Fix this to make the game more accessible instead of oversimplifying everything

I apologize, I didn't explain that clearly enough. Of course, the unified storage is intended to be an optional view.

It’s not meant to replace the individual inventories of your containers, but rather to serve as a menu that shows them in an aggregated way.

Thanks for the detailed feedback there are a lot of solid usability concerns in here, even if we don’t agree with every proposed solution.

A few of the points you raise are actually very aligned with ongoing internal discussions:

• Information clarity (containers, production, batteries, assemblers): We agree that players need better overview tools. Aggregated status views and clearer dashboards are something we’re actively looking at so players don’t have to manually inspect every block.
• Item management and logistics: The frustration with repetitive transfers and large-scale inventory handling is well understood. The direction here is not to remove depth, but to reduce unnecessary micromanagement and improve control over logistics at scale.
• Grid control complexity (rotors, pistons, cranes, etc.): This is another area where we’re exploring better control schemes and binding options to make complex builds more usable without relying on scripts.

On the broader point: the intent is not to “oversimplify” systems, but to reduce friction in areas where players currently rely heavily on workarounds, scripts, or mods just to achieve basic usability. The challenge we’re working through is preserving depth while improving clarity and reducing repetitive or unintuitive interactions.

That said, your concern about maintaining what makes SE engaging is valid, and that balance is exactly what’s being tuned during development.

Appreciate you taking the time to break it down so clearly it’s been passed on.

Arron, Community Manager

This is some of the best feedback I have seen for things that would improve the new player experience while maintaining what made SE2 great. Better than the current approach for sure.

I'd like to add a suggestion for a slightly different approach to item management:

Container groups. Several containers can be grouped into one larger virtual container, as long as they are connected directly or through large conveyors. The virtual container shows up as one large container in the inventory. The connection requirement makes sure that any item thrown into a container in the group can be extracted at another container door.

This would de-clutter the inventory by having less containers but still give the player a bit more control over what goes into which container. For instance, a player could choose to have a group of containers named "Bulk Freight" and a separate group of containers named 'Valuables" that is in a better protected place. Then the player could sort items into the different container groups according to value.

The concept could be extended to groups of assemblers, batteries and anything else where aggregating units to a larger pool makes sense.

I would like to expand on this list.. since i was a new player and the one thing that annoyed the crap out of me was the upgrading of tools.

Now you all know that this is by hitting G and then dragging the items on the actual bar.

However in every other game this is NOT by pressing G .. its usually I for inventory and then drag the item on the toolbar or 'equip' the item on the character screen.

Also the game is essentially a 'building' game but can be modded to give a more 'game' feeling instead of build whatever. I have been playing SE1 and the gameplay there is basically dig stone -> build refiner, assembler with power.. then a miningship then base.

After that its basically GG cause you can just go build your dreadnought or download it from the workshop and go to the endgame.. There is no actual progression.

here is the time i need to say i played empyrion galactic survival quite a bit .. and especially reforged eden2.

The game has underlying the same sandbox mechanics.

But the real cool part is that in order to unlock or build bigger.. you had to gather materials from specific worlds.

With this came a fundamental need to explore and conquer / attack to unlock new builds.

To clarify.. each component would take up a certain amount of cpu and you would only have a certain amount available before upgrading / expanding the cpu limit.

So imagine you drop somewhere in the wild.. lost all stuff and had to rebuild.

re-establishing contact and researching for specific unlocks makes a lot of sense.. unless you want to just build.

It would be great if I could connect my ship, vehicle, or welding unit to a base system, for example through a hose or connector, and have it automatically request the needed resources or trigger their production from the connected system. I’d also really like this for handheld tools, so I don’t have to manually pull each individual resource from nearby containers.

As an alternative, a dedicated welding container could also be useful, which you pair wirelessly with the ship, vehicle, etc. via antenna or module. The container would then automatically request the items from the storage loop — the ones I previously scanned with the welding system using right-click. After that, I would only need to mount the container onto the ship, vehicle, or welding system and could get started. If I’m using my handheld tool, I would at least have a container afterwards that I can place next to me.

