Design Philosophy - We need stuff to do when flying to new locations.

TLDR1: Consumables like food, water, and ammo should be "work" intensive. The process should not be streamlined.

TLDR2: Blocks that build consumables should create natural bottlenecks - so that the player needs to constantly balance what they are working on.

TLDR3: We need something survival related to do while flying to new locations that does not involve building.

TLDR4: Conveyors for consumables should be avoided - give us an excuse to move about the ship. It also makes no sense that food/water would be travelling along conveyors that carry fuel.

TLDR5: Solve complexity via good quality tutorials and significant resource assistance (ingots/ores all nice and ready found in a cargo container) at the beginning of the game rather than dumbing down the game to be boring.

I think the devs need to take a look at games like 7 Days to Die, Stranded Deep, Green Hell to understand what is missing in Space Engineers 2 and why they are heading in the wrong direction.

If you look at these games you will notice that there is something to do when you are at your base (and in SE2 your base can be a spaceship). The current focus of SE2 is streamlined building. Once you have built a base, your done. Once you have built a spaceship, you're done. If you need to go travel somewhere to collect resources or do a contract, the trip to and from that location does not require the player to do anything. Everything has been streamlined.

So how would other survival games be different if you could build spaceships? For a start, you wouldn't just fly the spaceship to location X to collect resources. While you are travelling you would be:

1. Heating water up to purify it.

2. Making different drinks that last longer, and apply different buffs etc etc but at the same time,

3. Using raw ingredients to make new base ingredients.

4. Using base ingredients to create food with different buffs.

While you are maintaining your food/water supplies, you would be wanting to slowly accumulate some extra supplies. This should not be easy to do. It should take time and dedication - something you can be doing while the ship is flying through space.

In addition to the food/water keeping the player busy, they would also:

1. Be taking ingots and making basic materials for ammo.

2. Taking the basic materials for ammo and creating actual ammo.

3. Making better ammo as they come across specialist materials and "level up" their ammo making skills.

Bottlenecks - Food/Water

Where possible, there should be bottlenecks. For example, you can use your kitchen to purify water - but then you can't prepare certain base ingredients for food. And if you are using your kitchen for purifying water or preparing base ingredients, then you can't use it to cook the actual meals. The player might need to be boiling water and then switching to cooking something as an ingredient for a meal becomes available.

Kitchen blocks should be super expensive and/or time consuming to construct so the player can only solve bottleneck problems over time. Perhaps they could rely on a material that is quite rare to find or a material that is difficult to make. If you want to make it easier on new players, you can start them off with certain materials/ores/ingots in a cargo container that they find as part of a tutorial - enough to make a basic kitchen.

Bottlenecks - Ammunition

Once again, you want to have bottlenecks. Something that forces the player to keep juggling what they are focusing on. They might want to focus on building bullet tips to make bullets for the gattling gun - but then change their the focus when the plasma machine creates enough plasma for the player to make plasma ammo.

The key thing you will notice in good survival games is that the player is not simply building a base and/or a spaceship. They also aren't simply doing missions backwards and forwards. They constantly have something to do - even when travelling to a new location.

What I would like to see is that rather than having a situation where players sit in a cockpit and fly in a straightline for ten minutes to complete a contract, they instead set the ship to fly in a straight line and then head off to the ships kitchen to begin preparing food/drink and then move to a ammo manufacturing station to prepare ammo. Once done with the ammo manufacturing, the player would go back to the kitchen to check on what items are now ready to be combined into a new tier ingredient or a meal/drink. The player then sets up new food/drink queues for the kitchen blocks and moves back to the ammo blocks to see what is ready to be made into the next tier of ammo ingredient or whether some actual ammo can be made.

To ensure the player is actually doing something, food, drink, ammo should not be part of the conveyor system. Or if keen really wants this, they should only pass through the largest of conveyors.