Sector 1 finished and thoughts

After finishing up the Verdure sector I wanted to leave some feedback.

1. Contract Rewards. Getting a reactor as the end of the sector reward was so incredibly lack luster.

This early in the game I have absolutely NOTHING that requires that much power, let alone have the uranium needed to run it. Can we please get something more useful/practical? At this stage I would have been really excited for a larger cargo container/hydrogen tank. Alternatively when you give us sorters again you could use these as an end of sector reward with a contract that shows using them for inventory management? Maybe just move the ion thrusters to the "sector end reward slot"? Reactors are great and important blocks, but this early are worthless. I love that you are having block unlock like this, give a sense of progression! But pleast be more logical in the order you give us blocks...

2. Contracts. these are being underutilized in very criminal ways. You created a tool that you could use to build an amazing tutorial with, instead gave us a bunch of honey do lists that have me thinkin your trying to bring back the old ways of World of Warcraft grinding. For the last few (3-4) contracts in the Verdure sector you have us flying from the space station to the other side of the planet for a honey-do list. We can't take multiple contracts, so we end up just having to fly back and forth, back and forth. If I remember correctly when the 3rd contract came up (in a row) that was sending me BACK to the other side of the planet to weld a few more things up I just alt+f4'ed the game and had to come back later because I had beocome bored with flying back and forth. Please limit how many contracts you have where it takes more time to fly to the site of the contract than to complete the contract its self. If you do need to have multiple contracts like this for some reason (story related for example) please space them out. Back, to back, to back, to back is not fun and really kills the mood of the game so fast. Alternatively you could have put a contract console block on the other side of the planet that we can use while working over there.

3. Tutorial/Intro to game. Its not good. It's hard to make a proper tutorial for a game, when the game isnt even finished. Maybe you intend to go back over things at a later date as far as a tutorial is concerned, but your current walkthrough/tutorial feels like it would be a great tutorial for the employees of Keen. There feels like there is this assumed knowledge that the players of this game need to come with. More pop ups and tool tips would be great. So far everything that you have for us is practically already done and I have not had to engineer a thing. I actually stopped playing your campaign/story and just started to build my own ship because I was bored of how your contracts had done so much of the work for me.

Our first hydrogen ship for example could have been a half finished idea. A projection of a ship thats incomplete and needs us to "engineer" the rest of it. Tell us it would be recommended to add 2x 2m Hydrogen Thrusters instead of placing them for us. Give us tool tips that show us how to find that and add it to our hotbar. Dont put the gyros on the ship, tell us what they are and how many a ship of this size may need.

Instead by this point we have 2 ships (atmo and hydro) that are half constructed, but fully finsihed ideas. We are printers, not engineers. These two ships could have been a great way to really explore and teach us how your new projection system works. This could add so much more depth to the beginning of the game, and give us a knowledge that will server us well from that point forward.

This kind of depth into how things work in Space Engineers 2 will help SE1 player adapt to the new way of things, help new players learn, and give a decent chunk of good content for us in the beginning.

3. Fast Travel... please take this idea out back and just shoot it. This is 100% horrible and huge step backward for your as company and a game. I was really curious what you were going to give us to travel the vast emptiness that is space and you didn't give us a thing? Fly to the station and click a magic button? I will never forget the first time I saw a jump drive work in SE1 years ago..... this new system of your is a heaping pile of disappointment. There are ideas ALLL AROUND that could be used as inspiration, or to be blunt just straight up plagiarized. Anything would be better than the nothing we got.

4. The new flight system. If your willing to take the Fast Travel idea out back to put it down, you really should drag this along with. I remember playing Empyrion and they offered the option to turn this kind of flight system on (they called it Pilot Mode). They were kind enough to give us the option to turn it off. PLEASE give us the option as well. I tried it in Empyrion and hated it so much. None of my friends liked it either. Its not to say there won't be people out there who do like it, but can we please have the option to choose? The old system truly felt more grounded, like we were enjoying coupling gaming and simulation.

5. Hotbars & Control Panel. I left a comment elsewhere on here talking about this a bit, and maybe its already planned/in the works, but just in case it isn't please bring hot bars back and improve our ability to create/manage groups. One of the things that always made me come back to Space Engineers was the immersion you can have creating/setting up your ship. In SE1 we had the ability to get as organized/immersed into organizing our ships systems as we wanted.

This new tiered system is a great start and I can really see it outshining SE1.... but we REALLY need the ability to add blocks to a group without breaking it up, and a way to choose the order in which groups show up. Even if its just alphabetically and we have to name them accordingly that's fine, but having groups always show up in the order that they were made is a HORRIBLE sorting method. We have to redo huge amounts of work, if not all of the work we did, just to move a group up by one?! Or to add a single new block?! This is a horrible way to make players spend their time on the game and just plain insanity.

6. This new projection system is interesting.

ABSOLUTELY LOVE LOVE LOVE that you have brilliantly gave us a way to work creatively in a survival setting. I always switched back and forth between survival and creative because of how much of a pain it was in survival to make a major change to ship or base design. Not anymore.... design the whole things THEN weld it up. Perfect!

The drills have problems. Every time I deleted a drill, or a block near the drill, the drill would delete and usually took some near by blocks with it. I obviously don't have all the blocks unlocked by the end of the 1st sector, but the drill is the only block I had this problem with.

The system did feel like it became clunky as soon as I started to combine projection with welded blocks. I would want to place another block on the projected one but instead it would always snap to the welded one, causing me to have to go back and forth between welding and building for every block I placed, I'm still learning the game, so maybe there is something you already have in that will help with this?

Also please either split up the groups further, or give us a way to go both ways in the group cycle. Cycling through looking for the block you want just to have to go through for a 2nd time because you accidentally over shot was annoying.

CTRL+WASD. I noticed someone made a comment on the forum that called it clunky. I do agree to some degree, but don't know that I want the Insert/Delete key method back. I did eventually get kind of used to the CTRL+WASD and enjoyed the fact that my hand didn't have to travel to the other side of my keyboard EVERY time i wanted to rotate a block. Maybe give us the ability to choose our key mapping on this? I personally do prefer the new system to the old, but again maybe make this the default but give us the ability to remap the keys if we want.