1. Make stacking ore detectors create radio "lobes". Make it an actual game mechanic. If you stack 3 end to end in a line, you get a long narrow beam, If you put two next to each other you get a slightly larger area ahead, if you put two far apart on posts you get a shallow but very wide area. Generally what you're supposed to do is use a camera to spot from far away, then fly up to it and scan it. That's why its hard to tell the difference between uranium and silicon, gold and nickel, magnesium and cobalt from a distance. But also making stacked detectors create a larger bubble based on their positions would be an excellent mechanic.

2. New players should be able to go to a station and "do a job" where they get given a vehicle they can keep upon successful completion of a series of missions. Examples would be, drive a car to another station, mine 2-3 different types of mineral to keep the digger etc.

3 & 4. Firstly, the repeat mode on assemblers is useless. It should only repeat up to how much you have stacked in the machine or the grids inventory, then it works like the autofab program block scripts without having to need the PB, its a no brainer, just like you said, its a threshold that repeats up to the stack size if its under count.

The LCD programs are a joke, there should be lots more useful info for them, they should work like the event block somewhat. A program for specific container fills, add items to its list like the event block to make them appear on screen. Same with parts. Batteries, individual or total charge, weight screen should include total fill % and time till full stop when slowing down or time to full speed when speeding up etc. The LCD programs should be the bread and butter of what you mentioned regarding useful info.

Projectors should be able to queue up missing parts, or at least let you have some LCD info that shows total remaining components for the projected grid.

I think you have the right idea, it would be nice to make these kinds of concepts "game mechanics" instead of just solve all easy solutions

I would say that if the goal is to add features players want/need the most, look at what workshop items are most popular all-time. The LCDs script is pretty similar to what's being discussed here already. But what about Build Info and Leak Finder, or Build Vision?

I was genuinely about to rage-quit SE1 a couple weeks in when someone pointed me towards Build Info. As an actual aerospace engineer, I find it downright absurd that a supposedly engineering-focused game provides so little info about its blocks. Engineering is not about slapping a bunch of pieces together randomly and then testing to see if they work. Real engineering means planning your design in advance, based on the properties of the available components, so that you know it will work before you've even started building it. But that's not possible in SE1 or SE2 without external resources because we get almost no data about the blocks we're using.

As for Leak Finder, I certainly hope something like that will be included when pressurization is added, because it is a huge time saver. I've had leaks that I would never have guessed in a million years were occurring where the mod found them.

Build Vision is not quite as critical, but it is certainly incredibly useful. The ability to access blocks that don't have a terminal in the model is huge. But I think the most useful aspect of all is just the fact that you can use it to rename blocks while looking at them, so as to distinguish between multiples of the same block without lots of grinding and hopping between the cockpit and the outside of your ship. Given that SE1 allows remote access of owned grids' control panels already, I don't think it's at all unreasonable to be able to interact with individual blocks without sitting in a control seat or having a number pad on them.

Lastly, MES is also very high on the all-time list, which is unsurprising given the number of other mods that depend on it. As SE2 progresses towards more advanced encounters and NPC presence, I think it would be really popular with the players if there were some settings that could be changed to determine the type and difficulty scaling of hostile grids.

It kind of defeats the point of playing a game at all when it does everything for you.

introducing things we expect in the real world, as game mechanics with their own rules, is part of good game design. Hence my suggestions

Community Manager Arron, it seems the team(including you) still missing the point. Players who liked the first game and plays and support most, liked the game the way it is, with its complexity. Replacing the the realistic aspect of game with shallow, arcadey feeling by removing "micro management" would be making me not support the idea of SE2 as it is losing its roots, default setting should still be the way of first game, mixed Steam reviews would easily prove what I mean here. Thank you for at least reading even tho the second game wont be as good anytime sooner while first game been much better at these times of its early development. I wish you all good luck.

Good points... I like what Allison said! I LOVE complicated, doesn't have to be. Could be an option. I play Stationeers too because it is complicated. It makes me think about gas mixtures, pressure, running electrical conduit.

The build list option in SE1 kept me playing. W/out it you are doing WAY too much deliver.

What you are doing is not “reducing friction”. It is removing the game itself :)

Of course quality-of-life improvements are important:

• better monitoring tools
• better inventory management
• less UI pain

Nobody argues against that.

But that is NOT the point of this feedback.

