The Cohhilition

I'm currently running a little survival game on Space Engineers that I want to work on from time to time. The game is set to friends, so if I'm around and you want to join me let me know.

The game will be a mix between a picture show, story parts and game guide. There are a multitude of ways how to play Space Engineers and this is by no means the only way to start or play it, but maybe new players get an idea of what they might do to start out.

I do not try to teach every basic concept, like how to refine, what hotkeys to use and so on, but strive to give more an overall idea of what objectives you might try to accomplish.

Game Settings:
Survival Game Mode
16 Large Asteroids
No environmental hazards (Safe)
Cargo Ships On
10x Capacity, Refinery Speed and Assembly Speed
Thruster Damage On
Singe Rescue Ship Start

Game Name: Fairy Realms

We are stranded in a rescue Ship!



What shall we do? How will we survive?

There is this cool space suit that takes care of all the nasty oxygen food and water issues for us, but it uses up energy. While just living will keep us around for a long time, we cannot stay like this forever, so we have to make sure to find ways to replenish our energy levels, not to mention that our ship is a very basic one and we don't want to live in it forever.

In our ship we have a medical station. Not only can we go there when we got some scratches from bumping into asteroids and other maladies, but it will also, along with sitting in a cockpit replenish our energy of the suit.



We need energy and in order to get energy we need uranium fuel cells. We could also use solar energy but as solar cells are complicated to make it might be best to first find some asteroids, mine uranium and then refine it to get the fuel for our reactor that we need.

Sitting there in our ship won't get things done, so we fly closer to a good looking asteroid and begin our journey for finding all the ore we need.

Mining all the ore!

Happy with two big chunks of asteroid goodness we decide to take our hand drill, in lack of a real drilling ship and head out to find some ore. Our hand drill is equipped with a very basic ore detector, so once we are very close we get an idea of what ore there is around, but as its very basic and only works for 25 metres around us, keeping an eye out for the colors of the minerals might be worth a good deal too.



The first asteroid provided us with some iron and gold. The reddish iron color is easy to see, as is the yellow gold. After looking around for a while, we also found some silver and platinum, both silver colored. Not exactly the uranium we were looking for, but better then nothing. Hand drills are a pain really and we have to pick up all the little chunks that float away from our spot. The easiest seems to be to drill a hole into the asteroid and then mine in there because its harder for the little chunks to fly away from us. Dreaming of a little drilling ship for the future we fill our inventory up and then head back to our ships medical station to load up our energy again.

We quickly check our reactor fuel, but the uranium ingots we have left there should still keep us powered for a good while as long as we don't fly around with our ship too much. The suit itself doesn't use up all that much energy. The ore, we simply drop into the cargo box. It is directly connected to our refinery and reactor so it will automatically process our iron (Fe) gold (Au) silver (Ag) and Platinum (Pt) for us while we go and check the second asteroid.



After checking the second asteroid we found some uranium, a black colored ore as well as some blueish magnesium. We get some of both and head back again.

Our reactor is filled with a good 15kg of uranium ingots now, and we have refined magnesium, silver, platinum, gold, a lot of iron and some gravel from the refined stone. Now that our energy will hold for a while, we have to consider what to do next.

Of course we need some sort of base, also a drilling ship will be great, because mining with the horrible hand drill will make us crazy rather sooner than later.

Building our New Home

Deciding to go with a platform first with some basic necessities, we go to our assembler to make some steel plates. For basic blocks we will just need steel plates, but station blocks are big, so we will need a lot of them. Steel plates are made out of iron ingots. So we drag some of the ingots from our refinery to our assembler and then set steel plates in the production queue. We make several hundred at once, because we will need a lot for our station (Shift+left mouse adds 100, Ctrl+left mouse adds 10)

Once at the spot we can just open up our toolbar config and hit the New Station at the lower right. We can also drag the light armor block to out hotbar to add more blocks in order to make a little platform.



In our situation, we decided to make a 5 by 5 block platform for a start. This should give us some very limited room for our first systems and we can always expand later on.



