For anyone who can't manage to get the Flush Cockpit, you will need to click on the main menu button to sign up for the newsletter, enter an email (any old thing that's in the format of X@Y.Z will work) and then it'll be unlocked :) It does need to be the button in the main menu, if you've signed up through other means it won't recognise it.
One tip, I would add: When you reach space on the first lift-off, stop and make a gps coordinate. It will help you when landing, as you only need to go down from there to make it home. Saves on fuel, just watch your altitude.
I like that using the event controller was incorporated into a getting started tutorial, instead of left for an advanced tutorial. I keep thinking of it as an advanced/mid-game block because it's so new to the game, but really we should be treating event controllers as basic, just for the reason illustrated here - you save yourself a lot of headaches, checks on a checklist, and accidents.
I still think it's an advanced block, but the connector functionality is hopefully simple enough that people can follow and start to understand the power of the event controllers for doing all sorts of other things in their base :)
I had forgotten about the beauty of this community, just remembering those awesome moments with Capac, the beauty of the planets and machines you created, everything is just well thought out and pulled off! Thank you for the entertainment for all these years and never lose motivation to keep going. You are fulfilling a very important demand in your own, great way!
Great tutorial as always. I didn't know the "R" trick. A couple small steps worth mentioning for those doing following this step by step: 1) Before you lift off use the survival kit attached to the ship. If you die, you respawn at the kit you last used... don't have that kit still be on the planet. 2) When you use interior lights on a space minor to see inside an asteroid cave, make the lights brigher from the control pannel by increasing the "radius" value. It makes the light much brighter and you can see futher.
@@Splitsie If it helps, sometimes trade stations do sell or give platinum so that people can make thruster components, not just for their ion thrusters, but also for other material. But who wants to trade when you can "explore" space for free?! (Preparing for random encounters might be another good idea to think about if economics isn't what most players want.)
Started play SE about 2 weeks ago and watched most of your old tutorial videos - thinking - "I wonder if they'll ever get an update" "Whats new now" and BAM - You drop this banger! Thanks mate
I'm still hoping to continue on from the tutorials with something of an actual series eventually, potentially at the stage where I feel most of the core topics have been covered 🙂
@@SplitsieI’ve got like 400 hours in space engineers and I still watch your tutorials cause your really good at explaining and also I forget things so thanks
Another thing worth noting is that production resources (steel plates, construction components, etc.) can be much more dense than ores. If you do something like fill the large cargo container with steel plates to bring into space to build a space base, that ship will immediately fall to the ground and explode. You need at least 3 large hydrogen thrusters pointing down to lift a large cargo container filled with steel plates, so that is usually my minimum for building a small grid surface-to-space ship with a single large cargo container.
It was a joy to reload the homepage and see this video before being even notified about it. I don't think I've ever built a small grid launch vehicle for a first space launch, though sometimes I work on one that launches alongside the large grid one that usually ends up happening, and is almost always a mining ship. You can generate a frankly absurd amount of fuel from any ice lake (the bottleneck is always the gas generators; a prototech O2/H2 gen would be a really nice thing to have) with a few drills, a rotor and a piston, so overbuilding a building-sized platform with production and materials never seemed much of an issue provided you have the luxury of finding one to set up a decent sized facility at. And provided you don't blow it up messing with rotor limits, but sometimes you just have to learn a lesson hands-on. I am curious if anyone's ever just thought 'why don't I just build a ramp up there' and actually followed through with it for their first space venture. It would work, if you were willing to get the resource for it. Something nice for mining ships and hydrogen ships that I like to do is to have an event controller and a couple of blinking red or orange lights. I set all my decorative running lights to be a long blink where most of the time it's on and only sometimes flicks off, so a faster blinking speed works well to get attention if you're getting carried away with the drills and risking deleting ore or haven't been aware enough of your hydrogen levels on my ships, but it's really up to preference and experimentation what best gets your attention on a given craft. You can also use sound blocks instead of lights if that's your preference. It's pretty simple to set up, as the event controller is quite intuitive and as long as you name or at least group your lights whenever you place them, they don't get easily lost in the sometimes rather extensive terminal list. Plus, the computer bits on the event controllers and their lights sometimes changing makes for really nice decoration. Combining form and function is always a nice feeling. Docking sequences with event controllers can give you trouble if you're attaching to something with no power (say, a trailer-esque module, or a connector in a creative world... done that one a couple times), as the event controller draws power from the connected grid to turn everything on when you undock. If you're on a planet and undock from an unpowered grid without manually turning on at least one power source first, you're just going to drop. And speaking of functional decoration, I've been kind of wanting a whole series of blocks in line with that recent modular cargo container they added. In particular, modular hydrogen tanks that look like one solid unit when lined up, kind of the way warfare reactors do on small grid (and honestly a lot in the warfare packs, seeing as the thrusters and small grid batteries do that too). Kind of an off-topic ramble, but that's what I do. Anyways, probably could do with some parachutes, for a ship that might return planetside with varying levels of cargo. Though if I'm honest I always forget that too, but those really should be a staple of any craft expected to make the trip back down (or up, given the fuel requirements to get full loads to space). That and some blast door rings around fuel tanks and cargo containers, because they stick out far and are both explosive when full in their own ways - moving around asteroids (or in-progres builds, this is great for welding and grinding ships) can be disorienting in space. It can be the difference between scraping against a wall you didn't see but mostly damaging the wall, and scraping a wall you didn't see and blowing a full hydrogen tank up that takes half your ship with it.
I was initially planning on including parachutes but after testing this ship while fully laden it needed at least 8 parachute blocks and placing them carefully around the centre of mass was going to be far too awkward for me to reasonably include in the tutorial. As to the modular cargo/tanks thing, yeah I'd really appreciate more size options for tanks, especially on small grid
That's fair, parachutes can be quite annoying on heavy ships. Maybe they should make a heavy duty parachute, like a 3x3 or something. Regardless, one functional way would be to just have a small tower atop the ship roughly over the center of mass, kind of like a simplified and much uglier version of the escape towers on real rockets, could work for a simple conveyor system - something that at least works for if you really can't afford to lose the ship. But I suppose parachutes might warrant their own tutorial also for the ease of those searching through for a video on what specifically they need, as well as all their quirks. The idea of a folding tower crossed my mind before I remembered what hinges do when you pull them hard enough. Would make for some good comedy.
Splitsie your the best, basically taught me how to play and build in space engineers, despite the difference in what we play on. Been watching since your ship tutorial, the uppercase "U", then your old survival tutorials, and finally all the scenario gameplay. Im still kinda bleh with ship design, but wouldnt be here without ya. Definitely on my list of people i would love to game with.
i'll never forget the first time that i figured out how to break through the earth like planet and get to space, i'll never forget it. I didn't know what to do with myself so i flew to the moon and landed there, it was too much for my little brain to handle. Thank you Splitsie for helping us to leave earth like and explore space with the best chance of success
I consider myself an experienced player, with a few hundred hours in this game, i thought itd be nice to watch your video anyways. But it turns out i learnt a few new things from this! I had no idea that you can set multiple on/off groups to one event controller, and the R key is a nice thing to know as well! Thanks for the video as always Splitsie!
This is why I watch all these tutorials for games I put thousands of hours into like 7dtd which i have 7k hours in... Space Engineers i have 4,200 hours in... Arma 3: I have 1,100 hours... Vermintide 2: 3,100 hours... and yes, not only I have no life, I turn my computer off every night so those aren't AFK hours... but I swear each time there's tiny things I learn from each of these tutorials which for each of these games i delve deep into are meant for newbies and I'm definitely not a newbie but every once in awhile there's something I learn which makes it worth it. I did not know about the "R" key setting the block's orientation from it's prior orientation and I feel dumb every time I learn something like that. I think I realized my problem, I may not be a newbie but I'm definitely a noob
If it makes you feel any better, I might have discovered it by accident while teaching how to do that style of connector attachment in a previous tutorial, so it's fairly new to me too :D
One trick that can be used for locating lost ships (though it’s a bit cheesey) is to build a contract block, issue a contract to “recover asset” or “locate grid” and then accept the contract. It will give you a gps for “last known location” which will be at the location of the ship (as long as the ship is stationary). I used this once when I ran out of oxygen on the return trip but my ship had parachutes that deployed automatically. It helped me locate the landing site even though it was out of antenna range.
A small comment, mentioning that you only get the flush cockpit if you subscribe to Keen's newsletter might have been a good addition since this is for new players who may not know and won't have the option to replicate this build exactly if they don't subscribe. Just a small thing. Great video! Always love watching your content, even though I have 1500+ hours in the game!
