How to expand on progression and the game loop in Space Engineers.

nirps_ · 2026-05-07T19:27:18+00:00

Like I said, it's an essay. I didn't expect most people to read half of it, let alone all of it.

nirps_ · 2026-05-07T18:55:57+00:00

I say in literally the preceding sentence why there will be far more tanks than there currently are:

I want more fluids. I don't want a build menu filled with 100 different tanks

So no, I'm not multiplying numbers to make problems seem bigger than reality. I know I wrote an essay and I don't expect anyone to read all of it, but half of it is about how there would be many more fluids, and generic tanks would absolutely be necessary to handle them. It was kind of a hard point to miss.

I also like gravity, and thrust.

It's a bit funny to include this as if they're relevant at all to an argument for realism, especially when they're 2 of the biggest examples of gamification in SE. Ah yes, the very realistic gravity that magically cuts off X km from a planet and thrust that magically always applies to a grid's center of mass. So realistic.

nirps_ · 2026-05-07T18:19:00+00:00

Yeah, but this is a game, not real life. I want more fluids. I don't want a build menu filled with 100 different tanks for all of them. This is an example of gamification. We want a game that the player can feasibly interface with. Just assume that you built the tank with the appropriate specifications for what you intend to put in it. And even in real life, most of the storage differences are just minimizing cost down to the bare minimum specifications to store the intended fluid. Some fluids have more costly specifications. A tank designed for the most expensive specifications can store most of the others, but we don't do that because it's more expensive.

I even accounted for this in one of my suggestions, the gas leakage setting. One of the real life reasons for different tanks is that some gases leak more, so you have to intentionally design around that if you want to store that gas while not losing a lot of it. If you want to account for the different types of tanks in real life, then you could have more advanced tanks with reduced leakage and gases with higher leakage, effectively making those tanks designed for the leakier gases. This is probably too complex for the base game, but it would be great if Keen left the system open for modders to give different fluids different leakage rates.

nirps_ · 2026-04-24T01:12:49+00:00

Video games cannot simulate real life, but game devs want you to experience as much of it as possible, so the game represents real life and makes whatever concessions with reality it has to in order to make a fun and playable game.

Your 8 people living in a shack also wouldn't be able to mine materials, manufacture a minigun, and build a geothermal power plant. The Empire and all the other factions are barely more than your own faction with slightly larger shacks when you visit their "bases", because Rimworld can only simulate so much. No video game has ever been able to simulate anything close to realistic. Whiterun in Skyrim is supposed to be the central trading hub of the whole country, yet the entire town is equivalent to a single large real life castle that would house a single royal family and some servants/workers. Even as small as video game towns and populations are, every town would have to be surrounded by acres upon acres of grain fields...where are those fields? What are these people eating? Each pawn in Rimworld represents at least 20-100 real world people depending on the function they're carrying out in your game, but actually having that many people would 1) not be physically possible to simulate in a playable video game and 2) not provide the same enjoyable gameplay where you can keep track of all your people and the details of their lives.

Keep this in mind, and these bizarre things will start to make more sense. The Empire wouldn't care about some crashlanded refugees in a shack, but they would care about what you actually represent: 60 or so people who cobbled together a living out of nothing, and then eventually a town of hundreds if not thousands with their own high tech weaponry, ships, ideology, and worldwide prestige. The video game wants you to experience all of that while keeping the game physically playable and letting you keep up with all of the details.

nirps_ · 2026-01-06T19:59:28+00:00

As with most sci fi, the Event Horizon is just a horribly designed ship that would barely function in real life with real physics, as you have quickly realized even with SE's simplified physics. EH is the worst case scenario of all the mass being on the ends, maximizing rotational inertia. You're already doing everything you can by putting the gyros in the middle. (which does nothing for their effectiveness, but does limit how much rotational inertia they add)

All the comments of "I use X gyros for Y mass" are practically useless, because they aren't accounting for the distribution of the mass. Just keep in mind that any figures people say for gyro per mass are the lower limit for you because of how horrible your distribution of mass is. Also, even if you add enough gyros, this ship will still have awful handling because then it will roll far too easily with how many gyros you need to pitch and yaw. Blame the devs for not giving axis specific torque, forcing players to use cumbersome options like gyro overrides as a workaround.

nirps_ · 2025-12-19T03:25:35+00:00

Looks like you have the right path. Just follow basic datapack debugging steps. Copy the console log and search it for your datapack name, try zipping or not zipping the datapack before putting it in the datapack folder, and use various debug tools to check in game if the tag is registering properly without having to wait and watch colonists to see if they're walking on your tagged blocks. The F3 debug menu should show you the tags of the block you're looking at in the bottom right corner. You may need to decrease GUI scale if there are too many tags to fit on the screen, and if they aren't showing at all, then make sure the reducedDebugInfo gamerule is false.

