VS2.3 Hologram Building

I've played SE2 since about mid December 2025, and each time I tried the story mode / colonization scenario. It has really improved over time; I see gradual improvements in just about everything. Very excited to see where you go from here!

In VS2.3, I would say the current hologram / projection building system is definitely more difficult compared to SE1. When I download a Steam Workshop blueprints for SE2, it frequently has many small blocks layered on top of each other, and the outer blocks are in the way of the critical items on the interior that you need to build first, e.g., conveyors for fuel.

In SE1 this was remedied by two things:

- Show Only Buildable allowed you to follow a conveyor system throughout the ship and build it first, so that all Hydrogen thrusters would be properly connected.

- The projectors in SE1 of course allowed you to remove a part that was in the way, so you could get behind it and build something you inadvertently covered up while welding. Then, when done with the interior part, the removed block's projection is visible so you can rebuild it exactly as specified by the blueprint.

The current SE2 system removes both features, AFAIK. With these two features removed, and with so many thin blocks and layers in SE2, the build-from-blueprint has become just too difficult for me to attempt. I'm giving up halfway through a build because of the tangled mess I'm creating.

Now, an intelligent ship designer could mitigate some of these issues by, for instance, ensuring that critical conveyors are not covered by equally-important structural pieces, and that blocks are generally large enough to be visible both on the outside and inside of a design.

My only courses forward, if I want to leave the starter planet in survival mode, are to (1) just build a ship from scratch, or (2) use creative tools to spawn-in a blueprint entirely and skip the weld-up.

My summary suggestion: SE1 style build-by-hand methods support survival mode and "easy" build-ups of complex blueprints. SE2 doesn't yet have those features, so if it doesn't follow SE1's methods, then methods that are just as good needs to be found.