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Survival now feels very grindy

Menos Wansis shared this feedback ago

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The recent changes to the survival progression are very welcome, however in the current state it feels very grindy and not appealing.

Sitting somewhere and hauling stone from A to B for an hour just to get the basic setup for a base does not make me feel like an engineer, it makes me feel like a hauler. The main reason is that the starting pod is not mobile and cannot become mobile, as you need advanced tech to fly and wheels flip your car on top at the very first chance they get.

I suggest the following to remove the chore and add back the fun:

- There should be a way to get your car back on it's wheels if it has flipped and/or fallen over.

- You should be able to build a piston and a drill on the starter pod in a reasonable time-frame.

- Basic assembler and basic refinery should also be usable on small ships.

With these changes I could actually feel like an engineer solving a problem, yet there would still be progression as intended.

I like this feedback

Replies (5)

DStone ●

I would disagree since i've had my beginner-pod on Earth-like planet mobile by slapping on an RC and Gyro.

Tumbling over is annoying but then there is flying skills.

This is al part of the game in my opinion.

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Konstantin ●

Two engines are enough to lift it up. And two can be put forward and backward. This makes control easier.

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idont know ●

Yeah its absolutely frustrating that im in space and searching for gold and platinum since this test started.. Very annoying... Everything else is okay so far. The small inv is hard but it takes all my fun flying from one asteroid and in 95% iron and nickel 3% kobalt, silicon and ice and one uranium spot in.. i dont know... 500 asteroids? This kills the fun for me. I've spent the whole weekend in this game.. How much time should i invest in searching? And btw.. this is a test. it should be possible to archive all stuff relatively fast for testing reasons..

just my two cents :)

and its still one of my favorite games!

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Shaun Luttrell ●

You found Uranium? I flew from the moon to earth searching every astroid allong the way. Never found uranium.

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DranKof ●

- There should be an ability to grab a part and yank it, so if you have a small buggy you can flip it over, but if it's large you can't. Right now the most you can do is run at it and hope it flips. Sometimes I use pistons but because the aiming on the grinder is a little off, this can cause unintended problems.

- Totally agree with the assembler and refinery should be small-ship available. I mean, why limit it to large ships only?

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Stephen Conklin ●

"wheels flip your car on top at the very first chance they get" Really? I hadn't noticed that (seriously); As long as you're not running the thing with "Unlimited" for the speed limit, the rovers (even the ones made out of the planetary respawn pod) are fairly stable in my experience. You just have to set your wheels up properly;

Steering to between 12% and 20%

Power to between 20% and 50%

Strength to between 6% and 12%

Friction is really good at the default 50%

Height Offset to between -20.0 cm and 5.0 cm

Speed Limit to anywhere between 30 km/h and 120 km/h

These are really good settings to go off of; tweak as you see fit, but exceed them at your own risk lol

The real trick is to have it not riding too high, or your center of gravity tends to run into a problem of verticality, making it exceptionally easy to tip, much like an SUV. Rule of thumb: wide and low lets it really go. The Moon Drop Pod is a prime example of how to do it; even at speeds of up to 200 km/h (55.55m/s), it's relatively hard to flip on a 1g planet. the default 30km/h is good here, because it means you're not going to flip it easily on the moon unless you go and try to run up (or down) some stupidly crazy incline, or that dang physics bug crops up. At that point, I believe you're justified in temporarily activating Creative Mode Tools to flip it over (provided your server, if you play on one allows for the use of the Admin menu (There honestly needs to be a limited set of these tools for normal players that will allow you to, on a Survival server, cut and paste an existing non-station grid owned by said player, within a short radius of the player (lock the player in place during the cutting and placement, if you have to to make it fair))

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Menos Wansis ●

Wheels work fine in single player, they are a huge pain in multiplayer. If someone is lagging the server briefly your wheels can get stuck inside terrain. In this moment the engine does not smoothly move it out of terrain as a good physics engine would, instead it miscalculates the force the ground applies to the car to be much higher depending on how far you are sunk into terrain. So your car suddenly flips over like it was hit by a truck from below.

Similar unrealistic instant forces happen if you i.E. change the offset rapidly. Using that as a trick you can actually launch the moon-rover into space by just pressing x repeatedly on a server. This is something that really needs a fix, however since it is in the game since the beginning, I doubt it will be fixed with this update.

"Yeah its absolutely frustrating that im in space and searching for gold and platinum since this test started.. Very annoying..."

Yeah same here. I've been flying through space for a whole day without finding any gold or platinum. It is an idea to keep the highest tier ores as some kind of endgame stuff, so most people will have to use hydrogen engines instead of ion, and jump drives are actually not the most common method of traveling. But then the space pod definitely needs a rework, as otherwise people will just spam that to gain the material they need.

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Hypogriph Qc ●

Respawn ships can always be abused. Thats why it needs to get removed for pure survival.

Also joining a server which have the option "Delete respawn ship" on can lead to a lot of stress and frustrations as servers will usually have a set restart time and once you start seeing "Server restarting in 10 minutes", your panic level rise quickly.

As it is a sandbox game and you will not miss grinding & welding after building your own station. I think removing some of the grindiness and stress your game brings could help new players get started easily without removing the end-game grinding.

I also think the progression system have no place in SE.

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Menos Wansis ●

You can design respawn ships in a way that the amount of resources you gain is so low, that there is no reason to spawn them over and over. I.E. if you remove the thrusters from the planetary respawn pod there would be no reason to spawn that for resources, because you could simply mine more by hand in the time it takes to dismantle that thing.

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Rawr Rawr Rawr ●

While I agree with the idea there should be a way to flip over vehicles, I do not understand the title and first part of the post. Why do you have to haul stone? Its all around you, just mine the stuff directly underneath you. Overall im happy with the early-to-mid game survival section.

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Menos Wansis ●

It is not the difficulty of finding stone (unless you spawn on Europa), it is the sheer amount you need to haul. In the latest version if you were a new player you basically had to run back and forth to mine stone for half an hour till you have the basic base setup ready. Any player who does not know the game will refund Space Engineers and call it a "stone hauling simulator" before they even reach the next tier. Tediousness is not fun.

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Rawr Rawr Rawr ●

Once again im not sure what you mean by "stone hauling", its all around you (unless on Europa), and once you have a single large ship drill and some sort of basic vehicle to move it around you pretty much have all you need to start off. Just dig anywhere around you? Not sure im following...

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odizzido ●

You don't need to haul any stone at all. I played the test version for a couple hours and did zero stone hauling and got a base up and running. The only time I used the hand drill was to use the secondary function. You can engineer yourself a non-tedious solution.

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