On the topic of ingots

4Peace ●

Space Engineers 1 never had proper waste management.

Ore-to-ingot ratios differ for each resource type, so you end up with less mass after refining—but there is no actual waste. The rest of the matter simply disappears.

Some people refer to stone or gravel as waste, but that’s not really true.

Stone is just another ore—or more precisely, all voxel materials that are not explicitly defined as ores automatically convert into a generic “stone” ore, with different conversion rates. Sand and grass yield less stone, while rocky voxels yield more.

Stone is also the only compound ore in the game. By refining stone ore, you obtain four different ingots:

gravel
iron
silicon
nickel

And, btw, without ingots it would be impossible to achieve.

Was this confusing for players? Yes—absolutely.

And for several reasons.

First, all of these mechanics are very specific and not explicit. Nothing in the game clearly explains how or why this system works.

Second, new players (and even returning players like me) often had a hard time figuring out that stone could yield resources at all, or how to do it. I personally remember watching YouTube videos and accidentally discovering that queuing gravel in the survival kit would produce additional ingots.

How could this have been handled better in SE1?

For example:

When using an ore detector (or a hand drill), you could have seen a “stone/gravel” resource icon, plus additional Si / Fe / Ni icons—perhaps smaller, to indicate trace resources. This would immediately communicate that mining surrounding voxels yields usable materials.
The survival kit could have refined stone automatically, just like a refinery does. You would simply place stone into grid's inventory and see ingots being produced.
Collected stone item in your inventory display a popup hint of what resources and in which concentrations are in the stone and tell you to put it into survival kit or refinery to extract them.
by hovering (or selecting) any item in your inventory, there should be a contextual help of some kind to explain what it is and what you can use it for, with a link to the in-game wiki with even more information.

These changes would not have been particularly difficult to implement, yet they would have dramatically improved the FTUE.

What could be even better than that?

Remove the obscure mechanics that convert all voxel materials into generic stone, and instead let players collect materials as they exist in the world.

Voxel materials could have different properties such as density and composition:

sand-like voxels could naturally contain mostly silicon.
iron could be found in many voxel materials but not all, and in various concentrations.
“pure” ore veins could still exist, but surrounding voxels could contain the same resource at lower concentrations, along with elements commonly found together.

With this approach, when mining a deposit you would naturally collect some of the surrounding material as well. It would contain the same valuable elements, just at lower concentrations. There would be no reason to “get rid of stone”—you would want to bring everything to the refinery, or even continue mining the surrounding material after extracting the concentrated core.

Do we need waste at all?

Maybe not everyone wants to deal with waste—and that’s fine. Give us an option (a toggle in the world settings).

By default, refineries could produce not only ingots, but also a waste material. This could be:

a specific low-value item, or
even better, the same voxel material, stripped of valuable elements, with reduced mass and volume

You could then:

dump it back into the world
use it for terraforming (roads, ramps, bridges, landing pads, walls, bunkers, etc.)
or let it pile up near refineries, adding to immersion

Why does this matter?

In any case, having more ways to interact with the fully destructible voxel world feels like a no-brainer. It would elevate gameplay to a whole new level by leveraging one of the engine’s main strengths.

Instead of abstracting voxels away, the game could finally let them matter.

Space Engineers 1 never had proper waste management.

Ore-to-ingot ratios differ for each resource type, so you end up with less mass after refining—but there is no actual waste. The rest of the matter simply disappears.

Some people refer to stone or gravel as waste, but that’s not really true.

Stone is just another ore—or more precisely, all voxel materials that are not explicitly defined as ores automatically convert into a generic “stone” ore, with different conversion rates. Sand and grass yield less stone, while rocky voxels yield more.

Stone is also the only compound ore in the game. By refining stone ore, you obtain four different ingots:

gravel
iron
silicon
nickel

And, btw, without ingots it would be impossible to achieve.

Was this confusing for players? Yes—absolutely.

And for several reasons.

First, all of these mechanics are very specific and not explicit. Nothing in the game clearly explains how or why this system works.

Second, new players (and even returning players like me) often had a hard time figuring out that stone could yield resources at all, or how to do it. I personally remember watching YouTube videos and accidentally discovering that queuing gravel in the survival kit would produce additional ingots.