You are “smoothing corners” in completely wrong places, or doing it in the wrong way entirely.

For example: removing the whole refining step

This is not specifically about ingots. They are fine and they are good enough abstraction layer no one ever complained about.

It’s about flattening the entire production gameplay loop — which was already VERY simple to begin with.

And by flattening it even more, you remove a huge part of our need to create.

There are many ways to improve refining gameplay

• fix excessive waiting times
• poor automation options without scripts
• the stupid “stone” implementation
• tedious inventory handling
• auto refining and inability to choose what to refine, how much and in which order

Those things absolutely have to be improved and redesigned.

Instead, the whole refining mechanic was just thrown away.

That was a huge mistake. And you simply are not willing to ADMIT it.

There is an important thing that makes games great: Easy to learn, hard to master.

Take chess for instance, the rules are not that hard to learn. But you have a long way to go before you can win tournaments. SE1 is decent at this, the road from survival kit to refinery and assembler is pretty obvious but the huge variety of what you can build is amazing and you would need years to learn all the tricks. I agree with natec that taking the system from SE1 and refining the details would be more promising than trying to reinvent the wheel.

Also, "take ore, stuff into refinery, get metal (ingots) out", is easy to understand and most people have heard about it in real life.

ingots - Modern Material Science. Keen already developed the modern varients of 'ingots' in the Smelter block and the Refinery block, i.e. titanium sheets, steel plate, lead bar, gold thread, stainless steel rods...

There are no ingots, nowdays. They make rods from stock, sheets on rollers, etc. What are we, in the Bronze Age? Are we medieval blacksmiths...? If you want stocks of iron ingots, then make containers full of that type of component to your hearts content. When we can melt them back down, eventually, it will be working as everyone wants ingots to.

On the actual post, a really good list of points, each point is a strong idea. I would add, for point 5, a suggestion from KSP. Have a function of 'control from here' enabled on certain blocks, i.e. camera block, which aligns all controls, gyros, thrusters to the default movement controls, and orientation, of that selected block. Either 'control from here' selects the grid, the grid with subgrids, or a grouping of blocks (i.e. mechanical block groupings).

In practice, for example, you put a camera on the end of a crane, select the crane's blocks and create a group, then enable 'control from here' off the camera. Now, you can use the normal 'movement' controls to 'drive' around the crane head.

The problem is not how things are named.

Whether it is called "titanium sheets" or "titanium ingot" doesn't matter. The problem is that a whole production step was removed for certain items.

A smelter can directly produce motors, construction components, and turbines without having to produce the "ingot-staged" items first.

Which means that you can put some raw ore into an oven and get a fresh-baked motor out of it. ;)

The smelter should produce intermediate products, and the assembler should take on the task of producing the motor from those.

That's how I would expect the production to work in a semi-realistic game like SE.

I did an image search for industrial ingot usage, it took seconds, there were so many different types of metal supplied as ingots for commercial engineering including steel.

My guess is that most are for casting applications and the steel is used with large scale hammer presses. Here is a link to the steel ingot supplier catalog.

https://industeel.arcelormittal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Industeel-Ingots-Catalogue-version-2026.pdf

Precious, semi-precious and some rare earth are stored, traded and transported in multiple forms, ingots appear to be very popular still.

Cast iron suppliers will provide ingot pigs for casting operations.

https://lntsufin.com/product/jsw-foundry-grade-pig-iron-ingots-100-x-100-x-50-mm/17150-7518

As for other formats that engineering metal is supplied in, not many useful ones would ever fit into a backpack !

As Deon Beauchamp says, ingots are most certainly still common in metallurgy. Calling all refined metal "Ingots" as in SE1 is a simplification, but not a massive one. And IMHO just the right level of simplification.

The ore goes to a smelter/refinery, which produces different versions of a modern day metallurgy right now, then to a assembler/fabricator, for assembly into specific components...it is working as intended. A quick google search showed that Keen already is using the different modern 'ingots' in their powder, sheets, rods, etc for components. The most common apparently is pellets/powder, for the common ores.

Again, they -are- updated to modern usage for ore processing. The ingot argument is for gold bars, maybe, which is still used for precious metals for currency transportation. Modern transportation is different, for the different processed ores, anyways, and we already have it lol.

