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.

The survival kit in SE1 feels a little unbalanced too. It can heal the player, refine stuff and make parts as well. A mini-refinery, mini-medical center and mini-assembler all in one. Sure, its repertoire is limited, but it still seems like a lot of capabilities stuffed into a pretty small package.

For SE2 breaking this up into the SE2 survival kit having a mini-refinery but making no components, and limiting backpack building to printing from ingots or assembling components seems like a good idea to me. If you want to build from pre-made components, you would need to build a smelter first (I'll leave the topic open if the smelter should be redesigned too).

" If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? "

Deon - It depends on system resource usage. But if there is an “a tree falls in the forest” event, simply playing a system sound is likely less resource-intensive than scanning the area for players.

DrHexagon - A drill is meant to be a device for extracting material, not a refinery. A drill may (or may not) produce a sorted ore concentrate, but not metal.

The issue with ingots lies in measuring the amount of material—an ingot is a unit of calculation. What is the smallest amount of material we can use to produce “something” or “anything”?

From my perspective, the best solution would be for the drill to produce four types of concentrates (see below)—siderophilic (compounds containing oxygen and sulfur), lithophile (mostly compounds with oxygen), chalcophile (mostly compounds with sulfur, telur...), and a smaller mixture of residues (unclassified and inert elements, such as silver, gold, platinum group metals, and rare earth elements).

Each type of concentrate would require a separate refinery (or a refinery configured for that specific type of concentrate) or additional processing units within the refinery.

@Dr.Hexagon: For refineries it would be acceptable to check on progress only every second or two. Depending on what the frequency of game ticks is, that might be 100 game ticks per check. Also, adding and subtracting a few numbers for the fill level of the refinery is computationally cheap. Far cheaper than collision detection or a physics simulation for hundreds of objects.

@Semtex: You'd still need to figure out if the players can hear the sound and adjust the volume. Now, scanning the area is easy because the server knows where all the players are. In pseudocode:

For n= 1 to 100 do begin

d = Calculate distance between player and event

if distance < MaxHearingDiatance then

begin

*play sound to the player*

end

Edit: This forum is eating my indents

The game isn't like Satisfactory in this way, there is no "constantly in use" activity save for solar/wind energy generation.

Rather, the issue is that if I build X many drill rigs that are just idly spinning around collecting nothing, that consumes resources on the computer/host, while the ones I took the drill off but left the piston arm on, are still subject to the wind physics if it becomes unpowered.

The most ideal way to optimize in single player is to simply "shut down" everything that is not in the players view, and when it comes back into the players view, calculate everything without animating it before it starts animating it again. So is that drill at ground level, or is it 80m below ground level? Can the player still see it from 100m away? I find the game seems to not like it if I build a drill with a 100m conveyer between it and the cargo container, but the only evidence I have for that is the rotor being unable to move in one example on Verdure, and on another example on Kemik where the wind would pickup and the drill head would get smashed into the wall and occasionally explode. The only solution for the long drill arms in that case would be to rebuild the drill below the surface when there's enough room for it.

This is why the question of waste ore / ingots and such come up. Because as it is now, if you drill somewhere that seems to not have a high density minerals, it just disappears (eg Palatine, or asteroids) when realistically there should be iron, silica or even ice as the "waste" ore when you're after something else. Depending on what the larger neighboring mass is. Water forms naturally on a planet (there's been some really recent research to suggest that water is trapped in diamond-like material below the crust "Iron oxyhydroxide as water carrier to the Earth’s mantle" Thus Iron/Aluminium/Silicon and Magnesium should exist in Hydroxide forms that have water as a byproduct of smelting.

Now, that doesn't have to be true in the game, but it's just an observation that water should actually be more abundant than it presently is, and potentially as a byproduct of composite ore materials.

Rabiator - I imagine it a little differently. The server that manages the world/planet/area generates a “tree fall” event and sends a system message to the clients—the players' computers—in a certain area, roughly in the format "at position X;Y;Z; event BAC for object FDE, fall vector Q;R; object length P,” and the client’s gaming computer handles it on its own from there. Including the possibility that the tree might fall on some unlucky player’s head.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

DrHexagon

The performance drain of refineries grinding away for hours on servers updating every game tick

Bad implementation has nothing to do with removing the proper refining step. This is the same as saying that we should remove rovers altogether because they did not work well.

DrHexagon

I agree with better inventory management but I also agree with removing ingots and having your drill auto discard gravel and only collecting the valuable ore.

Anyway, we still have ingots in game, it is just we get them straight from the drills now instead of properly refining raw voxel materials, which we simply cannot collect now. The original voxel material is destroyed, and you get an already purified first stage production item out of mining.

Then you have smelters forming motors out of nickel and the refinery makes things like magnets.