Our console meanwhile shows us a few interesting aspects about our construction.
First of all, the inital materials to place our grid, where later our constructions are supposed to be, always take one ressource of whatever material our construction work needs first. The first material is always the one at the bottom of the list. As we continue our construction work not only the percentage and bar of it will go up, also the materials necessary might change. The bottom-most material for a light armor block is steel plates, so in order to even setup the basic grid we will need one steel plate. Total it needs 25 steel plates for a light armor block of a station. Small ships will use light armor blocks too, but they are a lot smaller and will require less materials.

The red line on our bar shows us when a construction will be operational. Once we go above that line in the construction process we can use whatever we are building. for light armor blocks, we cannot do anything with it, but for other constrcutions like a medical station, this is the point of damage it can sustain to still be working, once it drops below, we have to repair it in order to get it back to operational.

We have our 5x5 platform created. However we quickly figure out that a platform on its own, doesn't really do us a lot of good. In order to do anything on it, we will need energy. The easiest way to get that is by building a reactor like the one we have in our ship.
Sure we can just grab our ship's reactor and place it over here, but that will leave us vulnerable and without power to refill our suit in the meantime. In order to avoid that we decided to make a new one from scratch. After all we will have to make things on our own at some point anyways.



Our reactor also uses steel plates as first material, thats nice, so we can place it with one of our remaining plates in order to place the outline right away.

The First Mining Ship

Sadly it quickly gets obvious that we miss nickel cobalt and silicon in order to progress further. With a horrible hand drill we won't get far. So instead lets make a drilling ship first and salvage what we can without endangering our medical station and production chains.

We make some interior plates, construction materials and a few of the other things to get a basic ship design done. Small Ship, nothing too fancy for now. We equip it with 2 small reactors, 2 gyroscopes and 2 thrusters in every direction, making sure that we have more than enough energy output and gyroscopes for maneuverability as well as thruster power to get us where we want to be. We made it sleek enough to fly through our tunnels that we are going to dig. It will also feature 2 spotlights at the front and an ore detector at the back, so we know what we are doing. Of course it needs a cockpit.



Now to actually build the little drilling ship. We make all the materials that we can with the ressources we already have. No need to salvage our rescue ship for something we can get from the ore we already harvested.

It is usually better to build the ship in layers and finish one layers before the next, otherwise you will have to grind away parts of your design again to finish some underlying blocks. In this case I had to remove some generators and thrusters to be able to complete the blocks.

When the construction progressed it became obvious that we were missing bulletproof glass and the silicon we needed for it was nowhere easily salvageable. I headed out again and found a third asteroid with silicon and mined some with the hand drill. We were still lacking cobalt and nickel for the thruster components and motors, but by salvaging the rescue ships cockpit, the gravity generator as well as some thrusters we could finish the project.

After some initial testing for which I brought some uranium ingots over and distributed them to my two reactors I found that with the drill active and the ship maneuvering it sometimes peaks over 100% used energy. I quickly decided to add another 2 reactors to compensate. I could finish one and also added uranium ingots, but left the 4th one unfinished until I can find more materials.



I might also need one or two more gyroscopes, but for now it should work well enough for my needs.

Mining Expedition

With the newly finished, or nearly finished drilling ship, equipped with an ore detector (50m for small ships, double what the hand drill can get) We set out to mine again. I was mostly looking for a source of cobalt and nickel now, so I checked the now three asteroids I discovered again. At the first one deep inside the asteroid I found a cobalt vein. Happy about my ore vein discovery I decided to dig it up and test the new drilling ship while doing so.



Digging all the way to the cobalt!



Platform Expansion

In order to mix up the mining with something else, I decided to expand the station platform while the cobalt is being processed. We will need a lot of space at one point or another, so expanding it is always good. I added another 5 blocks on each side making it a 10x10.

Spontaneously I decided to also add a beacon. We will need it later for further expeditions, I forgot that we need a cockpit to activate and name it, so it's rather useless at this point in time, but will come in handy later.



After another short exploration and mining trip I found some Nickel (Ni, also red like Iron but a little bit lighter colored) also in our first asteroid. I mined a bunch of it and then finished up the reactor on our station platform.



After the generator is finished, we now have a way to power a lot of systems. I started with a gravity generator, because .. you know not knowing where up and down is, can be seriously annoying.



Once I brought over some uranium ingots from the rescue ship and the reactor powers up and provides power for both the beacon and the gravity generator things starts to work.

