For bigger builds I allways design them in creative mode and build it from the projected blueprint in survival. This makes iterating through designs, using symetry and correcting mistakes much easier.
Very true. Designing in creative is a much simpler way of doing things - especially the part later in these videos where I stuff up the symmetry on the armor :P
Very much the same. I get a basic frame of a ship built in Creative to see if the concept will work. Then I take said ship into my personal survival world and test there, making tweaks such as more storage/etc. as needed because in creative mode thrusters generate like 10x lift and your hydrogen/batteries will stay full. Once I get a refined concept, I add color and minor detailing blocks. Using this method I've designed a ship for me and my friends to reign in the server we're on. Essentially it's a ship that can work as a massive warship when every single part is assembled, however for refuelling purposes the ship can split off into 4 separate segments. The main carrier segment contains loads of thrusters, the oxygen and hydrogen refining systems, and an ore refinery. The 2 other segments that split off are each really agile mining ships with turrets and auto cannons. When every part of the ship has been assembled, the whole thing looks like a large like Battle Cruiser, has a total of 8 turrets (4 on the Carrier, 2 rocket 2 assault cannon+2 on each mining ship, both minigun), a plethora of guns (each Miner has 6 frontal auto cannons and a rocket launcher, and the Carrier has Artillery Cannons and Rocket Launchers) I'm not great at ship design so actually getting a working version of this made took me days of work but it works pretty smooth. In order to fully dock the ships so that you don't risk damage to them or the carrier I used merge blocks directly around the Connectors because I read that Connectors only magnetize, they don't make 2 separate grids into one. If you want to undock a Miner you just disconnect Connector and then turn the group of Merge Blocks for the ship named "Dock" off. The ships should smoothly separate, and it can even be done while the Carrier is in motion, it's just the pilot of the Miner can't move until the Carrier pulls forward, and the Carrier can't turn while a Miner is in the process of undocking otherwise smashing will happen as soon as it disconnects.
I'm surprised you don't have a lot of views/subscribers, you're tutorials are clean, basic, quick and straight forward. I've started space engineers yesterday (June 24, 2017) Your tutorials are very helpful :)
Funny that you say this. I wanted to buy it and play it but then I forgot about it. I came across his beginners tutorials and I liked them and I want to see what I can do with the game so I bought it.
Hey Everyone! With this video I've taken a slight step away from my usual tutorials, I struggled with how to put all my ideas about large ship design into a single video without it being a glorified lecture. So instead I thought I'd just show you exactly how I do my designs, I've tried to give as much insight as I can into the way I design and I hope you find it useful. Here's the link to the design on the workshop: steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=950873413 The side effect of doing the video this way is that it is proving to be a LOT longer, at this stage I'm looking at possibly 3 or 4 videos for this design. I'm well on my way to finishing up the next one and will upload it as soon as I'm done. If things go to plan that will be before the weekend :) Hope you guys are enjoying this different approach, if you have any comments or suggestions I'd love to hear them!
I'd much rather see a detailed clips like this, than an abbreviated clips that leaves me guessing at the parts that weren't shown, any day. Also, the thought process behind the design is just as important (if not more so) than the actual construction. Understanding the thought process helps me to better understand how to set about creating my own design, rather than just copying other designs in their entirety. I particularly like your idea of using conveyor tubes to create redundancy in your design. Up to now I have always tried to make my ships as compact as possible, moving things around to get the best use of various ports to minimize the space used. Although this minimizes build materials it has two major flaws. Firstly, it doesn't allow for changes to a design without major re-construction. Secondly, it makes the constructions look very much like a brick outhouse with engines. So far I have only built small ships, but I now think that I am ready to move up a level. So, for me, this mini-series is most welcome, no matter how long it takes. Cheers.
Thanks so much for the feedback :) It's always a challenge in survival to build more when less will get you by as the resources can be a pain to gather, but when I've done gone to the extra bit in the past I've always been happier with the result.