It's only true for the Steam version and I couldn't find a nice way to phrase it in the video, I was going to include a pinned comment about it so thanks for the reminder, I'll do that shortly :)
Great tutorial as expected Splitsie. After 1500 hours I still enjoy watching, and learning what a lazy engineer I am. lol. Event controller on a mining ship? Takes all the danger out of disconnecting, .. no more forgetting to turn tanks off stockpile, no more batteries on recharge... where's the excitement in that? lol
lol I'm getting too careful in my old age, or maybe a certain orange suit wearing friend of mine has broken enough ships that I have to repair or replace :D
I have 1k hours in Space Engineers, but the segment about the Event Controller was still mind blowing to me. I was seriously missing out on this. That's like THE next big thing I'm going to implement in all my ships to prevent my friends from flying without light and beacon signal, which often leads to mid-air collisions, as we typically play on Triton where it's stormy 24/7 :P
Me: *Tries to build symmetrical ships with thrust through the center of mass* "Darn, that's a headache to align it good and look functional!" Splitsie drops in with a spaceship tutorial: "All thrust is through center of mass, you only need to worry about enough thrust." Me: 😲🤯🤦♂️😞🤷♂️ "F... M... L... Great..." *Looks at the flying brick pallet of a 9 small grid drills with atmospheric thrusters and 2 large cargo with rock sorting connectors* "I was well chuffed by that accomplishment, was that for nothing?" Oh, well...
@Splitsie If only, haven't dived into sorters more than I got the ship to dump rocks, perhaps by a fluke. Played on max all settings, so the ship had about 1,5 million tons capacity fully laden, if I remember correctly, I think the total weight was around 2 million tons.
Great tutorial once again. Very helpful and very well explained. One suggestion (sorry can't help myself) when you pointed out that you will get much more thrust in the up direction and you need to remember that in space? Thats a good opportunity to suggest a system that is not often considered, mostly because no one teaches it. I dont consider it an advanced engineering technique its actually for basic designs. The second method I will mention IS advanced however ..Any way. Issue: Asymmetrical thrust. Solution 1) use same size thrusters in all directions. Yes its that simple, THEN you add larger thrusters, which u can turn on and off for those times when u need to fight gravity or to GTFO. So when in tight spaces while mining an asteroid or aligning for docking u have same amount of movement in all directions. This concept is a good one to mention at such times. Solution 2) have hot bar commands or programing which will reduce thrust so all directions as equal. You then activate this command when u require fine motion control, works on gyroscopes too. (
I'd definitely just go straight to building a large grid ship for going to space nowadays. You can imagine the convenience of processing ores on the go and the ability to repair your ship
It's a decent option when you know what you're doing, but I think for new players building something that expensive before you've crashed something cheaper a few times, is a recipe for rage quit :D
Glad that bit was helpful, I was in two minds about including it so soon in the tutorial series, but they're just so handy for little things like docking I felt it could fit in :)
Great tutorial Splitsie! For the (un)docking sequence I usually go with an event controller and a pair of timer blocks, I just find it easy to manage the sequence in the tool bar of the timerblock
To go with the event controller taking care of the ship's systems when you dock, a Base-Side conveyor sorter set to drain all is amazing for a dedicated connector for mining ship docking, especially once you're using a mining ship with several containers. (They're also awesome in general for rearming, refuelling etc in general.)
This video made me miss my mining hexagon, Splitsie. I need to install my new computer! I like how quick and easy this ship is. It may seem strange, but my mining hexagon was the only ship design I was able to get into space. Everything else failed for one reason or another. The mining hex was a flat hexagonal plane with hydrogen thrusters on either side, and drills on the front. Most people would consider it very strange, and it had virtually no ability to turn, but I loved it.
One method for saving fuel is to stop once you leave gravity, make a GPS, then hop out of your ship and jetpack to each nearby asteroid. If/when i find something useful at an asteroid i'll then move my ship next to that and either mine or make another GPS and keep manually searching using the jetpack until i've found all of the resources i want. The ore detectors range is the same as the advanced drill so bringing the whole ship to every asteroid is pointless since you can simply use your hand drill to check for buried resources. You can search several asteroids with just the jetpack and a drill then you can with a ship. Another good reason for jetpacking is that if you're attacked by drones you can outrun them with the jetpack since it goes 110 meters per second so you can make it back you your ship and be off long before they get a chance to shoot since their max speed is only 100 meters per second.
Something I like to do, is include a Remote Control on my first space ship, and make a GPS in orbit of my initial launch, some distance into Zero G. While it's very easy to mitigate the amount of H2 you're using, if you don't find Ice you can potentially have lots of H2, and so little O2 you're ending up in a death loop. In this situation, you can set your remote to take the ship to your 'Parking Lot' and turn off your survival kit. You'll respawn at base and your ship will make the trip to orbit where you can then pilot it down by remote or build something else to take you up and retrieve it.
I made one months ago had six large H tanks at the rear, three large cargo in front, three h2/o2 generators forward of that, a small connector for fueling on the side H2 thrusters with atmo Thrusters 10 small reactors in the middle on the belly down the spine... It was a beast, with six 5x5 wheels and three large H thrusters off the back. And that mod that makes large grid items smaller for use on a small grid. Three refineries and two assemblers with four JD's. Only takes a few minutes to jump planet to planet.
I've got almost 1000 hours in SE, but still love watching your tutorials. I forgot that the Event Controller was a thing and I should probably use it instead of my dual timer block setup for docking and undocking actions...
I've been watching and rewatching your videos for a long time. I have been playing for the last year that Survival Impossible of yours and have built up my bases, gone to several different planets. Your videos made that possible.
it took me around 130 hours to get to space for the first time, and it happened basically this week so thanks for your video, it made me feel really stupid for collecting platinum from fallen meteors bit by bit
Tip: put a large grid ore detector using a large grid rotor with a small grid head attached to your ship to get a 150m range over the 50m small grid ore detector. It still make take a dozen or two dozen asteroids to find Uranium or Platinum, but you are less likely to miss the ore deeper inside. You may want to turn on "share inertia tensor" so that it moves rigidly with your ship, rather than your ship constantly trying to rotate around it.
A large grid ore detector is certainly a good idea, though I'd say it's better these days just to use one with a connector on it. Since they no longer require power it's easier and safer and only a moderate amount larger to connect with them that way :)
tip about ores in asteroids: if it's an asteroid cluster (bunch of variety size of asteroids close together), usually comes with 2 types of ores within whole cluster so to save time you can stop skimming these cluster after you find 2 ore sign (cmiiw, since I spoke from my own experience and may differ) and Event Controller is really a game changer, no more lengthy switching toolbars pre/post docking!
because i'm crazy all my gps markers have to be 2 characters. ag, au, ni etc. for ice i use H2. for nothing found i use NS for No Signal. i also like to put small thrusters in all directions and turn off the big thrusters when they're not lifting me out of atmo or needed to move a heavy ship. that way you're not slamming into things just trying to drill. you could hear you slamming into the asteroid when trying to drill because the thrusters were way too big for such a light ship, but were needed once you got full. thanks for the event controller explanation. i tried doing that before but didn't know about the first slot second slot thing so nothing worked and i gave up. as usual your tutorials are first rate!
You and I do have similar philosophies for the initial exploration ship. If anything though, I would add a parachute and solar panel at a minimum. A small sorter, ejector, and hydrogen engine are nice but optional
I prefer to set up my thrusters in two groups, one for the braking thrusters and the other for the rest. That way I can keep inertial dampeners on while I coast in space with the braking thrusters off, and this will allow the ship to turn towards the direction it is aimed at. Since I usually have about as much thrust forwards as upwards, I can also set up the overrides in the forward direction and climb to space by starting to accelerate horizontally and pitching up, which in some cases gives me a bit more initial thrust by combining upwards and forward thrust.
I have tried searching uranium and platinum in asteroids in vanilla, but I believe the best way to get your first reactor and ion ship is hunting pirate cargo ships with assault cannons as they outrange all old vanilla weapons and pop turrets and then finishing up the capture by MOSTLY damaging but not destroying the main thrusters with gatlings or interior turrets
I hope more future enemy ships that are early and mid tier threats as the new encounters for prototech blocks have either an entire fleet of small and medium drones or competitive level superships and regular cargo ships with just a couple gatlings is not a challenge after the first one.
The easiest way I've found to get platinum is to select 'space pod' from the solar system start, mine a couple asteroids to build a couple basic manufacturing blocks, then strap a half-dozen parachutes on the ion powered starter ship. Once I pick somewhere that looks flat and land, I've got enough materials to build a cozy base and more than enough thruster components for a small grid ship or two, plus I can break down thruster components for all the platinum I'll need until mid-to-late game!