Keks - good point, they could move finished components over, and keep ore processing -pure- in the smelter/refinery. But...for modern technology advances...I wonder if there are machines that can already do that now?

“Keen already developed the modern variants of ingots”

No, they did not.

What they actually did was remove the refining step altogether and make it so drills extract “ingots” straight from the ground.

Conceptually, what the game now calls “ores” are already basically ingots:

• pure
• universal
• ready-to-use production materials

Similar to different filaments for a 3D printer.

There is no actual refining gameplay anymore where raw materials are processed, filtered, concentrated, where mass and volume is reduced while the rest of the material remain in form of a waste.

And that’s the core problem.

It doesn’t matter whether refining gives you:

• steel plates directly
• ingots
• filaments
• powders

The issue is that there is:

• no raw ores or other voxels you can really collect
• no refining stage altogether
• no gameplay related to mass or volume reduction
• not to mention misleading naming and total confusion about production blocks
• and the very idea that drills are also refineries now

“Ores” already function as ingots.

You drill:

• an iron deposit -> get pure iron resource (ingots)
• random soil -> still get pure iron resource (ingots), just less of it because the concentration is lower

They did not “modernize” ingots. They removed a major layer of gameplay from production mechanics, and shamelessly portray this so called game design as something that is meant to feed our “need to create”.

And please stop arguing about whether ingots are “modern” or “realistic”.

This has absolutely nothing to do with realism.

This is a GAME. Or rather absence of it :)

That’s what OP is talking about. People did not play SE1 for 10+ years because it was realistic, but because it was the GAME for the fk sake.

We played it because:

• it was a fun sandbox
• it gave meaningful reasons to build things
• engineering choices related to production mattered
• logistics mattered

The systems were actually extremely simple compared to many other survival games. But they created emergent engineering problems to solve. That’s what made it good.

Current SE2 production design goes directly against those principles.

Instead of improving weak areas:

• bad UI/UX
• tedious inventory management
• excessive waiting
• poor automation options
• and so on

…they flattened the gameplay itself.

Accessibility was never really limited by the production mechanics. The real problem was things like terrible UI/UX and unfinished or unpolished features, balance, lack of comprehensive tutorials.

Was opening a crafting menu to make a couple of steel plates in a survival game really such an accessibility problem? Come on :) This is just bad design built on wrong assumptions.

You don't have to agree with the “new proposed solution.” There already WAS a perfectly working mechanic, yet you still decided to ruin it. The biggest problem here is that it is not very obvious at this stage. Hence we see tons of back and forth discussions about "realism"/"futurism", which is cool, but can't really define the problem. This mistake will reveal itself slowly. More and more people will realize that the production gameplay is simply boring. It might seem like a small part of the game, but it is actually very important and is what made the original game successful IMO. You might sell a lot of copies by luring people in with shiny features like cool visuals and water, but gameplay is what really matters for the longevity of the game.

And no, mods won't fix fundamental gameplay issues for you. I think it is not too late to admit the mistakes that were made and fix them before even more dependent mechanics are built on top of them.

Indeed: “Fix this to make the game more accessible instead of oversimplifying everything.”

I stand by my words, ...and yet-

Natec, you hit the nail on the head:

"What they actually did was remove the refining step altogether and make it so drills extract “ingots” straight from the ground."

As you said, hitting a 'pure' ore deposit in the ground, that is essentially 'already' refined, means that building a refinery -is- an extra step. But this is a game. To make it realistic, other's ideas on different percentages of purities in ore deposits or alloys would -require- the refining step.

The issue doesn't just disappear, although.

A smelter and assembler functionalities could...technically...be combined into one machine, as I alluded to earlier. And could be staged into a progression based on beginning ore availability around you. But, as you said, people like the steps, it is like a 'preparatory command' used in thought. I.E: "Ready, set, go" idea of design flow.

And the attachment to the first game.

Survival Kit. More restrictive, (edit: functionality almost useless other than spawner), compared to what it once was. How does it work? It heals by 3d printing. How? The only way is by electromagnetic manipulation, at a micro scale. Take a molecule, set up a convalesce bond 'mimicking' another molecule, to change it into what you want. That is how it works for healing and building. Slow, but extreme flexibility. Suit backpack does the same.