I use atmo and ion hydrogene is to make fly my enormous monstruosity of carrier overlordthis thing have 90k of blpck for 1 hangar and it have 2 hangar with 6 cruiser inside an difhter are all arround the hull because they have a role of secondary armor and onvasion or defense fighter because overlord cant land onn planet or will replace a part of the ground by a hole with some armor block damaged
I might be a few years late to the vid, but I love how consistent this game is so far. All of the tutorials and basic guides from like 5 years ago still help! (and this one is no exception)
Keen (the Devs) have been great about backwards compatibility throughout development. One of my series, I ran the same save through over 2 years of weekly updates without it ever breaking 🙂
Even after still playing this game on Xbox for probably a year now, I still feel like a beginner, these videos help out a ton when I’m starting a new project
"If human military designers had their way, every colour of the spectrum would be removed except for grey, green and black and we would all live in windowless boxes." - Ranger Dulann, Babylon 5
@@senorskellig9131 I dont usually buy games but I bought this ones and all dlcs just cause I thought this guys deserved more of my money. So yes. Worth it
@jose rodriguez > "but I bought this ones and all dlcs" Ah.. so you're part of the reason they're still releasing DLC to this day.... People told me when they added the first DLC (and I also said there was going to be more) 'it's just $3.99 it costs less than a pint at the bar!', 'why are you making such a big deal about the DLC, yeah some functional blocks are included but does it really matter? it doesn't cost that much.' Now theres 5 DLCs and it's $19.95 for all of them, that's literally 4 cents under the full price of the main game. And guess what.. they're releasing more news updates hinting at even more DLC, so it'll cost more than the game to buy them all shortly, Keen took the one game they made that had promise (and killed off all their others) and are draining it for all it's worth with low quality content, and you're encouraging it. The game is going to die, the coders would rather port some furniture or have the art guys make a new skin and sell it for money (along with a couple blocks they should've added a LONG TIME AGO) on their obviously still early access title (that they released just to add DLC) instead of actually working on the gameplay loop, networking issues, bugs and general lagginess. You might say "but they're using the money to work on the GAMEEEE".. Nope.. they bought a mansion with the money. They also blew a good portion of the money on Good AI, one of Rosa's other failed projects.
I’ve been watching since survival maybe, and you are by far my favorite creator, I’ve loved every series so far. I just got the game a few days ago, and have been rewatching these tutorials.
new to space engineers but pumped almost 30 hours into it now, and this video is so entertaining! some things i like to figure out myself, but when you say "its easier to start with the big blocks", it just helps a lot and i have a bunch of "ahaa!" moments during this video. thanks, really nice.
Ships in the expanse (at least the books) and a few in the show are brick like, but also have enough detail and unique shapes to look good. This gives me inspiration for designs in se
The expanse is a pretty decent series to take inspiration from given the tech level isn't too different from SE so you can do a decent job of nailing the style :)
I really enjoy your videos. Even with having over 600h playtime i still have struggle with the extended game mechanics i really have never the intresst to look over it playing alone but with your tutorials i have the feeling its worth to look closer into the game even with playing alone. I hope really that you will make some tutorials about more extended mechanics like rotating blocks on bases or some usefull shipdesign to mine massiv amount of asteroids materials. You really make a good job at your tutorials. (sry for some bad english i´m not really used to it ^^)
You must be doing pretty well with english to be able to understand an Australian accent like mine :) I'm glad you're enjoying them though! When you say rotating blocks, do you mean using things like rotors and pistons? I've got a plan to do a tutorial on those in the future. I'll try to come up with a vertical miner or something like that and do a series similar to this ship build on it if I am happy with the design :)
Splitsie I understand you perfectly, I am non native english speaker and my english teacher were more british, UA-cam probably helped for the other accents.
Splitsie, thank you. you are a lifesaver (the title, not the gummy. just to be clear.) ive been needing a staging ship for touching down to space, and making my first space station
Last time I played space engineers was roughly when planets first came out, and even then, I didn't get far. Decided to come back to it, but needed a refresher. Thanks for the guide.
That is a big risk with a hangar bay due to their very large space requirements, but one approach that can help is to have the entrance be at an unusual location, try top, bottom or rear of the ship like the orville and you can end up with a different design. The other thing is to make sure that the rest of the ship is to scale with the hangar bay. The best designs I've looked at on the workshop have a hangar bay that only takes up a small portion of the ship which also helps avoid the brick :)
This is the Birth of the Talisman. Holy Crap! Splitsie, You've helped me and my crew for years now and I'm just now seeing this vid. Lil late but I caught it. I built my own take on the Great Fox (to scale) and never knew about this...
This will help me when I start my Xbox game for the VERY first time if EVER playing on space engineers when I’m trying to make a large ship with hangar, and eventually a asteroid base I’m sooo excited!!! Literally a immeasurable anount of excitement due to a very boring quarantine
Again you saved me, I just got comfortable building small grid ships and then loosing them too the dark void in space by running out of hydrogen and not having Ions “Because I finally discovered they run off of batteries” thanks again man great work! Time too not loose another ship! Maybe...