Another good one, even i learned something new. Was still using timers or groups for turning my ships off. But speaking of cooking things with thrusters @15:38 ... I feel you might have been missing a chance to mention that they tend to also cook engineers. That side thruster right beneath the survival kit looks like it might counter an attempt to heal up 😋
A neat trick is to place a remote control and a camera facing the same direction as your connector. That way you can activate the remote and the camera to more easily connect the vehicle.
This tutorial on how you built this spaceship, so I copied your design and it works so damn good! And I managed to find Uranium and Platinum in space on an asteroid! It may take me about 5-10 minutes to find these 2 ores!! So thank you :D
Nice tutorial, Splitsie - you might want to offer the warning that having a ship on recharge will drain the batteries of any other ship connected to the same base (that isn't also on recharge or with it's batteries off) as well as the base itself, just in case, and maybe note that the Flush Cockpit is a free-gift for subscribing to the Keen newsletter and not a truly vanilla block: Someone might get confused that they can't find it otherwise. By the way - was ramming the asteroid at the end deliberate for the video , or a useful outtake? I have learnt not to aim at 'roids when flying in space, still need to learn not to aim at my base station, either...
I'm not 100% sure, but I believe I covered that behaviour of batteries in the mining ship tutorial. I glossed over a bit of that stuff this time as the video had already reached 40 minutes and I didn't want it to get any longer :) As to the crash... I'll never tell! (It was on purpose, I had been tempted to use one of my many accidental ones from streams, but this looked cleaner) :D
@@Splitsie The Real Teal/Teal Terror crash (As I can never remember which is which) would have made an epic crash - but may have had people asking how you crashed a rover into a 'roid. (I'm going to find that VOD and watch that again...) In the mining ship video you warn about being unable to fly with the batteries on recharge, and show that the base batteries will drain - it should be clear that other batteries will also drain, but sometimes people (me included) forget that.
One thing you should mention is if you go straight up from your base, once you get to space, make a GPS marker for re-entry. This way you know you’re directly over your base and can “fall” straight down.
Sometimes if I can't slow down fast enough when I reach space (I upped my M/S Speed) I "Spin" my ship in circles which slows down my ship much faster. Of course this mostly works on small grid ships. I don't even bother touching the thrust override until I reach space because I feel like it doesn't save much fuel by moving back and forth.
naturally, there should be a Tutorial on how to take on SPRT Mayday's. they don't spit Drones but can be a challenge to take on if they have active guns. as a side note, it's never a bad idea to keep a spare gun and ammo for it in your cockpit in the event you do get Splatsied. having a gun will help you get your stuff back from your body bag!
1. On a non oxygen atmo world. Helpful to mention that is the H2O2 generator chews up all the ice and you didn't have an oxygen tank... No more oxygen for your engineer till you get more ice. 2. I'd add a parachute to make sure I decelerate coming in for a landing. 3. I'd also add a set of small maneuvering thrusters in the axis of the large thrusters and turn off the large ones to keep the craft more manageable - consistent.
That's why I recommend new players start on earth-like, you don't have to worry about things like that. I actively chose not to include parachutes here, the reason was that you need far too many of them for them to be practical. To make a safe landing most of the time with this ship loaded with ore you needed at least 8! Balancing that and all the extra conveyoring required started to stretch the tutorial out to a length I wasn't happy with. Having small thrusters to use when in space where the big ones are is certainly handy :)
I always fill a cargo container with enough stuff to set up a battery, solar panel or 2, 02h2 and a survival kit and then you can start from there :)) My small ships also almost ALWAYS have a survival kit and a couple parachutes If I’m not mistaken (I totally could be) it’s always worth having an oxygen tank too because one ice = “2 hydrogen” and “one oxygen” always so if you don’t have an oxygen tank your missing out on “free” oxygen , it could be the other way where it’s “2 hydrogen” if that’s all you have and then “1 oxygen and 1 hydrogen” if you have a tank for both
Even with just an extra battery, you could probably get started up there with the survival kit to build the parts, but bringing them would certainly speed things up quite a bit :D
Just a small note about the event controller. It needs power to work. This is fine when you are docked to your own station, but trade stations dont share power. This means that the event controller will shut down your ship when you dock, but it wont start up when you undock. I got very confused the first time this happened to me and I had to turn everything on manually. You can solve this by putting your batteries on the toolbar to set them to auto, which will then allow the event controller to turn everything else on.
Good point about the trade stations, they've got a few odd caveats that can catch people out, thankfully something like this is fairly easily remedied, but when new players mess with the 'trade mode' on their connectors it seems to cause all sorts of confusion
I always forget that it doesn't have to look cool, it just has to have the things attached and the thrusters pointed the right way. If one is starting in an environment where there's low or no O2 like the moon or Mars-like, chances are one will have an O2/H2 gen on the mining ship already. If there's no atmosphere, chances are the starting miner will be a rover or a ship with H2 thrusters. So the build order will change because the immediate needs are different.
That's why I recomment players start on Earth-like, it gives the most natural progression through learning the mechanics of the game, while also giving them the greatest amount of time to work through problems that they might face :)
Don't forget to look where you are going when you are going into space. The top down view is great for cinematic but as Splitsie pointed out some of the asteroids spawn within gravity and I have in fact lost a couple of ships finding that out while I was still lifting off.
I actively chose not to include parachutes here, the reason was that you need far too many of them for them to be practical. To make a safe landing most of the time with this ship loaded with ore you needed at least 8! Balancing that and all the extra conveyoring required started to stretch the tutorial out to a length I wasn't happy with.
the spaceman pointing graphic is very nice, but when it's tethered to the cursor I feel like its impact is lessened a lot from when it's intentionally placed to point at things it still does its job of highlighting just what is being pointed at, but it's moved closer to being visual noise compared to if it lingers at the subject Dunno if this is a new thing or a labor saving thing that's been around for a while, i've been away from SE in general
Splitsie likes to build asymmetrical. Wait, what? Since when?! Everyone knows it's a lie.🤣 But you should definitely do it more often!😉 I'm sort of the same. The asymmetry I use might be antenna/beacon/detector stuff and or fixed weapons. And I dock port sided, of course. Other than that, not much asymmetry going on when I build but when I do it always looks so cool.
It's something I like to do, but it's also something that only works in some situations, you've got to have the right balance of parts for it to look good
"It goes from 0.05g to 0" Yeah, I've learn that the hard way... Waiting for the 0g, stop and go make some well earned coffee... come back to a crashed ship. Make sure you continue a bit when you hit 0, otherwise you're ship will start to slowly go down towards the gravity well.
For leaving a planet its also useful to have a seperate camera that is pointing up, so you can look out for asteroids right above you and avoid crashing into them. Its really frustrating to just about being able to leave a planet in the early stages; just to then smash into a random asteroid XD Also useful can be to leave a GPS marker right above your base in a few km distance, if you want or need a straight line down to your base or to easier create jump drive GPS coordinates for later on.
You forgot to add the gyros to the event controler. I know that this is only a tutorial for new players but I find the small grid ore detector useless for survey work and any ship I intend as a surveyor I will ad a large grid conversion via rotor or hinge and add a lare grid ore detector. Also parachutes are very helpful on the deceleration when heavily loaded when returning from space. Another backup is to add atleast one solar panel so that if you drain the batery you don't get stranded.
I didn't forget, I just figured I'd dragged that part out long enough for players to understand how it worked so I'd move on :) I actively chose not to include parachutes here, the reason was that you need far too many of them for them to be practical. To make a safe landing most of the time with this ship loaded with ore you needed at least 8! Balancing that and all the extra conveyoring required started to stretch the tutorial out to a length I wasn't happy with.
@ ive had that happen to me so many times just never thought to fix it with an event controller. Also your escape from mars series with CATpac was what inspired me to play the game again and convince many of my friends to play too.
If you are not playing in easy mode with no asteroid impacts, you can very small amounts of the exotice materials from them. But they do make more of a mess outside your base then 25 moles and or a music festival, wheeled vehicles have problems.
Playing with asteroid impacts isn't 'hard' mode, it's just 'I want to eventually tank my performance' mode. Unfortunately all those little changes to the surface in the area will slowly accumulate and eventually be a significant performance hog, it's why they're disabled by default :(
SE's rendering of voxel deformation at a distance was a rude awakening for me. My first proper base was built into a cliffside, and when I finally went to space I was horrified that I could see the whole base interior from a few km up. It's a bit weird, though. I recently dug a "stealth" asteroid base from inside an ice asteroid's tunnel. Since I didn't carve into the outer surface, I never get the odd peekaboo rendering.
