Detaching & Attaching Blocks. Scrapyard Survival.

Hello, my fellow scrapyard engineers 👋

Right now, there’s no easy way to detach a block or a section of a grid without destroying everything it’s connected to. We’ve all been there: salvaging Factorum or other encounters, wanting to recover valuable blocks intact, or trying to move our own blocks without grinding them down. Think about big block like fabricators, refineries, or jump drives.

Or think about playing a scrapyard scenario, or any playstyle that doesn’t rely on the traditional mining-production loop, or only uses it partially. In all these cases, the lack of a clean way to detach and reattach blocks makes the process more tedious and less immersive.

This gets even more interesting if grinding could optionally produce scrap instead of components. That could be a difficulty setting or even useful option for backpack building. For example, you grind down a catwalk into iron scrap, then use that scrap to backpack-build any other iron-based block.

In that context, being able to detach and reattach blocks becomes even more valuable as you do not want to craft all the components again from the scrap or even lose some part of materials during grinding.

How would detaching work?

With a grinder, of course 🙂

Just like the hand drill has a secondary terrain-clear mode, the grinder could have a secondary detach mode.

• Aim at a block with a grinder.
• The connected surfaces in the direction you’re looking at highlight.
• Hold RMB to “grind” those connections.
• After a short time, the highlight changes color, showing the connection is gone.

If nothing else is holding the block, it detaches immediately. If it’s still connected somewhere else, you just repeat the process on the remaining sides or nearby blocks until the whole section comes free. This feels both realistic and intuitive, plus showing you connection points is useful on its own.

Example:

You have a refinery sitting on the floor. Instead of tearing up half the base underneath it, you simply stand next to it and look slightly down. The bottom attachment highlights. Use the grinder to grind the connection until the highlight turns red. Still attached? Look at that side and notice a couple of catwalks and it show you the connection with yellow highlight. Grind those connections as well. Done. The refinery is now a separate grid, free to move wherever you want.

Figure 1. Highlighting attachemnt on the bottom of the block

Figure 2. No more attachment on the bottom, weady to detach other blocks on the side.

Also simple, and no merge block required.

• Take out a welder.
• Aim the detached block (or grid) near another grid.
• Nearby attachable surfaces highlight so you can clearly see where it will connect.
• Hold RMB to weld it in place.

Welding could take a bit longer depending on the surface area.

Figure 3. Refinery positioned near armor blocks at the bottom and on the side showing where it will attach.

I think you already know, but here are some of the most noticeable possibilities, this system opens up:

• Less rigid base planning
  The refinery example is just one of many use cases. You no longer need to carefully plan everything far in advance or build those strange, never-really-finished semi-permanent bases with intentionally reserved empty space “just in case.” and live with all this ugliness for a while. Instead, your base can naturally grow and evolve over time. If you need more room or decide to change something, you simply move blocks or whole sections to a new place.
• Modular bases and outposts
  On your main base, you could keep a relatively small setup to print modules or sections. These can then be used on site or transported and attached to other outposts or secondary bases, instead of welding everything on site, which is often inconvenient in gravity.
• Missions and Campaign
  There can be various interesting campaing missions or contracts that ask you to do certain tasks like "detach this thing and attach elsewhere", "deliver this weather station module to the platform at GPS coords and attach it there", "finish the she ship and separate it from the base (it might be connected by a cockpit so it feels natural to avoid grinding it down lol)" and so on.
• Easier ship construction
  You could build sections of larger ships separately and then connect them together, without relying on massive and cumbersome printers or worrying about always having space for temporary merge blocks. Once mechanical blocks are in the game, building cranes to assist with building larger would also become an interesting option eben on planets.
• Next-level space shipyards
  Space-based shipyards would benefit hugely. You could still use large welder walls or printers, but you would also have the option to use much smaller printer setups to rapidly build smaller grid sections and then assemble them using tug ships. Use those salvaged jump drives or whatever to easily incorporate in your builds. bring your existing ships back to the shipyard to upgrade/modify them. Becasue let's be honest, without possibility for easy detachment and attachment of grid parts, you would rather throw it away and build a new one.
• Interact with NPC and Economy
  You can also buy one of those ships on NPC station for the base hull, update it, use it for some kind of activity to gather more materials or money, and then repeat the upgrade cycle.
• More engaging and PCU-friendly building
  This opens up entirely new dimensions for survival engineering and ship/base design. It supports a more modular or section-based approach to building. And having smaller printers is just more performance friendly, require less materials to build and less restrictive when things like max welders number is set on the server. Your shipyard can look more like a shipyard where you make ships and not like a giant windmill. 🙂
• A huge boost for scrapyard and scavenger playstyles
  Last but not least, and somewhat obvious, scrapyard-focused gameplay—or many others, such as pirating or doing contracts and scavenging. I want to have many equally viable options to progress in survival, besides mining/production loop.

And this really matters for vanilla gameplay. Mods can only go so far. A system like this needs to be deeply integrated into the core game to feel polished, balanced, and truly enjoyable for old and new players.

I genuinely believe this could be one of those features that makes SE2 stand out for years to come or even make Space Engineers 2 immortal. 🚀

And I’d really love to hear what you guys would do with a system like this. I’m sure there are tons of ideas already forming in your heads, I hope this can feed your "need to create". 🙂