I do not know if it still works but, if you hold shift and use the scroll wheel you can change the distance the ghost block sits. Making it easier to place the bigger items.
I'm not completely certain, but that often doesn't work for me in survival (always works in creative)... I'm not sure if I'm just being derpy or if it's meant to be that way :P
I know it's not exactly a unique process but I found it very interesting seeing your design process and how similar it is to mine. I begin with a function over form and then iterate until I get a vehicle that looks "nice". I usually go through 2-6 passes of redoing the external design shifting around internal functional blocks to better suit flow throughout the vehicle.
enjoyed this video, I'm currently designing my first large ship and appreciate another point of view about how to go about doing this. The way you've gone about this is very interesting, I was going to go about it by building the interior you can walk in first and building the hull around it. Can't wait for the next video in this series!
I've done things that way before as well, I tend to do things that way when I'm building in creative because in don't need the ship to function until it's complete. For survival I find it handy to have a working ship first. It's good to have a few different approaches though, stops you getting frustrated when things aren't working :)
So very true, it's one of the things I love about x1 inventory (and why I'm happy with the changes coming in the survival patch). Being 'encouraged' to engineer around painful problems like running back and forth a thousand times is a good thing in my book :)
Thank you so much for all you’re videos! Just bought the game and built my first ever custom miner (also my first build):) took 3 tries but in the end I got it. Thought about building a larger ship so I can explore the galaxy and was 100% sure I would build a shoe box. Thanks!
Anyone else notice how in this video he always says "oxygen generators" but uses only H2/O2 generators? Lul. Thanks for the video, mate! As always heaps and heaps of solid advice and insight that one can only gain from spending countless hours breaking their brain learning to build. We thank you for your sacrifice.
Actually back then they were still labeled in game as oxygen generators, it's taken some time but I now mostly remember to call them by their new name :P
if anyone is watching this in 2019 here's my tip; use references. It doesn't even need to be a ship space or naval. most of my designs i think of ww1 or ww2 tanks, like german design philosophy and such things. it also doesn't need to be something like the aforementioned, I like what splitsie said in the beginning, ""U' shaped". take that and run with it. make the whole ship a giant "U". it sounds silly to some but it really works. maybe this helps maybe it doesn't; personally I can't make bricks, it against my nature.
Yep, pretty much pick a shape you like the idea of and run with it, the weirder the object you start from I find tends to make for some really cool designs :)
I've never played space engineers but I've been planning to make a game like it for a long time, where you're a robot with a spaceship who travels the galaxy gathering metals for weapons,space ships, argon lasers, different robots to switch between and upgrades for them, and gas from gas bubbles in space for fuel. So you can pvp or build a giant base on a planet or astroid. It really sucks I came up with a lot of this thinking I was ahead of my time but this games shows that I'm behind asf. I love space engineers and I'm glad I know it now so I don't steal any of the mechanics.
At this point in SE development, I can defenitely tell that many of the design limitations, like the conveyors right next to the cockpit area that could only be covered by ramp armor, have been alleviated thanks to newer blocks like armor paneling. Thank you Keen!
What would be cool is to see this ship as a basic lander for other planets. Have some giant cruiser or mother ship that you use to jump between planets for material gathers and just general RP. It'd be pretty sick.
I like building the bridge first, then an industrial bulkhead, then my larger blocks, as I Usually end up having a large enough cross section for a centerline. H2 tanks and usually large storage containers, I've come out with some nice design from it. It also gives some semblance of weak points, since I don't wanna deviate too much from the bridge cross section. I also love doing nacelle based ships so I can shove a bunch of stuff in secondary sections and not just everything in line.
The idea of spending hours on a ship and flying it into space, and seeing that I MADE THIS and THIS IS ACTUALLY USEFUL AND WORKS, is just amazing, I'm getting there, still building rovers, and mining, but one day...
the refinery along one axis is 2 large-grid units thick, BUT becomes 3 when you add yield modules. So I count that into the overall measurement. helped me keep my novice level bare bones miner-refiner ship balanced.
