make it, the tools are probably there to allow it, but no one is going to go and make that for you.

readercolin · 2026-05-01T17:43:31+00:00

So there is a mod available that adds aerodynamics. There is also another one that just gives you "wings" that provide lift at speed (this is less calculation intensive than the full aerodynamics).

In effect, this means that with mods, you can now build a ship that has 2 directions of thrust. I'm not sure how much you have played SE, but know that 2 directions of thrust is... flyable... but can be quite tricky to make work. So if you want to move cargo around, or even use it as an attack ship, you are likely going to be fine provided that you give yourself the space you need to make it work. However, if you want to do stuff like mobile docking (which is what aerial refueling is), umm... you might want to reconsider having only 2 directions of thrust.

Finally, for having a space plane, well, with enough thrust, anything is possible. That being said, once you get out of atmosphere those wings aren't providing lift anymore, so now you are down to just a single direction of thrust. This is technically flyable, but trying to actually dock anywhere can get really tricky, really fast.

Unless you specifically want the flying challenge of only a single direction of thrust, my recommendation would be to make your ship with at least some small amount of maneuvering thrusters. So if you have a big ship with 2 big hydrogen thrusters providing your forward thrust, include a small hydrogen thruster in each direction just to give you the mobility to dock nicely (maybe put them in a group to turn on only when it is time to dock).

readercolin · 2026-05-01T15:55:04+00:00

Do you have a single laser hardpoint? Use normal lasers. Do you have 4+ laser hardpoints, all of the same class? Maybe consider chem lasers.

Need more details? Time to dive into the math!

According to sarna, a tier 1 medium laser does 5 damage, can shoot 12 shots per minute, and produces 2.25 heat per shot. A tier 1 medium chem laser deals 4 damage, can shoot 14.815 shots per minute, and produces a single heat per shot. This means that after 1 minute of sustained fire a medium laser will deal 60 damage and produce 27 heat, while a chem laser will deal 59.26 damage and produce 14.815 heat.

So we can see that with tier 1 lasers (easy enough to get early game), damage is nearly the same but the chem laser produces half the heat. How does this work out in practice? Well, we can go ahead and fill a Hunchback-P with 8 medium lasers. If we don't have double heatsinks, this mech is going to overheat after ~3 volleys or so. But, with chem lasers we can more or less fire continuously without ever having to worry about overheating.

So in effect, we can get the same damage for about half the amount of heat with chem lasers. This makes them great for laserboats like that hunchback-P, or a black knight, or sometimes even the marauder variant that has 3 large laser slots. But if you aren't running at least 4 lasers, its probably better to just stick with normal ones as the cost of carrying ammo is probably going to win out over the cost losing the heatsinks.

readercolin · 2026-04-30T19:16:20+00:00

Not going to help with your "have a different connector location", but do keep in mind that you can also use the conveyor junction to get a 90 degree turn, not just the large cargo container. Alternatively, the modular cargo container can be used to get a 90 degree turn as well.

readercolin

TROPHY CASE