I was hesitant to make this post- I knew I'd already talked about Space Engineers in the past, and I didn't wanna be too repetitive. It's getting kinda late though, and the other idea I had (in the form of a video) would likely take too long, so I went back to check what I'd written. It turns out it was hardly a paragraph... So I'm gonna do a proper, full-length post about Space Engineers!
Space Engineers is a fairly old game. I remember first seeing videos about it probably in 2013 to 2014- long enough ago that I had time to watch videos on it, forget about it, and then regain interest when planets were added (looking at YouTube, 2014 seems more likely, though I can't be certain). I didn't get the game until 2016- presumably it went on sale- but it had always had my attention as a really interesting concept. It did take me a while to properly get into it though- the controls are rather complicated at first.
I find this game really fun to build in. Every now and then (ranging from a few days to a few weeks, depending on my interests at the time), a concept will pop into my mind for a ship, and I have to convince my cousin to play so I have the motivation to sit down and finish it (since, as I've probably mentioned before, I have trouble playing a lot of games alone). There are two main reasons for this. Firstly- it's a creative game, so it can be fun to just mess around and make something that looks cool, whether it's a replica of an existing ship, or an original idea. Secondly- the game's physics engine is, obviously, not very realistic, so there's a lot of room to experiment with things.
One recent example of this is a ship I built yesterday. It's a pretty generic large ship, but with a warp drive I made. I'll explain how it works, in steps.
So that's what I did- I built a ship with about 20 gravity generators and a bunch of mass blocks, which can all turn on at the push of a button, meaning you can accelerate way faster than any ship that size should. I doubt I'm the first person to do this, but I know it's the best application of this invention that I've seen.
There is another thing I haven't talked about, and that's survival mode. Survival in this game is really interesting- you have to carefully manage resources, and building anything takes significantly more time (let alone building something ridiculous like my gravity drive ship). It's quite fun, and has a lot of things you never really see in creative- there's a whole system with storage blocks, conveyor tubes, refineries and assemblers, etc., which can be confusing at first, but is pretty simple once you figure it out.
The problem is, I'm always paranoid when I play survival. I don't know if this is true or not, but I'm fairly sure it's possible to "soft-lock" your save- if you run out of uranium, and have no solar power, then it's impossible to refine any uranium even if you mine more, so you're essentially stuck without power. It's easy to avoid if you know the game, but the fear is always there for me. It's not a huge deal, but it's enough to make me nervous to do much in that mode.
Anyways, I hope you enjoyed today's post!