This video is definitely beneficial in helping buiild smaller large ships. XD My first large ship was WAY bigger and I thought it was small XD. I actually built the blueprint first, then structured the ships hull around that blueprint, and that worked well enough. It did help that i had an idea of what i sort of wanted it to look like and what kind of rooms i wanted. Definitely wishing i had more room for hydrogen though. All in all itll be about 6 rooms including the storage/foyer/armory area, which makes it a pretty decent size. Not quite a capital ship, or even a frigate.. but its big enough. Its home. :3 One thing that i do want to point out is to be careful with the air vents, as they cost a TON of energy now. Not sure about back 3 years ago, but now they cost iirc around 150kw per tick which is nuts.
@@Splitsie Yeah.. Its something im struggling with right now. Also i just checked, and it looks like its around 330kw. It originally was 0.33kw. Maybe a typo? But the dev team say its by design so i have no clue what the were thinking...
A good shape I've found for not being confusing to assemble but also look great is a flat oval so like angled corners and build it vertically so similar to a rocket so the top of the tube would be your cockpit the front when flying the bottom would be the thrusters and maybe even the docking point if you want it to be a mother's hip kind of thing that your smaller ships can port in
In all large ships i build, i have an abundance of hydrogen generators to not make it a "Station Ship". I then always add a stowable 6 axis drill arm for gathering ice. I am thinking about upgrading to 8 axis so that i can curve it and make good turns in tunnels. This drill can also be used for mining regular ores, as it is connected to the rest of the ship. After i add this, i make a small rover miner. as backup. Most H2 Generators i've had were 62. This provides me with "Unlimited Range" and makes me truly mobile.
I know you made these videos ages ago, but I think they‘d be even better either without music or with less… loud music. I know it‘s the soundtrack of the game, but then again, I also never thought the soundtrack ever fit the game at all. It‘s the first thing I muted back then. :P Other than that, it‘s a *really* good set of tutorial videos, even after five years. Thanks a lot!
If I have the platinum I'd probably go with ion, maybe with a few hydrogen available for extra bursts of speed (such as when running away from something) :P
LCS.Thanks for vid :) pre-build tour comment of previous vid doesn't apply to bigger builds as I can see from the playlist this build took many vids before reaching the stage when you could show the finished article and that without all the time editing, checking sound, sourcing music. many of your subs appreciate your regular uploads(becomes routine to watch between bathtime and bedtime :p ).. much appreciation for the share volume of work off cam that goes into making your vids. mahusive thankyou an much luv :)
This method of construction is definitely an option, personally I find it clunky and a bit frustrating. My suggestion is to either remove the drills from your hover miner and add a welder in their place, or (my favorite method) build a small hover vessel with a welder on one end and a grinder on the other. Add a remote control unit on the back of your ship plus a view camera, every time you need to grind something, you switch to remote control and turn the little ship around. If you play with realistic inventory size, it will spare you thousands of trips to your storage, you simply dock your builder ship, load it up with materials, get back to building, not to mention jetpack fuel.
The reason you can't remove the drills from a mining ship and simply put a welder in their place is the size of the conveyor tubes. Because almost none of the components for construction can pass through small tubes you'll be unable to get anything into the welders or out of the grinders, a purpose built ship is almost always necessary. As to building with a ship, it's one of the best reasons to play with realistic inventory settings, they really force the use of engineered solutions like that. The downside is always that ship welders and grinders are unfortunately slower than the upgraded hand held (something that I wish was the other way around), so even with x3 inventory it's normally faster to weld and grind by hand :(
Almost quit space engineers on my first day, as i had next to no sleep and i am playing it on xbox one, which lacks good tutorials, so i almost had a fit at the game because it kept freezing and after i installed it and tried to make a new world it also failed to load. But i gave it a while and now i am having fun making bricks that did not in fact fly well for a brick.
I like to build my ships in sections for what i need after the other, this ends up with a slight brick but still nicely curved. i start the first one with the bridge with the medbay, which sits on the front of my ship with large H2s under it and the a set 2-4 refineries with 8-16assemblers on the ends of the refineries with a cargo area attached of 18-24 large cargos. then the section for drills and grinders which are placed on a few pistons, and i have large ion engines in all directions in this section for small maneuvers. then a section with about 24 large H2 tanks and O2/H2gens in between and place 8-12 jump drives that then make up the wall between the Fuel section and the drill section. then i start placing the hull around it and place large and small H2s on all places that have free connection points. after i place 2 large hangar bays on each side for small ships. Batteries, O2 tanks, and all other small blocks are placed in the free areas. for power i place all of the power production plants, so i have solar "sails" on the hangars, windmills on top, reactors somewhere in the ship and H2 gens somewhere in the back with the fuel. this makes a really large ship but one that has all you could need and you can also place a ton of guns on it for the perfect battlestation, it takes a few days to build and fuel up tho.