I actively chose not to include them here, the reason was that you need far too many of them for them to be practical. To make a safe landing most of the time with this ship loaded with ore you needed at least 8! Balancing that and all the extra conveyoring required started to stretch the tutorial out to a length I wasn't happy with.
@@Splitsie Oh, 8, that is a lot more than I expected, yet mentioning it is a great tie in to your tutorial on them. :-) Extra conveyoring, with all the exposed and available ports on that ship, where?! Even if only 1 port were available, the extra conveyoring consists of 2 junctions hooked to 9 chutes. Yes, it would be ugly. Seriously, if we are landing a fully loaded ship via chutes, we passed ugly a long time ago. :-)
24:00 I'm pretty new so I'm not sure if you have to do this or not, but when you're showing how you can do multiple things with the event controller, would you have to make a new event controller for each action you wanted to do when docking and undocking? (like turning the antenna/oredetector/thruster groups on and off)
No, that's why I used the separate hotbars, you can do up to 9 actions, but you can also use timer blocks to nest even more actions within those 9 toolbars :)
An excellent tutorial. No parachute hatches? I've splatted a number of 'first spaceships' on trying to land with a load of ore. I also fit any mining ship or rover with stone ejectors, though I can see why you left them out for sake of tutorial.
I decided against parachutes as you would need a large number of them for the ship if it's fully laden, trying to centre them properly would have required a lot of conveyoring and other stuff that felt like it would have been well beyond what I would want in a first ship for space.
@@Splitsie Okay .. how did you do that ! (according to the time stamps you answered this question 33 minutes before he asked it.) wait ... 33 minutes? that sounds familiar, is this a Battlestar Galactica Trope?
I have a question about conveyor junction. I was lead to believe that the more conveyor junctions you have, the more your PC CPU gets bogged down. The explanation is that the CPU will check all possible ways (exits) for the materials to go through them. So for every conveyor junction the PC will check for five possible exits for every entry. For conveyor tube or elbow there is only one entry and only one exit thus reducing the load on the CPU
I actively chose not to include them here, the reason was that you need far too many of them for them to be practical. To make a safe landing most of the time with this ship loaded with ore you needed at least 8! Balancing that and all the extra conveyoring required started to stretch the tutorial out to a length I wasn't happy with.
Splitsie, Can I ask a question about the Satreus version of your Scrapyard Scenario? In your video series, the planet Satreus appeared to be alot bigger, around 120km. The planet in your published scenario seems to be only 20km. Is this size difference intended?
I'm 27 minutes in so apologies if it comes up later but small grid large hydro thrusters should be avoided because they are hilariously underpowered and unbalanced. A small hydro thruster put out 100kN of thrust and the large puts out a ridiculous 480kN. It takes up 9 blocks of surface space while having less power than 5 small thrusters. Going all small is far far more effective. FYI the small grid large atmo thruster is nearly as bad. Small thruster is 96kN, the large is 576kN. Really hope Keen does a balance pass the bump them up to where they should be.
I am waiting for the event controller video. I have done limited things with it so it will be interesting to see what else it can do. Some questions. You have a 7 year old video on YT about engine thrust and showing how much each type of engine can lift. Is the info in that video still up to date? Can we have a EASY to follow tutorial on making drones and even setting up a autopilot to dock a ship. I haven't found a decent tutorial yet. ( and the one you have done is hard to follow). I have been having a lot of fun with the scrapyard survival mod. Where did all the vehicles and structures come from? Were they created for that mod or are they just ones off the steam workshop? Some of them are quite detailed and interesting. (And the crane was; entertaining). Is there a reliable mod for the grabby hands function as its a necessity for the survival mod but such a pain to get things to align properly. Thanks
For the scrapyard, the majority of the things you can find in it are things I built specifically for it (you can find the old livestreams of the build and mod design process over on my second channel ua-cam.com/users/flipsie ), with some of the designs being ones people specifically submitted for the mod that I then altered to suit my design goals :)
@@Splitsie I designed a really good trailer that connects up with one of the trucks I repaired in my scrapyard game. On your stream where you were playing the game, I think you called it the 'Flatliner'. The trailer was designed to go with that truck and I would like to post the trailer and truck on the steam forums but I know that some get a little upset if you post something that was their design. the trailer has a wheel setup using rotors so it sort of works off the concept of the Trailer for the U.SA. Dragon Wagon tank transporter from WW2. The way it works, results in all 8 wheels being on the ground as you go over rough terrain.
Efficiency is the wrong word, you mean power or thrust. Ion thrusters produce less thrust in atmosphere, i.e. they are less powerful, but with the same efficiency. Efficiency refers to the ratio of input to output. For ion thrusters that would be electric power vs thrust, which both change based on atmospheric pressure. For example the large hydrogen thruster is many, many times more powerful than the small, but only 10% more efficient. If you compared an array of small thrusters with the same thrust as one large thruster, you would find the larger thruster uses 10% less hydrogen.
![Space Engineers Survival (Episode 43) - Automatic Drone Launch Is NOT Easy... [2024]](/img/n.gif)
For anyone who can't manage to get the Flush Cockpit, you will need to click on the main menu button to sign up for the newsletter, enter an email (any old thing that's in the format of X@Y.Z will work) and then it'll be unlocked :)
It does need to be the button in the main menu, if you've signed up through other means it won't recognise it.
One tip, I would add: When you reach space on the first lift-off, stop and make a gps coordinate. It will help you when landing, as you only need to go down from there to make it home. Saves on fuel, just watch your altitude.
That's a good tip :)
Its incredibly useful, especially if you get it just right. Also doubles as a good jump drive location if you use large grid or want friends to visit
It's also incredibly handy if you end up needing to use chutes to re-enter
I like that using the event controller was incorporated into a getting started tutorial, instead of left for an advanced tutorial. I keep thinking of it as an advanced/mid-game block because it's so new to the game, but really we should be treating event controllers as basic, just for the reason illustrated here - you save yourself a lot of headaches, checks on a checklist, and accidents.
I still think it's an advanced block, but the connector functionality is hopefully simple enough that people can follow and start to understand the power of the event controllers for doing all sorts of other things in their base :)
except my event controllers appear to be set up correctly, but dont want to do more than one thing even on the other bars.
I had forgotten about the beauty of this community, just remembering those awesome moments with Capac, the beauty of the planets and machines you created, everything is just well thought out and pulled off! Thank you for the entertainment for all these years and never lose motivation to keep going. You are fulfilling a very important demand in your own, great way!
After getting back into Space engineers after 4 years I gotta say alot of your videos helped me through the memory lapse!
same
same. I even forgot the R button thingy to keep the orientation when changing grid size
Splitsie has finally joined the asymmetrical dark side :p
I presume you mean the paint colour you choose? :P
Great tutorial as always. I didn't know the "R" trick. A couple small steps worth mentioning for those doing following this step by step:
1) Before you lift off use the survival kit attached to the ship. If you die, you respawn at the kit you last used... don't have that kit still be on the planet.
2) When you use interior lights on a space minor to see inside an asteroid cave, make the lights brigher from the control pannel by increasing the "radius" value. It makes the light much brighter and you can see futher.
Finally we have a new video from Splitsie, and this time teaching us how to get to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism!
Lol should I mix it up and do something with the trade stations next time? 😂
@@Splitsie If it helps, sometimes trade stations do sell or give platinum so that people can make thruster components, not just for their ion thrusters, but also for other material.
But who wants to trade when you can "explore" space for free?! (Preparing for random encounters might be another good idea to think about if economics isn't what most players want.)
...hasn't been corrupted by capitalism.... yet.
I know that reference!
@Splitsie something with space station like kidnapping one😂
Started play SE about 2 weeks ago and watched most of your old tutorial videos - thinking - "I wonder if they'll ever get an update" "Whats new now" and BAM - You drop this banger! Thanks mate
The location of your little tutorial base looks like a excellent spot to start a series haha
I'm still hoping to continue on from the tutorials with something of an actual series eventually, potentially at the stage where I feel most of the core topics have been covered 🙂
@@SplitsieI’ve got like 400 hours in space engineers and I still watch your tutorials cause your really good at explaining and also I forget things so thanks
Wrong way right???
@@travistharp4215 i'm almost at 5000hours and i still enjoy watching it (and, afraid to say, still learn things with this)
Another thing worth noting is that production resources (steel plates, construction components, etc.) can be much more dense than ores. If you do something like fill the large cargo container with steel plates to bring into space to build a space base, that ship will immediately fall to the ground and explode. You need at least 3 large hydrogen thrusters pointing down to lift a large cargo container filled with steel plates, so that is usually my minimum for building a small grid surface-to-space ship with a single large cargo container.
