Gentle autodock please

Deon Beauchamp shared this feedback 20 days ago
Not Enough Votes

The current autodock for connectors is a little harsh.

Could the docking happen as a more controlled, low acceleration, refined adjustment to align the connector ports.

An auto-pilot would be a good move, rotating the vessel first, then linear adjustments, and then finally the mag lock.

Replies (5)

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Definitely need to dial back the docking energy, I had to repair thrusters after a particularly harsh dock that nearly destroyed the ship when the hydrogen tank also was damaged. I think you can tune the connector energy which probably makes it better, so there is probably a solution there, but the defaults are pretty strong for a small ship like the sledge. Opposite is true, since when i tried to dock with a larger ship (not a huge one), and the connector wouldn't actually lock, the ship would wiggle a little, fail to lock and then I'd have to adjust the ship a little and hit P again a few times until I got it lined up on my own.

However, I don't like how random the docking is as the ship bounces around and turns randomly before locking on the connector. A little autopilot control would be nice with the ideal being that the ship tries to rotate to square off with the nearest 90 degree of the connector. i.e. if you're docking and you're 4 degrees rotated from square on the grid, the docking tries its best to square you up with the grid you're docking with. This would also help with future merge block functionality (if that's going to be a thing).

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The speed of the connectors can be adjusted, 5.0 is very drastic.

That being said, I don't think 0.1 is much more gracious, so I set it to 0.0.

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I use multiple docks in an array to force ships into a specific alignment, usually in the pattern of 1 large and 3 small blocks to the 1 small. It seems 'realistic' that docking devices would have a self aligning feature to at least clean up the alignment a little. Also it might be worth having docking mode match the Gyro and Thruster with the joined grid if possible. If you've built a 'carrier' which which to dock smaller mining ships you may have noticed the small carried ships will cause drag or fire thrusters in unexpected ways.


But an alignment of multip docking rings does fix the alignment problem in a very Space Engineer way of thinking. so I don't think we need a 'auto-align' feature, though if it could be enabled/disabled all's the more.

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Yeah, I can see what you are saying, very space engineer solution. My comment is more about how inaccurate the docking is (with one connector). I can take minutes to properly align with the connector and then hit merge, and the damn thing twists and wobbles around until it's at a 45 degree angle.

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Yes. The auto dock is terrible.


I placed a connector on top of my base. I hover my ship over the connector. I pressed 'P'. The game slammed my ship into the connector so hard that the ship was thrown off to the side, and ended up upside down. How about if we just disable this ridiculous feature? People don't need this.


There's gameplay value in learning how to fly and manuever a ship to dock. It's a learned skill. It adds DEPTH to the game.

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I agree with this. Remove the auto-dock feature and give me back my cameras.

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I suspect that the intention of the auto-dock system was as an inclusion for NPC vessel and drone docking. Even so, auto-docking in its current form will cause problems for them too. There needs to be a landing approach system too to make the operation smoother. I would even go as far as adding landing approach automated comms and activating landing lights to add to the mood.

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i think connectors should also have an option to snap rotation to the closest 45° point

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