Been eyeballing your tutorials a lot. Great stuff! About the brick: Yeah it can be fugly, but unless enemy can penetrate your hull (and/or see inside), he has no idea where you have your stuffs ;)
you usualy avoid as much as possible to start with the Hull, i always start with the Internal components like reactor, piping, cockpit, thrusters and so on. after im happy with my results i then start building the hull, i use the diagonal parts as muhc as possible, that way at the end it mostly wont look like a boxshaped ship.
If doing things that way works for you that's awesome. For my own builds I prefer doing a mixture of hull and internal components. Where the parts are large I need to put them down to get an idea of what sort of space I'll require but then the same can be true of hull shapes. If there's a particular curve or other larger shape I want to include in the armour I will put that in first then create some internal structures and facilities to fit to that. If you're building something with an industrial feel you might want to stick to largely squared off shapes, though I still find that adding diagonals to corners helps. The shapes you use should be dictated by the function or aesthetic you choose - which is very much a personal thing and I wouldn't dictate that to anyone, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that. This little series of videos was not intended to be telling people that there is only one way to build, instead it was meant to give insight into what works for me to guide people who might otherwise be struggling :)
Ah, that's what happens when you place a block in survival mode and because you want to get the recording done quickly you switch to creative mode rather than having to make all the components. When you weld up in creative mode it adds the components to match the level of construction :)
Being able to see the entire build process along with mistakes being shown and all that is a nice touch :D I will say though that this style compared to the other tutorials feels more like sitting in a classroom (not that is a bad thing or anything 😇) while watching the teacher use a projection screen and pointing out piece by piece while keeping their tone of voice mostly around the same level. Granted it still does a great job to hold your attention. Kind of curious if you end up making the ramp portion a rotor based thing like your other builds though :P
I didn't use a mobile ramp for this one as I couldn't see a way it would fit without looking worse than the awkward permanent ramp, but I'm glad you appreciate the approach I take. When I'm recording tutorials I imagine I'm explaining things to someone beside me which means I don't need to yell/scream etc and if I think a mistake is a nice way of highlighting a potential point of frustration then I leave them in too :)
I made a A-10 warthog type ship and by that I mean to say I designed it around the main gun, in this case a rotary rail gun. It looks nice ish but I’m bad at making things blocky so thanks for the help ima try to sleek it up
Just remember that everyone starts out with bricks, but with enough time you'll start to learn more an more block combos that look good and it gets easier and easier, or at least faster :P
With my interest in SE peaked, been watching some videos. Like this. For most of time I prefer to built a "chassis" or a "skeleton" of the ship with the general shape I'm looking for. Like making a T, where the upper part of the T is for forward thrusters, filling up with redudantly with power, first focusing on the "center piece" of the shit like what makes this ship more special. Is it a small ship toting gratious amount of guns, a big broadsider with ridiculous rocket salvo sides protected by hangar doors? or a large industrial ship carrying small, maneuverable miners? Once the function and form is done, gotta take it for a test drive. If it handles way too well, spins bit too fast, acceralted and decceraltes on dime, it's good to go for the final phase Then I hide the outer side of skeleton with light blocks and start shaping the form from there with just the full blocks, depending on the usage, this allows me to either give a hollow shell or give multiple layers of armor, usually the 1-3 outer layers being hard armo. All military ships get their shaped blocks heavy. Anywho, might be two years old, but this build video series at least starts on strong note and Splitsie speaks with that warm patience that makes just listening a guy speak about space legos interesting..
That's certainly the way that I sometimes go about it, I tend to vary my approach dependent on what's most important to me with that ship. If it's form, I'll start with that and try to cram as much in as I can, if it's function I usually end up with something ugly that works, then spend multiple iterations adjusting it until it looks adequate :P And thanks, that last sentence made my day :)
Your allowing the function of the ship to completely dictate your aesthetics, this limits your design choices, efficiency in design can come in other forms. However it is simple for beginners and thank you for the very helpful tutorial, your vids are informative.