Good point and even more dense is taking the ingots :)
have thousands of hours in SE, Still watch your tutorials and still managed to learn something new, Great work as always Splitsie.
It was a joy to reload the homepage and see this video before being even notified about it.
I don't think I've ever built a small grid launch vehicle for a first space launch, though sometimes I work on one that launches alongside the large grid one that usually ends up happening, and is almost always a mining ship. You can generate a frankly absurd amount of fuel from any ice lake (the bottleneck is always the gas generators; a prototech O2/H2 gen would be a really nice thing to have) with a few drills, a rotor and a piston, so overbuilding a building-sized platform with production and materials never seemed much of an issue provided you have the luxury of finding one to set up a decent sized facility at. And provided you don't blow it up messing with rotor limits, but sometimes you just have to learn a lesson hands-on.
I am curious if anyone's ever just thought 'why don't I just build a ramp up there' and actually followed through with it for their first space venture. It would work, if you were willing to get the resource for it.
Something nice for mining ships and hydrogen ships that I like to do is to have an event controller and a couple of blinking red or orange lights. I set all my decorative running lights to be a long blink where most of the time it's on and only sometimes flicks off, so a faster blinking speed works well to get attention if you're getting carried away with the drills and risking deleting ore or haven't been aware enough of your hydrogen levels on my ships, but it's really up to preference and experimentation what best gets your attention on a given craft. You can also use sound blocks instead of lights if that's your preference. It's pretty simple to set up, as the event controller is quite intuitive and as long as you name or at least group your lights whenever you place them, they don't get easily lost in the sometimes rather extensive terminal list. Plus, the computer bits on the event controllers and their lights sometimes changing makes for really nice decoration. Combining form and function is always a nice feeling.
Docking sequences with event controllers can give you trouble if you're attaching to something with no power (say, a trailer-esque module, or a connector in a creative world... done that one a couple times), as the event controller draws power from the connected grid to turn everything on when you undock. If you're on a planet and undock from an unpowered grid without manually turning on at least one power source first, you're just going to drop.
And speaking of functional decoration, I've been kind of wanting a whole series of blocks in line with that recent modular cargo container they added. In particular, modular hydrogen tanks that look like one solid unit when lined up, kind of the way warfare reactors do on small grid (and honestly a lot in the warfare packs, seeing as the thrusters and small grid batteries do that too). Kind of an off-topic ramble, but that's what I do.
Anyways, probably could do with some parachutes, for a ship that might return planetside with varying levels of cargo. Though if I'm honest I always forget that too, but those really should be a staple of any craft expected to make the trip back down (or up, given the fuel requirements to get full loads to space). That and some blast door rings around fuel tanks and cargo containers, because they stick out far and are both explosive when full in their own ways - moving around asteroids (or in-progres builds, this is great for welding and grinding ships) can be disorienting in space. It can be the difference between scraping against a wall you didn't see but mostly damaging the wall, and scraping a wall you didn't see and blowing a full hydrogen tank up that takes half your ship with it.
I was initially planning on including parachutes but after testing this ship while fully laden it needed at least 8 parachute blocks and placing them carefully around the centre of mass was going to be far too awkward for me to reasonably include in the tutorial.
As to the modular cargo/tanks thing, yeah I'd really appreciate more size options for tanks, especially on small grid
That's fair, parachutes can be quite annoying on heavy ships. Maybe they should make a heavy duty parachute, like a 3x3 or something. Regardless, one functional way would be to just have a small tower atop the ship roughly over the center of mass, kind of like a simplified and much uglier version of the escape towers on real rockets, could work for a simple conveyor system - something that at least works for if you really can't afford to lose the ship. But I suppose parachutes might warrant their own tutorial also for the ease of those searching through for a video on what specifically they need, as well as all their quirks.
The idea of a folding tower crossed my mind before I remembered what hinges do when you pull them hard enough. Would make for some good comedy.
regarding making a ramp to space, grids of that size will start breaking physics
I love these tutorials even though I don't really need them. Also, really love the Capac Cursor.
Splitsie your the best, basically taught me how to play and build in space engineers, despite the difference in what we play on. Been watching since your ship tutorial, the uppercase "U", then your old survival tutorials, and finally all the scenario gameplay. Im still kinda bleh with ship design, but wouldnt be here without ya. Definitely on my list of people i would love to game with.
i'll never forget the first time that i figured out how to break through the earth like planet and get to space, i'll never forget it. I didn't know what to do with myself so i flew to the moon and landed there, it was too much for my little brain to handle. Thank you Splitsie for helping us to leave earth like and explore space with the best chance of success
I consider myself an experienced player, with a few hundred hours in this game, i thought itd be nice to watch your video anyways. But it turns out i learnt a few new things from this! I had no idea that you can set multiple on/off groups to one event controller, and the R key is a nice thing to know as well! Thanks for the video as always Splitsie!
This is why I watch all these tutorials for games I put thousands of hours into like 7dtd which i have 7k hours in... Space Engineers i have 4,200 hours in... Arma 3: I have 1,100 hours... Vermintide 2: 3,100 hours... and yes, not only I have no life, I turn my computer off every night so those aren't AFK hours... but I swear each time there's tiny things I learn from each of these tutorials which for each of these games i delve deep into are meant for newbies and I'm definitely not a newbie but every once in awhile there's something I learn which makes it worth it. I did not know about the "R" key setting the block's orientation from it's prior orientation and I feel dumb every time I learn something like that. I think I realized my problem, I may not be a newbie but I'm definitely a noob
If it makes you feel any better, I might have discovered it by accident while teaching how to do that style of connector attachment in a previous tutorial, so it's fairly new to me too :D
Lately I have been practicing the initial start. Sometimes I get a Miner or Trader station near by and go the Economy route.
Thanks for all you do!
LOVE the new tutorials. I've been playing for 5+ years and still learn something new every time
One trick that can be used for locating lost ships (though it’s a bit cheesey) is to build a contract block, issue a contract to “recover asset” or “locate grid” and then accept the contract. It will give you a gps for “last known location” which will be at the location of the ship (as long as the ship is stationary). I used this once when I ran out of oxygen on the return trip but my ship had parachutes that deployed automatically. It helped me locate the landing site even though it was out of antenna range.
If you place an unwelded block you can do repair contract to basically get an undetectable beacon for playing on servers.
Hmm... I'm going to have to think about where to include that tip for recovering lost vehicles as that's very handy :)
Excellent work, I do like using a coloured forward spotlight to gauge how close ur to an asteroid
Yup, that setup can be handy :)
A small comment, mentioning that you only get the flush cockpit if you subscribe to Keen's newsletter might have been a good addition since this is for new players who may not know and won't have the option to replicate this build exactly if they don't subscribe. Just a small thing. Great video! Always love watching your content, even though I have 1500+ hours in the game!
It's only true for the Steam version and I couldn't find a nice way to phrase it in the video, I was going to include a pinned comment about it so thanks for the reminder, I'll do that shortly :)
Great tutorial as expected Splitsie. After 1500 hours I still enjoy watching, and learning what a lazy engineer I am. lol. Event controller on a mining ship? Takes all the danger out of disconnecting, .. no more forgetting to turn tanks off stockpile, no more batteries on recharge... where's the excitement in that? lol
lol I'm getting too careful in my old age, or maybe a certain orange suit wearing friend of mine has broken enough ships that I have to repair or replace :D
@@Splitsie Capatron to the RESCUE!!!!! 🤣
i'm almost sure that Keen made the event controler for Capac after watching the survival series with them lol.
I have 1k hours in Space Engineers, but the segment about the Event Controller was still mind blowing to me. I was seriously missing out on this. That's like THE next big thing I'm going to implement in all my ships to prevent my friends from flying without light and beacon signal, which often leads to mid-air collisions, as we typically play on Triton where it's stormy 24/7 :P
Me: *Tries to build symmetrical ships with thrust through the center of mass*
"Darn, that's a headache to align it good and look functional!"
Splitsie drops in with a spaceship tutorial: "All thrust is through center of mass, you only need to worry about enough thrust."
Me: 😲🤯🤦♂️😞🤷♂️ "F... M... L...
Great..."
*Looks at the flying brick pallet of a 9 small grid drills with atmospheric thrusters and 2 large cargo with rock sorting connectors*
"I was well chuffed by that accomplishment, was that for nothing?"
Oh, well...
