About This Game
Space Engineers is a sandbox game about engineering,
construction, exploration and survival in space and on planets. Players
build space ships, space stations, planetary outposts of various sizes
and uses (civil and military), pilot ships and travel through space to
explore planets and gather resources to survive. Featuring both creative
and survival modes, there is no limit to what can be built, utilized
and explored.
Space Engineers features a realistic, volumetric-based physics
engine: everything in the game can be assembled, disassembled, damaged
and destroyed. The game can be played either in single or multiplayer
modes.
Volumetric objects are structures composed from block-like modules
interlocked in a grid. Volumetric objects behave like real physical
objects with mass, inertia and velocity. Individual modules have real
volume and storage capacity.
Space Engineers is inspired by reality and by how things work. Think
about modern-day NASA technology extrapolated 60 years into the future.
Space Engineers strives to follow the laws of physics and doesn't use
technologies that wouldn't be feasible in the near future.
Space Engineers concentrates on construction and exploration
aspects, but can be played as a survival shooter as well. We expect
players will avoid engaging in direct man-to-man combat and instead use
their creativity and engineering skills to build war machines and
fortifications to survive in space and on planets. Space Engineers
shouldn’t be about troops; it should be about the machinery you build.
Early Access
- Planets and moons – inspired by
real celestial objects (Earth, Mars, Alien, Moon, Europa, Titan), fully
destructible & persistent, volumetric, atmosphere, gravity, climate
zones
- Game modes
- Creative – unlimited resources, instant building, no death
- Survival – realistic management of resources and inventory capacity; manual building; death and respawn
- Single-player – you are the sole space engineer
- Multiplayer - alpha version (not a final version)
- Creative and survival mode with your friends
- Cooperative and competitive
- Privacy customization: offline, private, friends only, public
- Max 16 players (this may increase in the future)
- Weapons on/off
- Copy-paste on/off
- Starting Worlds
- Earth Easy Start - start on a habitable planet with a set of
basic vehicles. Your survival is threatened by attacking pirates who set
up shop within range of their drones.
- Mars Easy Start - become a colonist on a barren, inhospitable
planet. Make sure you secure a source of water soon. Also beware of
local pirates.
- Alien Easy Start – the alien planet is a place with very sparse
oxygen, not enough to breath freely. There is hostile fauna and pirates
who want to claim the riches of this mysterious world and are not
willing to share.
- Moon Easy Start – You start on a moon orbiting a habitable planet. Your base is under attack by pirates.
- Empty Star System - It is a star system with 3 distinctive
planets and their 3 moons. Except for local fauna, planets are
uninhabited.
- Easy Start 1 – start on an asteroid platform with one large ship and two small ships
- Easy Start 2 – start in a green asteroid station with several large and small ships (this is a large scene!)
- Lone Survivor – start on an abandoned asteroid platform with no ships
- Crashed Red Ship – your mother ship just crashed...
- Two Platforms – competitive two-team multi-player world
- Asteroids – start in a rescue ship with very limited resources
- Empty World – no asteroids, no ships; suitable for creative mode
- Enemy NPCs
- sabiroids (spiders): can be found on alien planets and on Titan
moons. They can destroy metal blocks and attack players. Their favorite
hunting strategy is hiding in the ground and un-burrow to surprise their
prey. When players kill a spider, new spiders won’t appear in the area
for some time. They also store some components inside their bodies from
objects and blocks that they consumed.
- pirate bases: can be found either in space or occupying planetary
surface. They have bounty hidden inside their containers that players
can loot if they get over the drone attacks.
- enemy drones: they spawn automatically from pirate bases and attack the players when they venture into pirate territory
- Ships (small and large ships – build them, pilot them and crush them
- Space stations
- First-person & Third-person
- Planetary bases, outposts, cities!
- Dedicated servers - allow players to
connect to a third party host, rather than using a player-host, in a
peer-to-peer set-up. The result is a faster connection and a more fluent
multiplayer performance with less lag
- Super-large worlds – the size of the world to 1,000,000,000 km in diameter (almost infinite)
- Procedural asteroids - adds an infinite number of asteroids to the game world
- Exploration - adds an infinite number of ships and stations to the game world; discover, explore, acquire and conquer!
- Drilling / harvesting
- Manual building in survival mode – use welder to assemble blocks from components; use grinder to disassemble and reuse components
- Deformable and destructible objects – real proportions, mass, storage capacity, integrity
- Scenario editor - players can create
missions and game modes which can be played by other players. Capture
the flag, deathmatch, racing or campaign driven missions - all can be
done by using the scenario editor, with your own rules and designs
- Building blocks - light armor (cube,
slope, corner), heavy armor, interior wall, interior light, small
cockpit, large cockpit, cargo container(s), drill (character,
large/small ship), ore detector, gravity generator, nuclear reactor,
thruster, gyroscope, assembler, medical room, magnetic landing gears,
spotlight, catwalk, cover wall, stairs, ramp, window(s), pillar, decoy,
wheels, automated turrets, weapons, artificial mass, conveyor,
collector, connector, merge block, camera, sensor, timer, text panel
- Magnetic landing gears – attach your ship to a surface (another ship or asteroid)
- Electricity - all blocks in a grid are wired in an electrical and computer network; electricity is generated by nuclear reactors
- Gravity – produced by planets and gravity generators. Spherical gravity generator also available.