How could this have been handled better in SE1?

For example:

When using an ore detector (or a hand drill), you could have seen a “stone/gravel” resource icon, plus additional Si / Fe / Ni icons—perhaps smaller, to indicate trace resources. This would immediately communicate that mining surrounding voxels yields usable materials.
The survival kit could have refined stone automatically, just like a refinery does. You would simply place stone into grid's inventory and see ingots being produced.
Collected stone item in your inventory display a popup hint of what resources and in which concentrations are in the stone and tell you to put it into survival kit or refinery to extract them.
by hovering (or selecting) any item in your inventory, there should be a contextual help of some kind to explain what it is and what you can use it for, with a link to the in-game wiki with even more information.

These changes would not have been particularly difficult to implement, yet they would have dramatically improved the FTUE.

What could be even better than that?

Remove the obscure mechanics that convert all voxel materials into generic stone, and instead let players collect materials as they exist in the world.

Voxel materials could have different properties such as density and composition:

sand-like voxels could naturally contain mostly silicon.
iron could be found in many voxel materials but not all, and in various concentrations.
“pure” ore veins could still exist, but surrounding voxels could contain the same resource at lower concentrations, along with elements commonly found together.

With this approach, when mining a deposit you would naturally collect some of the surrounding material as well. It would contain the same valuable elements, just at lower concentrations. There would be no reason to “get rid of stone”—you would want to bring everything to the refinery, or even continue mining the surrounding material after extracting the concentrated core.

Do we need waste at all?

Maybe not everyone wants to deal with waste—and that’s fine. Give us an option (a toggle in the world settings).

By default, refineries could produce not only ingots, but also a waste material. This could be:

a specific low-value item, or
even better, the same voxel material, stripped of valuable elements, with reduced mass and volume

You could then:

dump it back into the world
use it for terraforming (roads, ramps, bridges, landing pads, walls, bunkers, etc.)
or let it pile up near refineries, adding to immersion

Why does this matter?

In any case, having more ways to interact with the fully destructible voxel world feels like a no-brainer. It would elevate gameplay to a whole new level by leveraging one of the engine’s main strengths.

Instead of abstracting voxels away, the game could finally let them matter.

5

Steve ●

I couldn't agree more. In SE1 I could make ingot vaults but now in SE2 we can only make ore silos....

So it's not just that we don't get ingots, we don't get to make ingot vaults, or run ingot cargo missions.

It just isn't the same carrying some ore from one location to another. It seems weird. But when we had ingots, we had actual valuable cargo. The game had purpose...

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4Peace ●

IMO, ingots have even greater value than components made of that ingots. The only way to make them even more valuable is to be able to craft ingot stockpiles or ingot shelves, a more durable cargo containers where your can see your shiny ingots exposed.

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Steve ●

This right here! I had planned to model ingot shelves via blender into the game when they first mentioned modding would be a priority. But no ingots... not point in ingot shelves as they will just be empty.

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4Peace ●

@Steve

I want to help you to make ingot shelves mod for both SE1 and SE2. Find me on Discord.

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Deon Beauchamp ●

Ingots are used IRL so there must be very good reasons to do this.

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Jrolla ●

Ore is also shipped straight to factories as well, you could argue this one both ways because both ways exist IRL. I also miss the ingots, but can also see having technology enabling more efficient processes that far into the future negating certain ingots. There are still a couple items that are ingots, lead bar for sure and I am most certain there's a magnesium one too. I'm ok with it either way, but I did see a dev video where they said they were going to discuss adding ingots back into SE2 due to so many disgruntled players =)

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4Peace ●

@Jrolla
having technology enabling more efficient processes

I can't see a technology that magically vaporizes all the waste material from raw ores into nothingness. At this point, why bother with anything realistic, like using chemical engines, for example, if you can just propel yourself using some "sophisticated" antimatter-based thrusters? The current jetpack is probably using it already :) as it allows you to easily fly in gravity with a battery :)

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Jrolla ●

Well, I'm not looking to play a game about real life. We don't have ion thrusters, or jump drives, or medical computer screens that heal you, or cryo, or gravity generators, there's lots of unrealistic things... In 50 years from now, when SE2 launched this ship, these things might exist though, we don't know...