On the plus side, I imagine you've become quite the expert on sorters and that'll probably be useful in the future :)
@Splitsie
If only, haven't dived into sorters more than I got the ship to dump rocks, perhaps by a fluke.
Played on max all settings, so the ship had about 1,5 million tons capacity fully laden, if I remember correctly, I think the total weight was around 2 million tons.
If it helps there are mods that will 'fix' the cente of mass things and it will work like it does in real life ... Happy spinning ! 🙃
Now I have to wait for lunchtime to watch it. Timezones suck sometimes.
Hopefully some of the silly animations will brighten up your lunch break 🙂
Excellent information that is well explained. As a SE oldtimer, I even picked up a "new" trick!
I love the event controller for connecting and disconnecting. Best thing in that update, which came with a lot of cool stuff.
Agreed, once they fixed up the odd behaviours with it it's been so useful for all sorts of repetitive tasks like that :)
Great tutorial once again. Very helpful and very well explained. One suggestion (sorry can't help myself) when you pointed out that you will get much more thrust in the up direction and you need to remember that in space? Thats a good opportunity to suggest a system that is not often considered, mostly because no one teaches it. I dont consider it an advanced engineering technique its actually for basic designs. The second method I will mention IS advanced however ..Any way.
Issue: Asymmetrical thrust.
Solution 1) use same size thrusters in all directions. Yes its that simple, THEN you add larger thrusters, which u can turn on and off for those times when u need to fight gravity or to GTFO. So when in tight spaces while mining an asteroid or aligning for docking u have same amount of movement in all directions. This concept is a good one to mention at such times.
Solution 2) have hot bar commands or programing which will reduce thrust so all directions as equal. You then activate this command when u require fine motion control, works on gyroscopes too. (
I'd definitely just go straight to building a large grid ship for going to space nowadays. You can imagine the convenience of processing ores on the go and the ability to repair your ship
It's a decent option when you know what you're doing, but I think for new players building something that expensive before you've crashed something cheaper a few times, is a recipe for rage quit :D
@Splitsie Ha true, a new player would crash multiple times before they realize how much thrust they need and how soon they should activate dampeners
Nice I never knew how or what a event controller was
Glad that bit was helpful, I was in two minds about including it so soon in the tutorial series, but they're just so handy for little things like docking I felt it could fit in :)
Great tutorial Splitsie!
For the (un)docking sequence I usually go with an event controller and a pair of timer blocks, I just find it easy to manage the sequence in the tool bar of the timerblock
I normally do too, but I wanted to cut out the middleman for the sake of it being a beginners tutorial :)
To go with the event controller taking care of the ship's systems when you dock, a Base-Side conveyor sorter set to drain all is amazing for a dedicated connector for mining ship docking, especially once you're using a mining ship with several containers. (They're also awesome in general for rearming, refuelling etc in general.)
This video made me miss my mining hexagon, Splitsie. I need to install my new computer!
I like how quick and easy this ship is. It may seem strange, but my mining hexagon was the only ship design I was able to get into space. Everything else failed for one reason or another. The mining hex was a flat hexagonal plane with hydrogen thrusters on either side, and drills on the front. Most people would consider it very strange, and it had virtually no ability to turn, but I loved it.
One method for saving fuel is to stop once you leave gravity, make a GPS, then hop out of your ship and jetpack to each nearby asteroid. If/when i find something useful at an asteroid i'll then move my ship next to that and either mine or make another GPS and keep manually searching using the jetpack until i've found all of the resources i want. The ore detectors range is the same as the advanced drill so bringing the whole ship to every asteroid is pointless since you can simply use your hand drill to check for buried resources. You can search several asteroids with just the jetpack and a drill then you can with a ship.
Another good reason for jetpacking is that if you're attacked by drones you can outrun them with the jetpack since it goes 110 meters per second so you can make it back you your ship and be off long before they get a chance to shoot since their max speed is only 100 meters per second.
That was interesting & good if someone was trying to discover the accelerated space for the first time, probably on Space Engineers.
Thank you sir. I had no idea an event controller would do all that. I was putting down multiple controllers.
Something I like to do, is include a Remote Control on my first space ship, and make a GPS in orbit of my initial launch, some distance into Zero G. While it's very easy to mitigate the amount of H2 you're using, if you don't find Ice you can potentially have lots of H2, and so little O2 you're ending up in a death loop.
In this situation, you can set your remote to take the ship to your 'Parking Lot' and turn off your survival kit. You'll respawn at base and your ship will make the trip to orbit where you can then pilot it down by remote or build something else to take you up and retrieve it.
Yeah, having the 'space' GPS is handy for a bunch of reasons, especially once you get jump drives :)
I made one months ago had six large H tanks at the rear, three large cargo in front, three h2/o2 generators forward of that, a small connector for fueling on the side H2 thrusters with atmo Thrusters 10 small reactors in the middle on the belly down the spine...
It was a beast, with six 5x5 wheels and three large H thrusters off the back.
And that mod that makes large grid items smaller for use on a small grid. Three refineries and two assemblers with four JD's. Only takes a few minutes to jump planet to planet.
I've got almost 1000 hours in SE, but still love watching your tutorials. I forgot that the Event Controller was a thing and I should probably use it instead of my dual timer block setup for docking and undocking actions...
You can use it with the dual timer setup, just pop the timers into the two action slots :)
Might also want to watch out for bit of doom voxels around the asteroids.
I've been watching and rewatching your videos for a long time. I have been playing for the last year that Survival Impossible of yours and have built up my bases, gone to several different planets. Your videos made that possible.
Glad you've managed to find so much fun after these got you started :)
it took me around 130 hours to get to space for the first time, and it happened basically this week so thanks for your video, it made me feel really stupid for collecting platinum from fallen meteors bit by bit
Tip: put a large grid ore detector using a large grid rotor with a small grid head attached to your ship to get a 150m range over the 50m small grid ore detector. It still make take a dozen or two dozen asteroids to find Uranium or Platinum, but you are less likely to miss the ore deeper inside. You may want to turn on "share inertia tensor" so that it moves rigidly with your ship, rather than your ship constantly trying to rotate around it.
A large grid ore detector is certainly a good idea, though I'd say it's better these days just to use one with a connector on it. Since they no longer require power it's easier and safer and only a moderate amount larger to connect with them that way :)
tip about ores in asteroids: if it's an asteroid cluster (bunch of variety size of asteroids close together), usually comes with 2 types of ores within whole cluster so to save time you can stop skimming these cluster after you find 2 ore sign (cmiiw, since I spoke from my own experience and may differ)
and Event Controller is really a game changer, no more lengthy switching toolbars pre/post docking!
Yeah, it's common to find 2 so I usually do the same, once I've identified 2 of them I move on :)
Came for the tutorials (which are the best that I've found), stayed for the Scrapyard.
Every time he emphasizes the word 'tank' i get an Outlands flashback. PRAISE THE TANK!
because i'm crazy all my gps markers have to be 2 characters. ag, au, ni etc. for ice i use H2. for nothing found i use NS for No Signal. i also like to put small thrusters in all directions and turn off the big thrusters when they're not lifting me out of atmo or needed to move a heavy ship. that way you're not slamming into things just trying to drill. you could hear you slamming into the asteroid when trying to drill because the thrusters were way too big for such a light ship, but were needed once you got full.
thanks for the event controller explanation. i tried doing that before but didn't know about the first slot second slot thing so nothing worked and i gave up. as usual your tutorials are first rate!
Glad I could help out with the event controller side of things :)
You and I do have similar philosophies for the initial exploration ship. If anything though, I would add a parachute and solar panel at a minimum. A small sorter, ejector, and hydrogen engine are nice but optional
LOL The great Tribble migration at 27 minutes
I prefer to set up my thrusters in two groups, one for the braking thrusters and the other for the rest. That way I can keep inertial dampeners on while I coast in space with the braking thrusters off, and this will allow the ship to turn towards the direction it is aimed at. Since I usually have about as much thrust forwards as upwards, I can also set up the overrides in the forward direction and climb to space by starting to accelerate horizontally and pitching up, which in some cases gives me a bit more initial thrust by combining upwards and forward thrust.
I have tried searching uranium and platinum in asteroids in vanilla, but I believe the best way to get your first reactor and ion ship is hunting pirate cargo ships with assault cannons as they outrange all old vanilla weapons and pop turrets and then finishing up the capture by MOSTLY damaging but not destroying the main thrusters with gatlings or interior turrets
I hope more future enemy ships that are early and mid tier threats as the new encounters for prototech blocks have either an entire fleet of small and medium drones or competitive level superships and regular cargo ships with just a couple gatlings is not a challenge after the first one.