'...no technological reason the two cannot be combined...'

Also, 'economies of scale' is worth mentioning. A 'general' factory has more variety of goods, a 'specialized' one has less variety, but high production rates.

In SE2 if we use power consumption for a balance, we get= lower power usage, high production speed, wide variety for components....but you can only pick 'two'.

Then, refinery of ores can now make sense in a production loop.

I.E., when starting out with limited ore availability and power generation, it would make sense to build a cheaper 'smelter/assembler' combo unit. Then, when you get more access to ores, or a specific component need arises, you can build 'pure' smelter for ore or 'pure' assembler for components, at a high power usage and speed (like 2x power draw and 3 or 4 production rates).

Ores needing refinery or alloy separation, would work fine with this loop, too. Allows players to decide on how to build out their production lines based on the basic principles of economic.

@bnainz

If I understood correctly, you mean production chains should become more energy-efficient when items are produced continuously through connected stages. For example, steel plates used directly for higher-tier components could be processed much faster because the material does not need to “cool down” or be stored between machines. That idea fits perfectly with production line mechanics.

What I would do in addition to that :) is actually make production lines consume more energy whenever blocks are sitting idle waiting for dependencies. So yes, you could get a slight speed bonus from chained production, but it would be completely overshadowed by huge power waste if you fail to calculate production ratios correctly and minimize idle time.

Energy should play a massive role in production. Getting enough power should be a real engineering challenge. Power generation could fluctuate much more, disrupting production and causing even more energy loss if you do not have enough capacitors to stabilize heavy demand spikes (and pls nerf freaking batteries).

Different items could require completely different production ratios. Producing Item X might require exactly 2 smelters feeding 1 assembler. Item Y might need 1.5 smelters per assembler. If you only use 1 smelter, the assembler sits idle 50% of the time. If you use 2 smelters, then one smelter idles 50% of the time instead. At that point, speed modules or specialized upgrades could help equalize ratios.

But again, this only works if energy is truly valuable. If power becomes trivial, the whole system loses meaning.

Another interesting layer would be material losses caused by inefficient setups. Poor ratios could waste your resources.

This could also naturally encourage specialization and trade. You might build a highly optimized production setup specifically for hard drives and motherboards, with carefully balanced ratios for maximum efficiency and minimum energy waste, while trading for other components instead of producing everything on your own. Specialized production modules could further boost certain item categories, adding even more incentive for industrial specialization.

Then you open the door for advanced automation gameplay , press a button nd toggle on/off specific production blocks to optimize for producing specific items. The most advanced players could try to automatize even that in some way.

@natec

Having mass reduction step would surely add much more depth to the production and logistics, allow for interesting loot and trade options. And indeed, it has nothing to do with accessibility. Collecting raw materials opens up a world of possibilites as well. Nice write up.

This is a really cool idea and might fit into block building game. But SE2 is moving into completely opposite direction, streamlining and cutting down mechanics to the bare minumum, as I can see :)

agreed. Have default easily accessible machines ready made and downloaded into your suit systems at the start of the game. They work good enough for most users.

But for those PC building enthusiasts out there, you can open it up, fiddle with the components, move this over there, use that empty spot over here for some cache storage, route this over and under, and now you have room to overclock the machine and double it's speed in the same volume! or add additional functionality like refinery AND assembler in the same machine housing.

i think the developers lost the path, they trying to get more players possible, but doing so they are neglecting the thousands and thousands of players that sticked with them in the old times from 2013. that's not how you develop a game like that, you risk to lose the old players and not get new players anyways (space engineers is a particular and niche game). they changed so many things that didn't need changing...

SE2 feels like it actually skipped a step because the machines do exist (smelter, assembler, refiner), so the logic flows that the smelter should take only raw materials, and only produce ingots. The assembler should accept only ingots/gasses/liquids and produce physical objects. The Refiner should take only raw materials and produce other raw materials. That's the expectation.

...huh. That's a really good point for new players. And veterans see a block that removed a step, yet has the same name. Would feel like a broken logic step in the process.

For backpack building, if it was re-balanced around the idea of being a printer, it would make sense.