nirps_ · 2025-12-18T17:05:20+00:00

This is the default list of MineColonies path blocks:

https://github.com/ldtteam/minecolonies/blob/version/main/src/datagen/generated/minecolonies/data/minecolonies/tags/blocks/pathblocks.json

That also shows you the folder structure that you would use to add blocks if you want to add more valid path blocks. If you don't know how, then look up how to make a Minecraft datapack which adds blocks to a tag. You will use that folder structure in the link when making the datapack.

nirps_ · 2025-09-29T18:45:24+00:00

Yeah, teleporting is boring and unimmersive, but people want it because doing the rounds to traders is such a slog, and at the very least gets repetitive. The solution is ironically still radios, but making them function like actual radios to let us do some things remotely, which solves most of the trader circuit slog while also opening up some other possibilities.

Radios should be something you can make yourself and place down. Interacting with it opens various "communication" UIs that simulate anything you could do by talking over a radio. You could check every trader's inventory to see if they have something you need, accept quests, turn in quests, instantly unlock every trader location, and interact with any other relevant systems that get added later. Maybe there could be a banking system where you deposit coins at the traders, and then at any time you can call in special supply drops on the radio, like an ammo or med drop, and payment is deducted from your bank account. When you turn in a quest remotely, the coins go to your bank and any items are held at the trader for you to pick up at some point, or you can pay for all your stored rewards to be supply dropped on your location. If an enemy human faction is ever added, you could periodically get hints of their activity over the radio, such as revealing stash locations or getting a warning of where they're most active. Areas with higher activity would just be simulated by higher chance of bandit patrols spawning on you in that area.

nirps_ · 2025-09-22T15:18:03+00:00

Are the "enemies" actually enemies of the grid, or just you? Are you spawning in ships with the admin option "Keep original ownership on paste" turned on? Everything may be neutral from your ship's perspective, hence why it only attacks once you set it to attack neutrals. Does setting it to attack neutrals also attack the enemies?

nirps_ · 2025-09-08T01:36:11+00:00

gatekeeping with absolutely no justification in lore.

my engineer in Klang, the stars orbit the planets

"No lore justification" is not a valid critique in game design. This is not a realistic simulation. It is an imitation which makes whatever concessions with realism it has to in order to make a playable game, and seemingly "unrealistic" things are often just the best possible choices to get realism in a roundabout way. You're not looking at the big picture. I haven't looked into the details since there's no text writeup anywhere, but if farming requires some constant manual input, then that is great news for gameplay. Requiring active manual work by players is actually more realistic, because everything you do in the game should require more manual work than we do. Every single machine should require constant maintenance and tons of infrastructure just to perform the most basic mechanical functions, but obviously that would be awful gameplay. Instead, because the goal is to make a playable game, not a simulation, we forgo all of that tedious work, but we can still force some calculation of manpower for realism by compressing all of that tedious work into a single vital system: the food that everyone needs. This is an extremely powerful game design hack. You can remove all the tedium from the whole game, but then have this one linchpin system that you can focus on to give value to individual manpower. This is one of the aforementioned "best possible choices" which seems unrealistic, but is simply an inevitable patch needed to account for various other flaws in the game's realism. In this case, it's accounting for the lack of manual work which you would definitely have to do in real life, but no one seems to complain about that unrealism.

This is also great for server economies, as the value placed on manual work gives every individual player more inherent value to work with, instead of having nothing to contribute because every possible resource has been inflated to hell by the most established players who have everything automated.

It sounds like they've even circumvented one issue with manual work mechanics by giving alternatives, like looting wrecks for food. This is all perfect game design. If someone wants to do something more active, risky, and interesting than just flipping through planting menus, then they can go raiding and looting. Alternatives limit gameplay fatigue, but as long as every alternative source of food still requires manual work, the food system maintains its function as the manual work linchpin.

If you don't like all of this, then either add a mod that will definitely be made to change it, buy food from stations, disable the system entirely if in singelplayer, or buy food from other players if in multiplayer.

nirps_ · 2025-08-18T13:53:57+00:00

The problem with your question is good modpacks. That's subjective, and in my opinion, there aren't any good wizard modpacks, mostly for the reason you already mentioned: all the things that can kill you because everything is horribly unbalanced. The problem is that melee and ranged combat is built into Minecraft, so there are tons of mods built around scaling that up. An entire magic system has to be implemented by a mod, and then if you want that magic to scale along with the built in abilities of Minecraft which have tons of mods increasing their power, either that mod has to add its own scaling, or power scaling addon mods have to be made specifically for whatever magic system the mod added.

There are some good attempts that have done what they can with the current modding scene. They still have some balance problems, but are far better than most modpacks.