If anything, this is a very early alpha placeholder system rather than anything we can seriously consider properly designed mining and production mechanics.

To drill, or not to drill, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The scrap and ingots of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of VS3,

And by opposing end them: to die, to spawn

No more; and by a fast travel, to say we end

The heart-ache, and the thousand unnatural simplifications

That thrust is air to? 'Tis a consummation of ice

Devoutly to be wished. To gravity, we crash,

Slightly overloaded.

It is important to keep in mind that the Earth’s crust is not the original crust that formed when the planet was created. Earth underwent a very unique evolutionary process in which it collided with the planet Theia (roughly the size of Mars), leading to the formation of the Moon and a complete restructuring of Earth’s crust and upper mantle, into which remnants of Theia’s iron core and a large portion of Theia’s mantle were incorporated.

A small portion of the ejected material formed the Moon, and about five to ten times the volume of the Moon escaped Earth’s gravitational field and was subsequently captured by Venus and Mars, as well as by the giant planets (some of which were directly swallowed up, while others were captured as moons). Some of this material may still be found among the asteroids. So it appears that even the surfaces of Venus and Mars are not composed of the original planetary crust, but rather of a layer of debris from the collision between Earth and Theia that is many kilometers thick.

To put this into perspective—the volume of the Moon would form a layer more than 47 km thick on Venus and 1,500 km thick on Mars!!! On Earth, it would be about 43 km...

Why am I writing this...

Because this is what should govern the distribution of elements on planets throughout the universe.

Keep in mind the game's planets are about 10-1000 times smaller and closer to each other. The real earth and moon are 384,400 km apart. The ISS is 400km from the surface. The stations around Verdure and Kemik are 40km. Likewise a day is 24h IRL but 1.5h in the game. (Not that every world would have a 24h day anyway)

So I agree that the distribution of materials should be more reflective of what we find in the universe, it's probably harder to scale the distribution since Lead, Gold and Platinum are roughly the same rarity, while Uranium has the same rarity as Nickel, Copper and Chromium. Silicon, Aluminum are closer to each other, and Iron is abundant.

But this would only really be reflective of rocky worlds with an iron core. A planet with an atmosphere probably burns more of the lighter rare materials in the atmosphere, making it harder to recover industrial levels of it. Where as a planet with no atmosphere (eg a moon) likely has more stellar material on the surface or sinking into the surface.

As a side note, this seems to be how Kemik works, there are clearly asteroid-sized rocks all over it, with chromium or uranium, but the game seems to overlap the voxels. So trying to mine it with a machine tends to get stuck on the collision box of the rock when it drills through where the voxels overlap.

The way I see it, the planets are scaled down by a factor of 100-150-200 for “technical reasons.” A standard home computer simply can't handle a voxel-based world model at actual size—with an average diameter of ~10-15,000 km—not a chance... It probably wouldn’t be able to handle a procedurally generated world either (No Man’s Sky uses procedurally generated worlds, with sizes reaching 100–150 km in diameter; so far, I’ve encountered a maximum marker distance of 380 kilounits (~380 km), which gives a planet diameter of ~120 km)

I played in SE1—64G DDR4 RAM is enough for a 300–400 km planet, but not more... It starts to freeze and crash. I haven’t tried it in SE2, but I assume the limit will be similar there as well. It’s clearly a matter of memory capacity—how much you can map.

The day-night time scale is determined by the typical length of players' gaming sessions, not by physics. A terrestrial planet the size of Earth can have a day-night cycle ranging from 6 hours to 240 hours without significantly affecting surface conditions.

As for planets with iron cores—all terrestrial planets will be similar. An iron core, a rocky crust. It’s simply a matter of physics and the chemical composition of the universe. Above that, there’s some kind of atmosphere—maybe as dense as Venus’, maybe as extensive as Neptune’s or Uranus’, or none at all—like on the Moon or Mercury. Or something in between, like on Earth and Mars. By the way—a comparison of the atmospheres of Earth, Venus, and Mars, along with their gas compositions (such as argon, krypton, xenon, and the like), suggests that Earth lost at least 95–99% of its original atmosphere in the past (likely during the Theia impact).

Earth-like planets orbiting other stars will therefore be similar to the planets and large moons in the Solar System—the “iron core, rocky crust” model is universal. You can pour quintillions of cubic meters of water onto them—and you have a water world; let it freeze—and you have an icy world like the moon Europa; inflate it with a few quadrillions of cubic kilometers of hydrogen, methane, and ammonia—and you have a world similar to Neptune or Uranus. Burn Earth’s carbonates into lime and carbon dioxide—and you have Venus. Add a few extra percent of sulfur—and you have the moon Io with its sulfur volcanoes.