True, it's just one way of approaching design. I couldn't think of a simpler method for helping people to improve and avoid the brick at the time though, hopefully it helped a few people be happier with their builds :)
There are plenty of spots you could add extras, I had a look in mind when I started this build, in a lot of ways I was just lucky that it actually flew ;)
That's certainly the approach I use sometimes, I change up my approach dependent on the needs of the ship: for looks, design shape first then squeeze everything in, function first, build all the core first, leaving enough space and then try to make it look at least half decent.
@@Splitsie that seems like a good strategy, maybe during the design process you can add extra components if your design allows it. I will definitely give your approach a try in my next ship
I like brick ships, they can take an unimaginable amount of punishment in multiplayer One of my mates built a replica of the USS Enterprise NCC1701 and challenged me to a duel I threw together a cube in about 20 minutes, covered it in turrets and won 5 times in a row, my cube didn't get repaired and didn't have shields at all His one was completely replaced after each battle and had shields The it took him 5 battles to finally take out my reactor (which was covered in about 10 layers of heavy armor)
There's a reason military devices tend to be bulky and generally pretty ugly (many aircraft being the obvious exception, but they're a special case), when you're aiming for pretty you should be doing it because that's where you find the fun - I don't enjoy flying around in a brick, even if it's going to survive as it just doesn't make me happy :P
@@Splitsie true, when I'm playing in single player or if the server has shields and not too many OP weapons, I tend to design ships that look cool and just put stronger shields on it But if I'm playing on a server without shields or there are massively OP weapons, I usually just fly bricks into combat because they last longer My bases are almost always solid bricks of armor, my current base on the server I play on is 20 blocks thick of heavy armor on all sides which is embedded in the voxel, it took AGES for me and my mate to actually get the resources and build it during the construction of this base, we lived in a Borg cube style ship with a shield on it and covered in turrets, so far we have been attacked 12 times (4 during construction and 8 after completion) 5 have cracked the shields, but only 2 of those 5 ships have been able to crack the shields and do real damage to the base other than breaking a few armor blocks The worst one was when someone who also liked to use brick ships came in with a series of pulse cannons (mod weapon) on the bottom of the ship and simply started drilling through the armor, the base shield dropped within 20 seconds and the turrets outside his ship tore our AI controlled fighter drones to shreds (patrol waypoints programmed into the RC block) Only thing that managed to drive him away was when I crashed my battleship into his (we had teleport pads in the server, so I TPd from the war room to the ship and rammed him into the ground) Apparently he barely had enough thrust to stay aloft let alone arrest a 280m/sec fall (the speed limit was modded) The damage to the base was extensive and I ended up putting my battleship just above the hole for the 2 days it took to rebuild and get the shields working again (there wasn't much left of his ship and this world is VERY stingy with ore deposits to encourage PvP) That was the greatest day in my SE career and is the very essence of PvP fun
Is there a blue print for the atmospheric ship splitsie has in the background? I really like the design, just curious how he has it designed and layed out. I tend to make ships that look bring like, I always struggle with designing something that looks cool.
I'm guessing you mean the old atmospheric lander, that's the ship that you used to start the game with and I suspect there's a blueprint of it somewhere on the workshop if you search for 'atmospheric lander' or 'original atmospheric lander' :)
Not necessarily, though it is the way I often build, these days I can build with a mix of armour design and internals and that can improve the end result as I'm more inclined to leave extra space between certain functional parts to allow for a more complete armour design at the end :)
@@Splitsie I just got the notification for your reply. Thanks youtube. Anyway. Thats also a good way to build, although i think it would take longer. But still good. Love your videos. Keep on going.
@@Splitsie I didnt get this one either. I just came back to re-watch the series and found you had replied. Keep going, best tutorials and videos ive ever found.
Personally how I avoid bricks is laying out a series of steady drives (inward facing enclosed thrusters in a box of armor blocks 6 point movement and it's hidden so you FPS stays good and you minimize the amount of space used for thrusters on the outside) i space the drives out with with beams long enough to put my systems in, and then i "even" out the contours so the shape of the ship forms. then final detailing is that much easier.
I do similar block style building when I'm making ships in Avorion, I find it helps at times to think of the ship that way, but it's probably just because of the excessive amount of time I've spent in Space Engineers and Minecraft :P
This is survival mode, symmetry has never been available there, would be nice if we could build like that onto a projection but I don't think that's likely to happen
If you're playing official, because of the psu limit (the amount of blocks you can place) dont use the advice of this video. Test a design in creative and figure out its psu. Psu on official atm is 6250 which is very little. Hopefully it increases so you dont have to worry as much. Bricks are normally efficient and perform the task its intended to do while keeping psu down.