Even if you do find platinum, that's still probably the fastest method with how slow platinum is to refine :D
The easiest way I've found to get platinum is to select 'space pod' from the solar system start, mine a couple asteroids to build a couple basic manufacturing blocks, then strap a half-dozen parachutes on the ion powered starter ship. Once I pick somewhere that looks flat and land, I've got enough materials to build a cozy base and more than enough thruster components for a small grid ship or two, plus I can break down thruster components for all the platinum I'll need until mid-to-late game!
Another good one, even i learned something new. Was still using timers or groups for turning my ships off.
But speaking of cooking things with thrusters @15:38 ... I feel you might have been missing a chance to mention that they tend to also cook engineers. That side thruster right beneath the survival kit looks like it might counter an attempt to heal up 😋
lol good point, thankfully at least you'll be right next to your bag when you respawn :D
A neat trick is to place a remote control and a camera facing the same direction as your connector. That way you can activate the remote and the camera to more easily connect the vehicle.
Yup, I really should get in the habit of using that more often
This tutorial on how you built this spaceship, so I copied your design and it works so damn good! And I managed to find Uranium and Platinum in space on an asteroid! It may take me about 5-10 minutes to find these 2 ores!! So thank you :D
Glad it's worked out so well, you had much better luck than I did 😂
Like others have said, your videos are a life saver!
Another important note about navigating around asteroids, the small pebbles or doom voxels. Hard to see, but just as deadly.
Nice tutorial, Splitsie - you might want to offer the warning that having a ship on recharge will drain the batteries of any other ship connected to the same base (that isn't also on recharge or with it's batteries off) as well as the base itself, just in case, and maybe note that the Flush Cockpit is a free-gift for subscribing to the Keen newsletter and not a truly vanilla block: Someone might get confused that they can't find it otherwise.
By the way - was ramming the asteroid at the end deliberate for the video , or a useful outtake? I have learnt not to aim at 'roids when flying in space, still need to learn not to aim at my base station, either...
I'm not 100% sure, but I believe I covered that behaviour of batteries in the mining ship tutorial. I glossed over a bit of that stuff this time as the video had already reached 40 minutes and I didn't want it to get any longer :)
As to the crash... I'll never tell!
(It was on purpose, I had been tempted to use one of my many accidental ones from streams, but this looked cleaner) :D
@@Splitsie The Real Teal/Teal Terror crash (As I can never remember which is which) would have made an epic crash - but may have had people asking how you crashed a rover into a 'roid. (I'm going to find that VOD and watch that again...)
In the mining ship video you warn about being unable to fly with the batteries on recharge, and show that the base batteries will drain - it should be clear that other batteries will also drain, but sometimes people (me included) forget that.
One thing you should mention is if you go straight up from your base, once you get to space, make a GPS marker for re-entry. This way you know you’re directly over your base and can “fall” straight down.
Good tip :)
Sometimes if I can't slow down fast enough when I reach space (I upped my M/S Speed) I "Spin" my ship in circles which slows down my ship much faster. Of course this mostly works on small grid ships. I don't even bother touching the thrust override until I reach space because I feel like it doesn't save much fuel by moving back and forth.
Even with more than 4000 hours in the game, this is still informative ! Thanks and a cool ending btw ;-)
lol glad you enjoyed the ending, figured I should demonstrate the risks with that :D
@@Splitsie Yeah, We all been there , probably multiple times :-)
naturally, there should be a Tutorial on how to take on SPRT Mayday's.
they don't spit Drones but can be a challenge to take on if they have active guns.
as a side note, it's never a bad idea to keep a spare gun and ammo for it in your cockpit in the event you do get Splatsied.
having a gun will help you get your stuff back from your body bag!
Good point, spare weapons are quite handy :)
1. On a non oxygen atmo world. Helpful to mention that is the H2O2 generator chews up all the ice and you didn't have an oxygen tank... No more oxygen for your engineer till you get more ice.
2. I'd add a parachute to make sure I decelerate coming in for a landing.
3. I'd also add a set of small maneuvering thrusters in the axis of the large thrusters and turn off the large ones to keep the craft more manageable - consistent.
That's why I recommend new players start on earth-like, you don't have to worry about things like that.
I actively chose not to include parachutes here, the reason was that you need far too many of them for them to be practical. To make a safe landing most of the time with this ship loaded with ore you needed at least 8! Balancing that and all the extra conveyoring required started to stretch the tutorial out to a length I wasn't happy with.
Having small thrusters to use when in space where the big ones are is certainly handy :)
Finally eh? We were starving here! Dog even returned to Icarus this time, and I almost did the same! 💫
awesome thanks for that always good to get a reminder of things wr may have forgotten we can do
Don’t forgot you can use parachutes to slow your decent as well, especially if you return the planet with low fuel
I always fill a cargo container with enough stuff to set up a battery, solar panel or 2, 02h2 and a survival kit and then you can start from there :))
My small ships also almost ALWAYS have a survival kit and a couple parachutes
If I’m not mistaken (I totally could be) it’s always worth having an oxygen tank too because one ice = “2 hydrogen” and “one oxygen” always so if you don’t have an oxygen tank your missing out on “free” oxygen
, it could be the other way where it’s “2 hydrogen” if that’s all you have and then “1 oxygen and 1 hydrogen” if you have a tank for both
Even with just an extra battery, you could probably get started up there with the survival kit to build the parts, but bringing them would certainly speed things up quite a bit :D
afaik you always get same amount of gas per ice. That is, if you aren't making both at once, you get twice of one.
Just a small note about the event controller. It needs power to work. This is fine when you are docked to your own station, but trade stations dont share power. This means that the event controller will shut down your ship when you dock, but it wont start up when you undock. I got very confused the first time this happened to me and I had to turn everything on manually. You can solve this by putting your batteries on the toolbar to set them to auto, which will then allow the event controller to turn everything else on.
Good point about the trade stations, they've got a few odd caveats that can catch people out, thankfully something like this is fairly easily remedied, but when new players mess with the 'trade mode' on their connectors it seems to cause all sorts of confusion
Ah vanilla is so nice and easy. ❤ thanks for the 'vacation'
I would be really grateful if you could do a guide on armor block shapes and what you can form using them ❤
I always forget that it doesn't have to look cool, it just has to have the things attached and the thrusters pointed the right way.
If one is starting in an environment where there's low or no O2 like the moon or Mars-like, chances are one will have an O2/H2 gen on the mining ship already. If there's no atmosphere, chances are the starting miner will be a rover or a ship with H2 thrusters. So the build order will change because the immediate needs are different.
That's why I recomment players start on Earth-like, it gives the most natural progression through learning the mechanics of the game, while also giving them the greatest amount of time to work through problems that they might face :)
Don't forget to look where you are going when you are going into space. The top down view is great for cinematic but as Splitsie pointed out some of the asteroids spawn within gravity and I have in fact lost a couple of ships finding that out while I was still lifting off.
Nice... I will say that this might have been a good one to show parachutes on.
I actively chose not to include parachutes here, the reason was that you need far too many of them for them to be practical. To make a safe landing most of the time with this ship loaded with ore you needed at least 8! Balancing that and all the extra conveyoring required started to stretch the tutorial out to a length I wasn't happy with.
@@Splitsie Fair enough... I didn't realize you needed that many.
I love your videos, i am i new player in SE. I am in my 3week playing and loved
Great video as always and thank you.
the spaceman pointing graphic is very nice, but when it's tethered to the cursor I feel like its impact is lessened a lot from when it's intentionally placed to point at things
it still does its job of highlighting just what is being pointed at, but it's moved closer to being visual noise compared to if it lingers at the subject
Dunno if this is a new thing or a labor saving thing that's been around for a while, i've been away from SE in general
One thing i would like to see is different survival kits, smaller or a med bay style like large grid.
Splitsie likes to build asymmetrical.
Wait, what? Since when?!
Everyone knows it's a lie.🤣
But you should definitely do it more often!😉
I'm sort of the same. The asymmetry I use might be antenna/beacon/detector stuff and or fixed weapons.
And I dock port sided, of course. Other than that, not much asymmetry going on when I build but when I do it always looks so cool.
It's something I like to do, but it's also something that only works in some situations, you've got to have the right balance of parts for it to look good
"It goes from 0.05g to 0"
Yeah, I've learn that the hard way... Waiting for the 0g, stop and go make some well earned coffee... come back to a crashed ship. Make sure you continue a bit when you hit 0, otherwise you're ship will start to slowly go down towards the gravity well.