We now have gravity on our station and around it. Also the beacon, even though we cannot set a name without a console yet, sends a signal, so we can have a marker from quite far away. If we ever get lost we will see the beacon and can find our way back. I also finished up the 4th small reactor on our little drilling ship.



Moving to our Base

It is about time we give up our rescue ship and move things to our base. In order to do that though, we have to get ourselves more informed about item movement , conveyors and collectors, and all the nice goodies how we bring items from one place to another.

What I first understood is that for our purposes, we will, at least for the beginning, need neither a connector, nor a collector. We don't want to grab items floating in space, or eject any items. We just want to link our Cargo, Assembler and Refineries.

I also grinded down our Rescue ship some more to have a look inside the inner workings of our refining process.



We now have a good idea what we want, now for the next step. First we need a way to refill energy at our station, so we need a medical station. As we will give up our rescue ship, materials shouldn't be an issue, we just grind the medical station down on the rescue ship and then build it up again on the station. In emergencies, we always have the cockpit in our little drilling ship to get energy up again. I also set up a cargo container on the station, so we can store our goodies that are still in our rescue ship. We don't want to loose them.



Once the medical bay and the cargo container were built, the cargo from the ship completely transfered over several journeys back and forth with the jet pack, the rescue ship was no longer necessary, it served its purpose and I salvaged it gathering the materials and stored them in our new cargo box for future projects.







Not going into detail yet with our new production chain all that is missing in regards to basic systems would be a cockpit/control panel.

We build that one before we figure out our new way to craft and refine materials.



Refineries, Assembler and Cargo Boxes, Conveyors doing all the work

Refining of some ore's can take a while, therefore we want more than one in the future. We also want a single access point where to gather and deposit materials from, therefore I decided to make a conveyor system with tubes, between several refineries with a single cargo box to access it from. An assembler is also added for the first station, additional assemblers can be added later on too same as refinieries.

Fairies like a clean looking home, so I built most of it with the idea in mind that I don't want too see any ugly refineries, or stumble over an assembler every time I want to go for a walk.



So what exactly do we have here?



At the right side we see the refinery. It's a 2 wide, 4 long, and 2 deep construction.



The refinery has several access points. (the windows with the grey lid and yellow borders) These can be used, not only to access them manually, but also to connect to other devices, such as an assembler, or a conveyor. Refineries can have a direct access to an assembler, I am currently not sure, if they can also have a direct access to a cargo box, or if they need a conveyor in between. For now as I want to have my cargo box accessible from the top while my refinery and assemblers are hidden, I need a conveyor anyways for the additional range.

The one access point in the screen above is unused. To the right side of the refinery are just some light armor blocks, used during construction in order to be able to place the refinery properly. I could destroy them again later on, when I have enough other blocks at the top to make it all hold together, but as they don't exactly bother me, I just leave them currently as they are. On the opposite side of the refinery access point we see above, is another access point, leading directly into the assembler.



The assembler, as seen above, is a 2 long 1 wide and 1 deep construction block. From the view above we see it has an access point at the front, but also one at each side, leading to the refinery on the right, and to the conveyor on the left.

Conveyors are those 1x1x1 boxes that - if you want a very basic explanation - move things around.



As you can see in the screen above, I placed this conveyor to the left side of the assembler. Above the conveyor is a conveyor tube, basically a pipe to extend a conveyor's range, leading to the cargo box at the top. Same as cargo boxes, conveyors have access points on every side.

At some point, I got really annoyed, that my overview whenever I accessed my new box, also showed my old cargo box, the one standing all alone where we first placed it. as the old one was never connected to the conveyor system I could see it, as it was part of the same station but I could not access it. Same as the rescue ship, it served its purpose.
Both to have more storage for the future, and to split up between components and refined ore, I created another cargo box and linked it with a conveyor tube system to the other one. Now I could access them both from any of the two locations, have extra storage space and have my finished parts split from my raw ressources. Also the foundations are laid for further refinieres and assemblers should I want to make more of them.



Ship Landing Area

As some might have noticed my little drilling ship was always parked a good bit away from the station. The reason of it is, because thrusters destroy blocks. If I would land on the station I would destroy the floor I want to walk on. Thats not exactly helpful. In order to avoid this we want to make a floor out of heavy armor blocks. While more expensive in materials, these blocks ignore damage from small ship thrusters. Large ships are not supposed to dock by landing on a platform, (and large ship thrusters destroy even heavy armor blocks) but small ships can do so.