Simply put, the basic model is universal. Add a magnetic field to that—does a planet lack a magnetic field? In geological time, it will rapidly lose its water… like Venus, or even Mars.

Add mass and distance from the star, plus tidal locking—Mercury without an atmosphere…

I don't think the game is trying to emulate a true solar system or ... well any realistic solar system. The closest I've seen a game try to do this is NMS and "The Outer Wilds", NMS handwaves far too much to be realistic beyond "yes a planet with a higher mass, might have a different shape" yet it let's you land on what would be qualified as gas giants. Something you should not be able to do with any spacecraft. You'd need something closer to a submarine engineered, and even then, we're not really sure what the core of gas giants are. It could be metallic hydrogen/helium, it could be Ice IX, it could be anything, but we only have a faint idea from the magnetic and radiation fields.

Likewise planets far away from the star itself, or maybe the moons of a gas giant, likely aren't "iron core" worlds, they might literately be "snowballs" of ice that just keeps being smoothed over from melting periodically. Titan is suggested to be Ice VI and rock. It might have a silica-rock core, but it might not be something that is "solid" like an iron core is.

As far as the game is concerned, if everything is scaled down by about 1000, which is fine, the distribution doesn't really change. It's just a question of what survives. So if there are ice and gold asteroids, then finding ice and gold on the same planet that has no thermally heated side should be possible. If a planet is tidally locked (which evidence to date suggest most planets are tidally locked to their star unless they have a moon, which then the moon is usually tidally locked to the planet and the planet-moon barycenter is what is tidally locked. But then again we have not much evidence of this being true save for some examples of planets around red dwarfs all appearing to be tidally locked (TRAPPIST 1).

So NMS and SE2 might actually be deviating from what is out there, and most planets being tidally locked one way or another. NMS believability (not saying it's a bad game, just I had no expectation of it being realistic) goes out the window from it's shortcuts to prevent players from being constantly killed by environmental hazards. It's way too easy to just mine enough cobalt to make batteries in the backpack and just exist perpetually, even in the worst hazards in that game. SE2 meanwhile, You need Oxygen and Hydrogen and Energy to exist perpetually, and that only happens if you stick to areas with ice, otherwise you just constantly die when you go do missions. But then respawn back on your ship with your suit fully oxygen and hydrogen stocked. That's not really any penalty to just keep throwing yourself out the airlock then. I'm willing to handwave "revive machine" for the sake of not making every game a permadeath hardcore experience. However this is the same handwave every survival mode of games do, and it could really maybe be dialed downwards to prevent "death is a solution" from being convenient.

Like recharge the health, oxygen, energy, hydrogen to 30% if you respawn on a ship that is not fully equipped to fuel those resources. That creates the incentive to have your revive spot/ship to actually be fully functional.

There's been at least two missions I've gone out to on my hydrogen ship, only to come back to the ship and see it's hydrogen at zero. So if the revive spot is the ship, and the next closest revive spot is 30m from that one... welp now I don't get back to the space station, the only way off this mission location is to build a ship with an ion engine, but that is unlocked so really late in the game it's kind of a problem. I wound up (on Kemik) just attaching ion engines to the atmosphere mining craft I had built, and driving it into the atmosphere, which took multiple tries because the perpetual sand storm on the planet kept pulling it back down. Eventually I got it to escape orbit and then went to the space station, and got there with like 9% energy left.

Finding enough Iron in one spot on Kemik is hard, most of the ground is Nickel. The obvious volcanic cone shape of the area suggested to me that I might find something else there. But I setup a fixed mining rig twice, one time just to get iron from the one spot I found it on the surface, and another to try and get chromium, but the rig was really hard to build on a steep ground, I wound up abandoning the mission and deciding that maybe the game wants me to find chromium with the asteroids. So I'll come back to it later.

Point being, that I think as far as the planet goes, it should be possible to find everything if you look for it, but certain materials maybe shouldn't exist given the environmental hazards. For example, I found ice on Kemik, How? There's no visible ice on the planet, it was something the mining sensor found at the bottom of the outside of the volcano. But that wasn't enough ice to get the ship back into space. Ice should be abundant on planets with water/biosphere, but only at higher altitudes, or polar regions, or something that is perpetually dark, like INSIDE the lava tubes/craters.

When I found one of these caves not far from where I was mining, I was thinking to myself "this would make a cool underground base.... that I would never find again". My feeling is that might be either a place where a NPC base might exist in the future or a renegade base. But I was reading another thread and was like "oh, I guess it would be hard to power it since the wind would be above the hole, and there is no sunlight except in the dead center."

I'm hoping there is something interesting to go looking for in the cave/lavatube system but I get the feeling that it might just be entirely empty and ships that go in might get lost trying to come back out.