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4Peace ●

@Jrolla

Ion thrusters and even jump drives are at least within the realm of known physics—pushing the limits, sure, but still comprehensible and theoretically feasible.

What stretches credibility for me is mining “100% pure ore” and turning it directly into components with zero waste. Where do the impurities go? What happens when you want to recycle components into something else—do they magically turn back into ore? That introduces a lot of assumptions very quickly.

At some point, you have to ask: where is the line between acceptable sci-fi abstraction and a world that simply stops being believable?

I can understand this level of oversimplification in an early alpha, where the goal is to rapidly test basic mechanics and gather feedback. But when talking about a finished game, systems like ingots and scrap become almost inevitable for many reasons.

They don’t just help “explain” in-game mechanics in a believable and understandable way—they also unlock a huge number of gameplay possibilities. That matters a lot in a sandbox game, especially for:

long-term replayability
deeper gameplay
better modding support
overall system flexibility

The current mining and production loop works fine for contracts or as a support mechanic for a campaign. But once you step back and think about the core sandbox fundamentals, there are many more factors to consider if you want the game to stand on its own for years.

The players you call “disgruntled” are usually the ones who care deeply about those sandbox fundamentals. They expect a Space Engineers sequel to encapsulate them even better than the original did.

I think most of us would agree we want another game that lasts a decade, not one you finish once, complete the campaign, and then move on from.

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4Peace ●

As for accessibility: first of all, the multi-tier production chains that are planned for the game are already quite complex.

Accessibility should be built on top of robust systems, by simplifying and abstracting certain aspects—especially for the FTUE (first-time user experience).

For example, backpack building can and should work exactly as it does now, regardless of whether ingots are in the game or not. You point your welder at a block and you should be able to weld it up no matter what resources you have available: ore, scrap, or ingots.

Under the hood, the game can automatically handle the full production chain:

ore → ingot → component
scrap → ingot → component

All of this should happen transparently, with minimal and contextual UI.

For instance:

if you only have ore, the UI shows how much ore is required
if you have ingots, it shows ingot requirements
if you have scrap or ready-made components, it accounts for those as well
show mix of things if you happen to have them and prioritize automatically higher tier resources

We already have UI logic like this in the game today (ore vs. components). This same logic can—and should—be expanded to crafting in the fabricator or some other high level production/planner block.

Ideally, you should be able to queue an entire blueprint, and the system would automatically:

use all available production blocks on the grid
queue required ingots, components, and block wrapper
prioritize the most “ready” form of available resources

All of this should be presented through one clear UI, showing:

what you currently have
what is missing
which production blocks are required or missing
Links to open related blocks
Contextual wiki everywhere explaining everything in details

This is where accessibility truly comes from—not from removing additional steps in an already complex production chain, but from smart abstraction and good UI layered on top of it.

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Jrolla ●

Well it is my understanding they are already considering or already planning to do balance changes with backpack in comparison to using production buildings due to player feedback, but I don't know any more details than that. I also agree that using 1 kg of ore shouldn't equal a 1 kg component, I have never disputed that. I actually was saying this exact same thing on steams forum.

I literally said I miss the ingots also, but I'm also really liking the more efficient way of producing components straight from smelting the ore instead of having a truly non essential step of ingots. It's done in the real world, why not in SE2?

Especially with simple ores like iron, alloys is a different story but still possible. 3D printers can use more than 1 material, why wouldn't a futuristic smelter/refinery/factory. I'm happy with this one either way, ingots or not.

VS2.2 gives us the rest of the production system, some of your points might very well be in it, such as building queues and such. We're missing roughly have the game, none of us know what the final product even is let alone how it functions yet... The devs have literally stated some of what we have now is temporary just for the functionality of testing other things, such as fast travel for example(supposedly an effect similar to warp effects instead of an instant teleport). I would think, from their statement of complete production system, this convo is more suited for after VS2.2 than now.

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Jrolla ●

The disgruntled players, are just unhappy players... That's what disgruntled means lol. A lot of the complaints on steam about this contained nothing more than "it's different and I don't like it" or "it feels too simplified" more-so than discussing the realism of it.