For leaving a planet its also useful to have a seperate camera that is pointing up, so you can look out for asteroids right above you and avoid crashing into them. Its really frustrating to just about being able to leave a planet in the early stages; just to then smash into a random asteroid XD Also useful can be to leave a GPS marker right above your base in a few km distance, if you want or need a straight line down to your base or to easier create jump drive GPS coordinates for later on.
Yes. I place a GPS marker labelled "(BASE NAME) Zero G" directly above my base and use that for an aiming point when returning from space.
Good tip about the markers, that becomes especially handy if you're making regular trips once you have jump drives :)
That's the best mouse cursor I've ever seen...
Also love the vid of course :D
lol Thanks, I really like it for the tutorials, so handy to have something that shows up so clearly :)
@Splitsie Oh... Handy... I see what u did there...
You forgot to add the gyros to the event controler. I know that this is only a tutorial for new players but I find the small grid ore detector useless for survey work and any ship I intend as a surveyor I will ad a large grid conversion via rotor or hinge and add a lare grid ore detector. Also parachutes are very helpful on the deceleration when heavily loaded when returning from space. Another backup is to add atleast one solar panel so that if you drain the batery you don't get stranded.
I didn't forget, I just figured I'd dragged that part out long enough for players to understand how it worked so I'd move on :)
I actively chose not to include parachutes here, the reason was that you need far too many of them for them to be practical. To make a safe landing most of the time with this ship loaded with ore you needed at least 8! Balancing that and all the extra conveyoring required started to stretch the tutorial out to a length I wasn't happy with.
The end is gold. ;)
Dude i never thought about using an event controller like that
It's my favourite use for them, saves so many accidental unlocks with the batteries on recharge :D
@ ive had that happen to me so many times just never thought to fix it with an event controller. Also your escape from mars series with CATpac was what inspired me to play the game again and convince many of my friends to play too.
If you are not playing in easy mode with no asteroid impacts, you can very small amounts of the exotice materials from them. But they do make more of a mess outside your base then 25 moles and or a music festival, wheeled vehicles have problems.
Playing with asteroid impacts isn't 'hard' mode, it's just 'I want to eventually tank my performance' mode. Unfortunately all those little changes to the surface in the area will slowly accumulate and eventually be a significant performance hog, it's why they're disabled by default :(
SE's rendering of voxel deformation at a distance was a rude awakening for me. My first proper base was built into a cliffside, and when I finally went to space I was horrified that I could see the whole base interior from a few km up. It's a bit weird, though. I recently dug a "stealth" asteroid base from inside an ice asteroid's tunnel. Since I didn't carve into the outer surface, I never get the odd peekaboo rendering.
Yup, it's a bit annoying that they've never found a solution to it :(
Suggestion, add parachute(s) to ships that will travel into gravity, just in case things don't go so well. :-)
I actively chose not to include them here, the reason was that you need far too many of them for them to be practical. To make a safe landing most of the time with this ship loaded with ore you needed at least 8! Balancing that and all the extra conveyoring required started to stretch the tutorial out to a length I wasn't happy with.
@@Splitsie Oh, 8, that is a lot more than I expected, yet mentioning it is a great tie in to your tutorial on them. :-) Extra conveyoring, with all the exposed and available ports on that ship, where?! Even if only 1 port were available, the extra conveyoring consists of 2 junctions hooked to 9 chutes. Yes, it would be ugly. Seriously, if we are landing a fully loaded ship via chutes, we passed ugly a long time ago. :-)
24:00 I'm pretty new so I'm not sure if you have to do this or not, but when you're showing how you can do multiple things with the event controller, would you have to make a new event controller for each action you wanted to do when docking and undocking? (like turning the antenna/oredetector/thruster groups on and off)
No, that's why I used the separate hotbars, you can do up to 9 actions, but you can also use timer blocks to nest even more actions within those 9 toolbars :)
The only problem with using hydrogen around Splitsie and especially Capac it has an explosive manner. :~)
An excellent tutorial.
No parachute hatches? I've splatted a number of 'first spaceships' on trying to land with a load of ore.
I also fit any mining ship or rover with stone ejectors, though I can see why you left them out for sake of tutorial.
I decided against parachutes as you would need a large number of them for the ship if it's fully laden, trying to centre them properly would have required a lot of conveyoring and other stuff that felt like it would have been well beyond what I would want in a first ship for space.
Pretty sure Splitsie spent an hour to find asteroids that don't contain Uranium so he doesn't look like he always gets OP luck.
lol :D
Going 'splat' into an asteroid? Yeah, like *that* would ever happen to you.
Uh huh, definitely never happened to me live on stream... :P
@@Splitsie Okay .. how did you do that ! (according to the time stamps you answered this question 33 minutes before he asked it.)
wait ... 33 minutes? that sounds familiar, is this a Battlestar Galactica Trope?
@@Splitsie nah, just almost crashing a spaceship into titan.
Any chance of ACS to include Mayday spawns for SOS? Or is there a way for ACS not to spawn drones?
I have a question about conveyor junction. I was lead to believe that the more conveyor junctions you have, the more your PC CPU gets bogged down. The explanation is that the CPU will check all possible ways (exits) for the materials to go through them. So for every conveyor junction the PC will check for five possible exits for every entry. For conveyor tube or elbow there is only one entry and only one exit thus reducing the load on the CPU
Most of those problems were fixed a year or two ago, and it was only ever a real problem on large ships or bases 🙂
Suggestion: Add parachutes! You know, because...
I actively chose not to include them here, the reason was that you need far too many of them for them to be practical. To make a safe landing most of the time with this ship loaded with ore you needed at least 8! Balancing that and all the extra conveyoring required started to stretch the tutorial out to a length I wasn't happy with.
Splitsie, Can I ask a question about the Satreus version of your Scrapyard Scenario? In your video series, the planet Satreus appeared to be alot bigger, around 120km. The planet in your published scenario seems to be only 20km. Is this size difference intended?
It's on my to-do list to fix, it was an accident that it happened that way :D
@@Splitsie Thank you for the reply. Hopefully I will not need to start over when fixed.
I'm 27 minutes in so apologies if it comes up later but small grid large hydro thrusters should be avoided because they are hilariously underpowered and unbalanced. A small hydro thruster put out 100kN of thrust and the large puts out a ridiculous 480kN. It takes up 9 blocks of surface space while having less power than 5 small thrusters. Going all small is far far more effective. FYI the small grid large atmo thruster is nearly as bad. Small thruster is 96kN, the large is 576kN. Really hope Keen does a balance pass the bump them up to where they should be.
I am waiting for the event controller video. I have done limited things with it so it will be interesting to see what else it can do.
Some questions.
You have a 7 year old video on YT about engine thrust and showing how much each type of engine can lift. Is the info in that video still up to date?
Can we have a EASY to follow tutorial on making drones and even setting up a autopilot to dock a ship. I haven't found a decent tutorial yet. ( and the one you have done is hard to follow).
I have been having a lot of fun with the scrapyard survival mod. Where did all the vehicles and structures come from? Were they created for that mod or are they just ones off the steam workshop? Some of them are quite detailed and interesting. (And the crane was; entertaining).
Is there a reliable mod for the grabby hands function as its a necessity for the survival mod but such a pain to get things to align properly.
Thanks
For the scrapyard, the majority of the things you can find in it are things I built specifically for it (you can find the old livestreams of the build and mod design process over on my second channel ua-cam.com/users/flipsie ), with some of the designs being ones people specifically submitted for the mod that I then altered to suit my design goals :)
@@Splitsie I designed a really good trailer that connects up with one of the trucks I repaired in my scrapyard game. On your stream where you were playing the game, I think you called it the 'Flatliner'. The trailer was designed to go with that truck and I would like to post the trailer and truck on the steam forums but I know that some get a little upset if you post something that was their design. the trailer has a wheel setup using rotors so it sort of works off the concept of the Trailer for the U.SA. Dragon Wagon tank transporter from WW2. The way it works, results in all 8 wheels being on the ground as you go over rough terrain.
Efficiency is the wrong word, you mean power or thrust. Ion thrusters produce less thrust in atmosphere, i.e. they are less powerful, but with the same efficiency. Efficiency refers to the ratio of input to output. For ion thrusters that would be electric power vs thrust, which both change based on atmospheric pressure.
For example the large hydrogen thruster is many, many times more powerful than the small, but only 10% more efficient. If you compared an array of small thrusters with the same thrust as one large thruster, you would find the larger thruster uses 10% less hydrogen.
No I mean efficiency, with each thruster weighing the same amount, being able to put out less thrust makes them less efficient per unit of mass added.