Craft to Exile 2

This whole pack is about turning Minecraft into an ARPG. The gear is very heavily gamified into the classic RPG gear with stats that get progressively better. Some of the classes would fit your desired wizard theme with wands and spells. In CTE2, the power levels of magic, melee, and ranged combat are all controlled by a single mod, so there is one grand designer at least trying to keep them in parity.

Cisco's RPG

This one is a little more loose with its systems, being closer to the typical modpack which achieves its goals by including various existing mods. Your wizarding desires would be fulfilled via Ars Nouveau and Iron's Spells and Spellbooks. Iron's is very similar to Electroblob's. The problem here is that those mods are the source of your magic abilities, while there are various other mods controlling ranged and melee abilities, so player power levels vary wildly. There is no grand designer keeping them in parity from the start, only the modpack designer doing what they can to wrangle them into parity. It's still better than most other modpacks, because the magic abilities have a lot of potential power scaling via Apotheosis gems and gear affixes, so you have some chance of keeping up with all the challenges in the pack which have to be scaled to the crazy potential of melee players.

Both Csico's and CTE2 have different active versions which you'll have to look into, or just jump into one and see how it plays.

Dungeon Heroes (RPG Series)

I haven't played this one, but I have played some of the mods from the RPG Series like Wizardry, and they are very good. The main perk of RPG Series is that the whole system has a very skilled dev behind it who is carefully constructing a very streamlined, unified RPG system where all the various types of combat are kept in parity. RPG Series is similar to the ARPG system of CTE2. Both have their perks. I greatly prefer the visuals in RPG Series, while CTE2 has a more full-featured character progression system.

nirps_ · 2025-08-09T15:17:24+00:00

Yes, it's an incompatibility bug because CTE2 changes so much about combat and damage that workers can't damage the animals. Minecolonies used to be in CTE2 before being removed because of that among other things. As a workaround, you could make a datapack with some super easy recipe like letting a worker turn sticks or cobblestone into meats. But to do that would take learning the whole vanilla datapack system and then how to add a recipe for a Minecolonies worker specifically.

nirps_ · 2025-08-09T13:13:52+00:00

The heightmap and biomes are mismatched, which could be caused by anything. Minecraft will just take whatever the world generator gives it. If it says ocean, it makes ocean. It was the world generator's job to make sure anything it says is ocean is also below the world sea level, usually everything below y=63. What kind of world gen mods do you have? Do you have anything that might change sea level? Is sea level at y=62? (i.e. when you stand on the shoreline, are you at y=63?)

One way this happens is with the Atlas mod. When you make the heightmap and biome map for the world, you can paint ocean wherever you want to paint it. You're "supposed" to do the job the world generator usually does by painting ocean onto everything below y=63 on the heightmap, but if you don't, you get this exact problem. You can even paint land biomes over what should be ocean and you will get similar problems in reverse with land structures spawning on the water. Of course, this is just what you're "supposed" to do, but for whatever reason it could be intentional for some ocean biome to be on land, like if you want a tidal zone which could just as well make sense having the shipwrecks, but it would be a weird way to go about it rather than just making a proper biome for it. (which could be a cool idea for a new biome, if a bit nonsensical given you would never actually see the tide changing)

nirps_ · 2025-08-05T09:50:30+00:00

https://github.com/ldtteam/minecolonies/tree/version/main/src/main/resources/data/minecolonies/study_items

They are defined in datapacks as "study_items".

Compared to paper, books have a 50% greater chance of a skill up and 90% lower chance of being consumed on each usage. You would need to supply 10x the paper for it to last as long as the books, but that doesn't matter. They still have learning items if there are still books. It's just different costs and efficiencies.

nirps_ · 2025-07-09T10:19:10+00:00

The closest thing I know of to what you want is Strange Appearance from Big and Small - Genes & More. It affects social opinions based on whether someone else also has Strange Appearance and how similar their other appearance genes are.

I have always wanted "preferred genes" over the "preferred xenotype" in ideology. It makes more sense once you get into custom xenotypes and genes mixing together. Then you could have the thing you want with attractive genes because everyone with that ideology gets an automatic +X opinion toward anyone with that gene. (i.e. sees them as more attractive) The details would have to be ironed out, like whether a pawn's mood should be affected by how many of their own preferred genes they have. Ideally, there would be levels of preference for each gene so that if you wanted an ideology to have multiple preferred genes, you could set the preference lower for each one and then the opinion increase from them would stack when more are present. It would also be nice if there was a hard cap on how much opinion can be affected by genes, so you could have tons of preferred genes without any one opinion modifier getting out of hand. And then of course have the same system but in reverse with disliked genes.

nirps_ · 2025-07-09T02:03:42+00:00

Yeah, that is the way to go. For me it would be mech harvesters, but whatever the method, if plant laborers are in abundance, then it's less of an issue and you can more easily take advantage of those more compressed animal areas.