Ingots have nothing to do with sandbox or real life, it's just a product you're used to making in SE1 to make anything. There's a steel plant near me that literally does it, import ore and export product completely negating making ingots in the middle for no reason. Smelt the ore into molds for product(component) instead of a mold for an ingot that you need to smelt again to make your product... I mean the way the system is functioning right now, the ingot will have the same mass as the ore anyways, so what's the difference besides adding another step that isn't even necessary?

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4Peace ●

@Jrolla

Yeah, I was initially happy to see the iron ore smelted straight into steel products, just like irl. Except for the part that there was no waste management. But then I considered many other gameplay mechanics that are expected to be in the game at some point, at release or later, or added via modding, and I started to realize the importance of ingots from the gameplay perspective. It is no surprise that many games of the genre use ingots. And we have some ingots already in the game for silver, lead and whatnot, but not the most important ones, like iron. And yeah, we've discussed more in here :)

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Jrolla ●

If they change the weight ratios, yeah I would want ingot as a middle step for sure, and I kind of hope they do. I mean come on, practically no ore is that pure straight out of the mine... I never calculated it, but SE1 had waste going through the process didn't it? Ingots weighed less than the ore to make them? I would assume most of those games do it the real way with waste too, not something I expected in SE2... I am perfectly fine with not having stone as a byproduct while mining however =)

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Deon Beauchamp ●

Ignoring where the waste goes has been a dumb idea since like forever.

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4Peace ●

Space Engineers 1 never had proper waste management.

Ore-to-ingot ratios differ for each resource type, so you end up with less mass after refining—but there is no actual waste. The rest of the matter simply disappears.

Some people refer to stone or gravel as waste, but that’s not really true.

Stone is just another ore—or more precisely, all voxel materials that are not explicitly defined as ores automatically convert into a generic “stone” ore, with different conversion rates. Sand and grass yield less stone, while rocky voxels yield more.

Stone is also the only compound ore in the game. By refining stone ore, you obtain four different ingots:

gravel
iron
silicon
nickel

And, btw, without ingots it would be impossible to achieve.

Was this confusing for players? Yes—absolutely.

And for several reasons.

First, all of these mechanics are very specific and not explicit. Nothing in the game clearly explains how or why this system works.

Second, new players (and even returning players like me) often had a hard time figuring out that stone could yield resources at all, or how to do it. I personally remember watching YouTube videos and accidentally discovering that queuing gravel in the survival kit would produce additional ingots.

How could this have been handled better in SE1?

For example:

When using an ore detector (or a hand drill), you could have seen a “stone/gravel” resource icon, plus additional Si / Fe / Ni icons—perhaps smaller, to indicate trace resources. This would immediately communicate that mining surrounding voxels yields usable materials.
The survival kit could have refined stone automatically, just like a refinery does. You would simply place stone into grid's inventory and see ingots being produced.
Collected stone item in your inventory display a popup hint of what resources and in which concentrations are in the stone and tell you to put it into survival kit or refinery to extract them.
by hovering (or selecting) any item in your inventory, there should be a contextual help of some kind to explain what it is and what you can use it for, with a link to the in-game wiki with even more information.

These changes would not have been particularly difficult to implement, yet they would have dramatically improved the FTUE.

What could be even better than that?

Remove the obscure mechanics that convert all voxel materials into generic stone, and instead let players collect materials as they exist in the world.

Voxel materials could have different properties such as density and composition:

sand-like voxels could naturally contain mostly silicon.
iron could be found in many voxel materials but not all, and in various concentrations.
“pure” ore veins could still exist, but surrounding voxels could contain the same resource at lower concentrations, along with elements commonly found together.

With this approach, when mining a deposit you would naturally collect some of the surrounding material as well. It would contain the same valuable elements, just at lower concentrations. There would be no reason to “get rid of stone”—you would want to bring everything to the refinery, or even continue mining the surrounding material after extracting the concentrated core.

Do we need waste at all?

Maybe not everyone wants to deal with waste—and that’s fine. Give us an option (a toggle in the world settings).

By default, refineries could produce not only ingots, but also a waste material. This could be:

a specific low-value item, or
even better, the same voxel material, stripped of valuable elements, with reduced mass and volume

You could then:

dump it back into the world
use it for terraforming (roads, ramps, bridges, landing pads, walls, bunkers, etc.)
or let it pile up near refineries, adding to immersion

Why does this matter?