We were all about productivity and basic necessities, now I want to build something pretty too. So I decided to build a hangar like structure for my little drilling ship. As fairies like myself love big projects, of course it's going to be a massive hangar area, especially as we want more and bigger mining ships later on, which will benefit from having a hangar area.

As I gave it some more thought, it turned out not to get all that massive. At least not massive for me, but it should accomplish what I wanted. A big enough place to have several small mining ships. Not a gargantuan drydock, but I guess I will keep that for later for the large ships.



I decided 10x20 not only looks fine, but is a decent size that I can accomplish fast enough while still giving me a lot of room to expand my mining fleet.

Filling in all the empty blocks. Each block will require 150 steel plates to construct. That is a total of 30000 steel plates or 66000 iron ingots. Not including the walls we will add later on.
Quite a bit for a small scale project.



To gather all the iron we will go on more mining trips. good for us, iron is very common and easy to acquire. We will also gather some more uranium, because it is always good to have extra fuel supply for our reactors.
Making big holes in asteroids is a good sign of getting a lot of ore.



When the drill starts to get serious amounts of ore stored, we give it a break and look for some uranium next.

We got uranium, we got more iron, and making good progress on the new hangar floor.



At some point during the welding I ran out of iron ingots, but it doesn't take a lot more to complete it, so another mining trip it is.



After getting more iron ore and refining it into iron ingots and then making more steel plates I finally completed the hangar floor. Next step will be create walls and a roof for my place!



Next we want, not only walls, but as every proper hangar should have, we want a hangar gate. There are lots of different ways how to realize this. I decided to go with a rather simple two rotor construction, as we don't have the immense ressources a creative world offers us. We want it to be small but efficient.



Around the complex I built the grid for walls. Nothing special or fancy really, I might adapt or add on to them later, but for now it's just straight block walls. In front of our platform area is our future gate itself. It's just 2 grid rows for now as I want to first test it all and a full height gate would make that harder. To the right at the corner we have the rotor controls. Access can be gained from inside via a simple reactor control panel, as well as from outside with a cockpit at the side of the gate house. I'm not totally happy with the design and we will likely improve this one later on to a full tower like construction, maybe with turret bays or somesuch at the top, that might be cool looking. As with many aspects of our station though, for now it will serve our purpose.

We have stairs down to the gate house from inside the hangar area. I added another wall piece so that it looks a bit better and the ships cannot by mistake land on the stairs.



While hard to see in this construction view, the whole gate mechanic is simply a rotor, on a rotor with the outside rotor acting as gate and the inside one just adding a little bit of a gap to make movement possible, but otherwise locked. On the outside rotor we have a reactor added to provide power, as rotors themselves do not channel power and the whole outside gate part is otherwise shut off from power.



After constructing the two rotors and the reactor, powering the new gate mechanic, first tests seem to work fine. With proper limit settings, the gate goes up to a 90 degree angle and then stops there. Once I have added a roof type of thing and made the gate part longer it should close the hangar area.



I noticed after a while, that my gate was scraping a little bit. I adapted the design slightly and then also increased the length of the gate. I considered the design as for looks and decided to make a lot of windows for my hangar. It's not a PvP environment so it doesn't have to be very durable anyways.



While welding all the parts by hand I realized that this is going to take a long time. I wanted to improve the speed because I don't want to sit here forever. I decided to make a new ship, this time a large ship, with a few large welders to improve not only the speed of the welding, but also to avoid having to pause every so often to regain my energy.



It is neither pretty nor a very good design, but its my first welding ship and I didn't bother to test a lot of other ones before making it. Seems to work though, so I'm not exactly disappointed.

Now that i have a welding ship, further work on my station should proceed more quickly and without my dieing a lot while writing all of this while outside of a cockpit without energy.
I made some small design changes to the gate, the most visible one is the added windows to the gate part. I will later also add windows to the hangar back wall.



After some slight welding ship changes (because my backward thrusters were damaging my conveyors) I continued welding my station. I also added some new expansion for the main station part, finally hiding the refinery and preparing for further refinery additions.



Added more windows, finished some more blocks, gates now closed. Started to color the hangar area with fairy blue.



Will give it a longer break here and continue some other time

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