- Rotors – create rotating objects
- Advanced rotors – able to function as a conveyor system
- Refinery - process harvested ore to ingots
- Assembler - manufacture components from ingots
- Oxygen - take off character's helmet, generate oxygen out of ice by using the oxygen generator
- Symmetry/Mirroring Mode - useful in creative mode when building structures that require symmetry
- Weapons - automatic rifle, small and large explosive warheads, small ship gatling gun, small ship missile launcher
- Large weapons - missile launcher (for large ships)
- Jump drive – a traveling mechanism that allows players to travel big distances in a short period of time
- Solar panels - produce energy depending on the amount of light that they catch from the sun
- World management – generate new worlds, “save as” to multiple copies, auto-save every 5 minutes (can be turned on/off), edit world settings
- 32-bit & 64-bit - 64-bit version expands the amount of objects, ships and asteroids (almost unlimited)
- Steam Workshop - Share your creations with the Community (upload and download worlds)
- Modding - world files, shaders, textures, 3D models
- Source code access – modders can get complete access to the game’s source code that can be found on Github (https://github.com/KeenSoftwareHouse/SpaceEngineers). This offers the opportunity for more and better modified content.
- Localized interface (WIP) - Czech, Danish,
Dutch, German, Icelandic, Polish, Spanish-Spain, Spanish-Latin America,
Finnish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese-Brazil, Estonian,
Norwegian, Swedish, Slovak, Ukrainian, Russian
- Custom colors for blocks – Customize your creations by using any color you like
- Cargo ships - auto-piloted vessels
(miners, freighters and military) that carry ore, ingots, constructions
components and other materials from sector to sector. They can be looted
but beware, they often contain booby traps!
- Environmental hazards – protect your character and your creations from meteor storms (Safe, Normal, Cataclysm, Armageddon)
- Conveyor, Collector, Connector (IMPORTANT: this is a first work-in-progress version and a realistic version will be added later)
- Conveyors move items from inventory to inventory. Collectors can
collect small objects (ore, ingots, components, tools) into inventory.
Connectors can throw items from inventory to space (in future update
could be used to connect two ships/stations and transfer items)
- Artificial mass – can be used to add gravity-affected mass to ships, useful in machine ships or cars
- Wheels - use them with rotors and artificial mass to build vehicles
- Automated turrets – gatling, missile and
interior. Turrets are used mostly as defense mechanism rather than
shooting other players. They aim on decoys (automatically by default),
meteorites, missiles or all moving objects (eg. small/large ships) -
targeting can be changed in the control panel
- Large weapons - missile launcher (for large ships)
- Large and small ship grinder and welder – assemble and disassemble blocks faster and in larger amount
- Batteries - enables players to store the energy generated by solar panels or reactors at an efficiency rate of 80%
- Pistons - offers the option to build more advanced machinery
- Ion thrusters – suitable for environments without atmosphere (space or moons) / not recommended to be used on planets with atmosphere
- Hydrogen - hydrogen thrusters, hydrogen tanks and hydrogen bottles
- Atmospheric thrusters - powered by electricity, working only on planets with atmosphere
- Factions - create and join factions, determine ownership of blocks and manage the relations between them (hostile/ally). NOTE:
Factions are currently Work-in-Progress. There are still many things to
be added (eg. chat and communication) and some bugs/issues are yet to
be fixed.
- Remote ship control – control ships without being inside the ship’s cockpit (drones)
- Remote turret control - control turrets directly
- 3D printing - export (CTRL+ALT+E) and 3D print the creations that you design in the game (http://www.SpaceEngineersGame.com/3d-printing.html)
- Modding API - brings a lot of new
possibilities to modders and allows them to alter the game by writing C#
scripts which have access to in-game objects (WIP - more features will be added in the future)
- Blueprints - save your ship or station on a blueprint and paste it into your game
- Projector block – project blueprints and weld the projection
- Sensor – detects ships, palyers, asteroids, stations, floating objects and their state (friendly, neutral or enemy) and ownership
- Sound block - reproduce predefined sounds such as alarm or siren for announcements
- Programmable block – players can write small programs executed by the block
- Communication – chat between players and factions
- GPS - create, send, receive and manage GPS coordinates in the game
- Voxel hands - shape and form the asteroids and change their material (creative mode only)
- Xbox controller support
Please be sure to read the list of current features before you buy the
game. It will give you an insight on what is or isn't actually working:
http://www.SpaceEngineersGame.com/features.html
How to Play
Start by watching this video tutorial:
http://www.SpaceEngineersGame.com/how-to-play.html
Performance Notes
Space Engineers is in development and undergoing frequent optimizations. The performance will get better.
The performance depends on the complexity of your world and the
configuration of your computer. Simple worlds run smoothly even on
low-end computers, but a more complex world with rich object
interactions could overload even high-end computers.
Please read our performance advices:
http://www.SpaceEngineersGame.com/performance-advices.html
Minimum requirements represent the bare minimum to run simple scenes and don’t guarantee a perfect experience.