In any case, having more ways to interact with the fully destructible voxel world feels like a no-brainer. It would elevate gameplay to a whole new level by leveraging one of the engine’s main strengths.

Instead of abstracting voxels away, the game could finally let them matter.

Space Engineers 1 never had proper waste management.

Ore-to-ingot ratios differ for each resource type, so you end up with less mass after refining—but there is no actual waste. The rest of the matter simply disappears.

Some people refer to stone or gravel as waste, but that’s not really true.

Stone is just another ore—or more precisely, all voxel materials that are not explicitly defined as ores automatically convert into a generic “stone” ore, with different conversion rates. Sand and grass yield less stone, while rocky voxels yield more.

Stone is also the only compound ore in the game. By refining stone ore, you obtain four different ingots:

gravel
iron
silicon
nickel

And, btw, without ingots it would be impossible to achieve.

Was this confusing for players? Yes—absolutely.

And for several reasons.

First, all of these mechanics are very specific and not explicit. Nothing in the game clearly explains how or why this system works.

Second, new players (and even returning players like me) often had a hard time figuring out that stone could yield resources at all, or how to do it. I personally remember watching YouTube videos and accidentally discovering that queuing gravel in the survival kit would produce additional ingots.

How could this have been handled better in SE1?

For example:

When using an ore detector (or a hand drill), you could have seen a “stone/gravel” resource icon, plus additional Si / Fe / Ni icons—perhaps smaller, to indicate trace resources. This would immediately communicate that mining surrounding voxels yields usable materials.
The survival kit could have refined stone automatically, just like a refinery does. You would simply place stone into grid's inventory and see ingots being produced.
Collected stone item in your inventory display a popup hint of what resources and in which concentrations are in the stone and tell you to put it into survival kit or refinery to extract them.
by hovering (or selecting) any item in your inventory, there should be a contextual help of some kind to explain what it is and what you can use it for, with a link to the in-game wiki with even more information.

These changes would not have been particularly difficult to implement, yet they would have dramatically improved the FTUE.

What could be even better than that?

Remove the obscure mechanics that convert all voxel materials into generic stone, and instead let players collect materials as they exist in the world.

Voxel materials could have different properties such as density and composition:

sand-like voxels could naturally contain mostly silicon.
iron could be found in many voxel materials but not all, and in various concentrations.
“pure” ore veins could still exist, but surrounding voxels could contain the same resource at lower concentrations, along with elements commonly found together.

With this approach, when mining a deposit you would naturally collect some of the surrounding material as well. It would contain the same valuable elements, just at lower concentrations. There would be no reason to “get rid of stone”—you would want to bring everything to the refinery, or even continue mining the surrounding material after extracting the concentrated core.

Do we need waste at all?

Maybe not everyone wants to deal with waste—and that’s fine. Give us an option (a toggle in the world settings).

By default, refineries could produce not only ingots, but also a waste material. This could be:

a specific low-value item, or
even better, the same voxel material, stripped of valuable elements, with reduced mass and volume

You could then:

dump it back into the world
use it for terraforming (roads, ramps, bridges, landing pads, walls, bunkers, etc.)
or let it pile up near refineries, adding to immersion

Why does this matter?

In any case, having more ways to interact with the fully destructible voxel world feels like a no-brainer. It would elevate gameplay to a whole new level by leveraging one of the engine’s main strengths.

Instead of abstracting voxels away, the game could finally let them matter.

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Jrolla ●

Well, not all waste in smelting is actually mass left over. Some "waste" burns into a gas and floats away... By waste in production, I'm talking about the fact you lose mass smelting ore so anything coming after the fact would weigh less than the initial ore. I'm not talking about hoarding sand left over from breaking down rock to get the ore out. That is a step we literally don't need to be reproducing in SE. Why would you want more micromanaging just to get your ore refined for use? This isn't a mine/factory simulator, it's a space simulator!

If you want everything, literally everything, to abide by our known rules then how are we exploring out in space in ships in the first place? Can't have an ion engine because it isn't a real thing! Gravity generator? Nope. Jump drive, yeah Nope! Give me a break here, and the devs... If you want a road building game with bulldozers and sand you can move, this isn't it... Do you understand what would happen if the game had those mechanics? Our PCS would explode just loading the game... Sounds cool yes, but come on man, you would shrink the galaxy by probably 80-90% if every grain of sand was movable! Wouldn't surprise me if the game consisted of only a couple planets/moons and nothing more because of what it would take to run... Personally, I like more asteroids spawning than movable grains of dirt...