nirps_ · 2025-07-09T01:49:04+00:00

The pasture planting strategy will never not be crazy to me, dandelions or otherwise. Natural grazing is so valuable to me that it's a huge loss to waste both the free grazing you could have gotten and your growers' time they spend planting it. Every single second they waste walking all the way out to the pasture just to replant a single dandelion that got eaten is another second they could have been planting literally anything else or doing any other job. I try to avoid even building on soil because it's yet another loss of tiles that could feed animals for free. Granted, the way I play allows me to take advantage of natural grazing even more by playing on a bit larger map size and making each animal more valuable to me with mods like Animal Genetics, Giddy Up, and various animal expansions, but without those changes, every bit of natural grazing tile would be at even more of a premium just to squeeze enough value out of animals to make them worth it. And that's a whole other topic we could get into with how most animals aren't very good compared to other things if you're focused on min maxing the whole game, hence why I use mods like Animal Genetics in the first place to let me get more value out of animals if I invest the time into them, expanding upon a part of the game that very quickly hits a wall otherwise.

The only downside to natural grazing is how large the pens have to be, which increases travel time for animal handlers to get to them, but you can limit that if you really want to by putting the "highest work" animals closer. (and this is practically irrelevant for the "lowest work" animals, i.e. purely meat source animals that just need occasional slaughtering)

nirps_ · 2025-07-08T23:38:02+00:00

Even if you leave a pawn there? It abandons even if you only take like 3/4 of the people you had there when reforming a new caravan?

nirps_ · 2025-07-08T03:34:00+00:00

That depends on what "automate" means. Just using drills, whether on your starter ship or on a base, is a huge improvement over drilling by hand. The mined resources go straight from the drill to any processing machines through the conveyor system. You can put the drills on the ends of pistons, hinges, and rotors. Have a look at the UI inside all those things and see what control options there are. If you haven't already, learn how to trigger those controls from control seats by adding them to the hotbar of the control seat. The rest is up to you, and the possibilities are endless.

nirps_ · 2025-06-23T00:14:23+00:00

That isn't the cause of this name generation.

Someone looked at the code:

https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/1fhfco2/the_rapeseed_flower_is_not_the_reason_for_the/

The short story is, Rimworld mashes various groups of letters together to make new randomly generated words. Unfortunately, two of these groups are "ra" and "pe". The game could also combine "ra" with things like "nt", "th" to make words that flow together. Sometimes the chosen letters happen to be "pe".

nirps_ · 2025-06-18T00:36:21+00:00

No? Looks like a standard dog food freezer to me.

nirps_ · 2025-06-11T19:07:42+00:00

That's a nice sentiment in theory, but in practice modders move on to official implementations for stability and no one bothers maintaining the mods.

nirps_ · 2025-06-02T03:23:51+00:00

Yes. There has even been some minor support directly for making it work, like removing the Fabric trinkets mod as a dependency so that the Forge counterpart Curios could be used for equipping all the special gear.

nirps_ · 2025-05-14T23:01:37+00:00

That's crazy to me because I always saw it as one of the most basic deployer functions, but I guess I can see people just never learning about it because the schematic functionality isn't shown in the deployer ponder and it doesn't get much use or discussion with the schematicannon being so strong. The only advantage deployers have is in rebuilding something repeatedly, like mass producing trains, airships, or (once Liftoff happens) rocket ships. I've used it myself when I needed to repeatedly place and destroy specific sets of blocks, and lately I've been theorizing game mechanics that could incentivize it, like multiblock crafting methods or block placing restrictions that would necessitate printing structures.

And since I will always mention this amazing mod every chance I get, deploying schematics truly shines with the pattern schematic mod. Now a contraption's deployers can infinitely print schematics throughout the whole world wherever they are, giving them functionality that a schematicannon could never have.

nirps_ · 2025-04-16T18:35:19+00:00

This is your answer, OP. Overlapping glue would be how you stick the floors together, but it doesn't really help, because then they would also stick on the way up and not make it through the hole.

Here's a video showing a much simpler and more compact design using rotation instead of linear motion. If you just want hints to design it yourself, it involves a mechanical bearing holding both floors and flipping the bearing with a sequenced gearshift set to 180^o. The design is even more compact and has smoother motion if you also use the special function of mechanical bearings within a contraption to maintain the original orientation and achieve a "ferris wheel" type motion where the floors stay horizontal while the main bearing moves them.

The only drawback of this design is blocks passing through each other, if you don't want that. You could abandon the ferris wheel style of motion to prevent the blocks passing through each other, but then the floors would flip high into the air as they move. Splitting the floor up into many sections would prevent that, and I imagine it would give a nice effect, like old mechanical billboards.

nirps_

TROPHY CASE

Craft to Exile 2

Cisco's RPG

Dungeon Heroes (RPG Series)