Star size/spectral class, “habitable zone”/green band, and the region of planetary synchronous rotation.

Note that the line representing the habitable zone ends in the middle of the band of spectral class A stars. This is due to the star's lifespan. Heavier Class A stars have lifetimes that are too short for planets and a planetary system to form around them.

Tidal locking has an interesting property—it either occurs very quickly, on a timescale of millions to a few hundred million years (the region to the left of the line), or the process proceeds very slowly and takes billions to tens of billions of years (to the right of the line), often longer than the stable lifetime of the star (and thus usually of its planets as well)

https://www.daviddarling.info/images/habzone.gif

Class M: Red dwarf / red stars, temperature under 3,700 K, mass under 0.45 solar masses; lifetime exceeds 100 billion to trillions of years

Class K: Orange stars, temperature 3,700–5,200 K, mass 0.45–0.8 solar masses; lifetime is 20 to 50 billion years.

Class G: Yellow stars like our Sun, temperature 5,200–6,000 K, mass 0.8–1.04 solar masses; lifetime is about 10 billion years.

Class F: Yellow-white stars, temperature 6,000–7,500 K, mass 1.04–1.4 solar masses; lifetime is 2 to 4 billion years

Class A: White stars, temperature 7,500–10,000 K, mass 1.4–2.1 solar masses; lifetime is around 1 billion years. More precisely, a star with a mass of 1.4 solar masses lives for about 1.5 billion years, but a star with a mass of 2.1 solar masses lives for only about 150–200 million years

Class B: Blue-white stars, temperature 10,000–25,000 K, mass 2.1–16 solar masses (the graph shows only a portion of the mass range up to 10 solar masses); lifetime is 10 to 100 million years.

Class O (not shown in the graph): Blue-white stars, surface temperature over 25,000 K, mass over 16 solar masses; lifetime is a few million years.

Tidal locking of a planet with a large moon relative to its star is an interesting problem. It will likely result in the planet becoming rotationally locked to the moon. In other words, the planet will always face the same side toward its moon. Or the system planet-moon will break apart.

As for No Man’s Sky—this game completely ignores physics, chemistry... and logic. A game about space travelers... in an unrealistic universe. OK, I played it and had a pretty good time.

A note on exoplanets: All known exoplanets are subject to an extremely strong selection bias. This is beautifully illustrated by the graph at https://phl.upr.edu/hwc

Note that we only know of Earth-sized planets in the vicinity of M- and K-type stars. From the vicinity of G-type stars, such as our Sun, we know only Jupiter-sized planets.

It is important to note that the horizontal axis of the graph is not distance, but the luminosity of the star.

Another perspective on the selection bias — it’s not very exact, but it gives an look. I’ve overlaid a graph of known exoplanets onto the image of the habitable zone and tidal locking shown above so that the “green bands” overlap.

It is clear that the selection of “known exoplanets” is heavily biased by the selection effect, and if we were to observe our Sun at the same distance using the same methods, we probably wouldn’t find any planets....

States that the game becomes to simplified to cater to the the new players... follows up by requesting for a simplified unified inventory, item management, ore detector to make the game even more simplified.

Two links:

https://steamdb.info/app/244850/charts/#6m

https://steamdb.info/app/1133870/charts/#6m

And one might ask oneself why...

@Roxstar

...requesting for a optional simplified unified inventory view.

Bad UI/UX ≠ depth of gameplay.

Yes, finding ores needs to be more fun and less tedious.

depth of gameplay?

As Italian Film Classics: Mio Dio, come sono caduta in basso!

@Keks

Seems I have pressed the wrong comment thingy again. This was about the original request not the ore detection.

The UI of the inventory and such is not bad, you're requesting for a global base inventory basically which would remove the need to think where you put your storage containers. You can hide hundreds in a wall as you never need to access them as you can summon any item from anywhere from one large list. Which is not a UI request it's a simplification request.

In space engineers I always use the Radio Spectrometry mod for ore detection as it makes it way more immersive so I heavily vouch for replacing the ore detector with that.

However your request is kind of the same thing. Just show me where all the ores are so I can fly to those locations instead of needing to go out and explore. Again, not a bad UI, just a request to make it simpler.

Your request is not: "Bad UI/UX ≠ depth of gameplay."

Your request is a simplification of a system as you want to be efficient without effort.

Unfortunately, it seems there’s still some confusion about the idea of the unified inventory view. I wrote this at the very beginning of this thread, which should make it clear:

...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.

The inventory UI has its flaws when dealing with a high inventory count and moving many items. This is the bad UI I'm talking about.

The ore detector needs changes; currently, it's neither fun nor challenging. A higher range would at least help to make it less annoying. But of course, if there is a better idea, go for it.