So, you think the only way to get ore out of stone is ingots? You obviously have no clue on the process then because smelting is what separates the elements, sometimes it doesn't even require smelting it is crushed into powder and the ore is pulled out with magnets! You could break down stone into the same 4 elements here in ore form(besides gravel of course), what do you think the molten ore they used to make the ingot was before it got poured into the ingot mold??? Why pour it into an ingot mold when you can just pour it into a product mold? Why is this so hard to understand??? It's literally reality...

Well, not all waste in smelting is actually mass left over. Some "waste" burns into a gas and floats away... By waste in production, I'm talking about the fact you lose mass smelting ore so anything coming after the fact would weigh less than the initial ore. I'm not talking about hoarding sand left over from breaking down rock to get the ore out. That is a step we literally don't need to be reproducing in SE. Why would you want more micromanaging just to get your ore refined for use? This isn't a mine/factory simulator, it's a space simulator!

If you want everything, literally everything, to abide by our known rules then how are we exploring out in space in ships in the first place? Can't have an ion engine because it isn't a real thing! Gravity generator? Nope. Jump drive, yeah Nope! Give me a break here, and the devs... If you want a road building game with bulldozers and sand you can move, this isn't it... Do you understand what would happen if the game had those mechanics? Our PCS would explode just loading the game... Sounds cool yes, but come on man, you would shrink the galaxy by probably 80-90% if every grain of sand was movable! Wouldn't surprise me if the game consisted of only a couple planets/moons and nothing more because of what it would take to run... Personally, I like more asteroids spawning than movable grains of dirt...

So, you think the only way to get ore out of stone is ingots? You obviously have no clue on the process then because smelting is what separates the elements, sometimes it doesn't even require smelting it is crushed into powder and the ore is pulled out with magnets! You could break down stone into the same 4 elements here in ore form(besides gravel of course), what do you think the molten ore they used to make the ingot was before it got poured into the ingot mold??? Why pour it into an ingot mold when you can just pour it into a product mold? Why is this so hard to understand??? It's literally reality...

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4Peace ●

Jrolla, you contradict yourself many times throughout your messages.

On one hand, you say you care about realism. On the other, you’re perfectly fine with absurdly simplified game mechanics that assume mining “pure” elements directly from the ground and turning them into components without any change in mass.

Then you say that once mass is reduced, you want ingots—but at the same time you keep repeating that you prefer iron ore to be smelted directly into steel products, backing it up with countless real-life examples.

I'd say you are more obsessed with realism than anyone else here, while I am deliberately staying within the realm of the actual game and discussing the gameplay benefits of having—or not having—ingots and waste management.

From the gameplay perspective, we currently have one refinery block capable of purifying ores into “ingots.”

Both the refinery and ingots are in-game abstractions that already simplify a lot of what you’re describing using real-life examples.

In real life, every individual resource has its own dedicated, multi-stage industrial process. Yes, sometimes materials are cast into ingots, and sometimes steel is cast directly into products—but this is a game, not real life.

From a game design standpoint, having one single “ingot” item as the output of refining raw ore is beneficial ,and I provides countless examples of that.

Once you start considering recycling and potential compound ores, ingots again become the first logical candidate—not because of strict realism, but because they offer enough realism and because any young Timmy in the world will immediately understand how they work and why they exist.

Lastly, about voxels.

The game world is literally made out of them. That’s one of the biggest strengths of the engine. And you’re telling us we should find another game if we want to interact with voxels? Really?

Have you ever tried Creative Mode? You can already remove and add voxels freely.

What is the actual difference between removing voxels and adding them back?

Do you have any real data showing that adding voxels is significantly more performance-heavy?

In fact, one of the popular suggestions around collecting voxel material is to allow players to “repair” terrain, effectively resetting modified voxels. This could improve performance and reduce world file size, not worsen it.

At the end of the day, this discussion isn’t about forcing real-life industry into the game. It’s about believable abstraction, strong sandbox fundamentals, and making full use of the systems the engine is already built around—especially voxels.