In addition to that I would have also added a piston and hanger doors for the ion thrusters , Atmospheric thrusters ,Hydrogen Thrusters , and landing gear .
For bigger builds I allways design them in creative mode and build it from the projected blueprint in survival. This makes iterating through designs, using symetry and correcting mistakes much easier.
Very true. Designing in creative is a much simpler way of doing things - especially the part later in these videos where I stuff up the symmetry on the armor :P
How you can save the ships as blueprint on xbox?
Same
@@crazy_nicc791press RS and copy to clipboard.
Then press RB+b and press new from clipboard
Very much the same. I get a basic frame of a ship built in Creative to see if the concept will work. Then I take said ship into my personal survival world and test there, making tweaks such as more storage/etc. as needed because in creative mode thrusters generate like 10x lift and your hydrogen/batteries will stay full. Once I get a refined concept, I add color and minor detailing blocks.
Using this method I've designed a ship for me and my friends to reign in the server we're on. Essentially it's a ship that can work as a massive warship when every single part is assembled, however for refuelling purposes the ship can split off into 4 separate segments. The main carrier segment contains loads of thrusters, the oxygen and hydrogen refining systems, and an ore refinery. The 2 other segments that split off are each really agile mining ships with turrets and auto cannons. When every part of the ship has been assembled, the whole thing looks like a large like Battle Cruiser, has a total of 8 turrets (4 on the Carrier, 2 rocket 2 assault cannon+2 on each mining ship, both minigun), a plethora of guns (each Miner has 6 frontal auto cannons and a rocket launcher, and the Carrier has Artillery Cannons and Rocket Launchers)
I'm not great at ship design so actually getting a working version of this made took me days of work but it works pretty smooth. In order to fully dock the ships so that you don't risk damage to them or the carrier I used merge blocks directly around the Connectors because I read that Connectors only magnetize, they don't make 2 separate grids into one. If you want to undock a Miner you just disconnect Connector and then turn the group of Merge Blocks for the ship named "Dock" off. The ships should smoothly separate, and it can even be done while the Carrier is in motion, it's just the pilot of the Miner can't move until the Carrier pulls forward, and the Carrier can't turn while a Miner is in the process of undocking otherwise smashing will happen as soon as it disconnects.
"assuming space engineers has any sense of structural integrity," builds spaceship on 1 landing gear.
For style I find it helps to assume it, for function, build what works :D
@@Splitsie indeed.
Corby Sloan it just WoRkS
I usually build my ships in creative and use a projector and fix any issues I missed for survival
@@Splitsie I modified your ship I wish there was a way to show you, I might be able to put it on the workshop
I'm surprised you don't have a lot of views/subscribers, you're tutorials are clean, basic, quick and straight forward. I've started space engineers yesterday (June 24, 2017) Your tutorials are very helpful :)
Thanks so much for the kind words!
Hope these help you get some real fun out of the game :)
He's getting big, but it's a niche game sooooo nobody really is picking it up for the first time.
Funny that you say this. I wanted to buy it and play it but then I forgot about it. I came across his beginners tutorials and I liked them and I want to see what I can do with the game so I bought it.
Hey Everyone! With this video I've taken a slight step away from my usual tutorials, I struggled with how to put all my ideas about large ship design into a single video without it being a glorified lecture. So instead I thought I'd just show you exactly how I do my designs, I've tried to give as much insight as I can into the way I design and I hope you find it useful.
Here's the link to the design on the workshop: steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=950873413
The side effect of doing the video this way is that it is proving to be a LOT longer, at this stage I'm looking at possibly 3 or 4 videos for this design. I'm well on my way to finishing up the next one and will upload it as soon as I'm done. If things go to plan that will be before the weekend :)
Hope you guys are enjoying this different approach, if you have any comments or suggestions I'd love to hear them!
I'd much rather see a detailed clips like this, than an abbreviated clips that leaves me guessing at the parts that weren't shown, any day.
Also, the thought process behind the design is just as important (if not more so) than the actual construction. Understanding the thought process helps me to better understand how to set about creating my own design, rather than just copying other designs in their entirety.
I particularly like your idea of using conveyor tubes to create redundancy in your design. Up to now I have always tried to make my ships as compact as possible, moving things around to get the best use of various ports to minimize the space used. Although this minimizes build materials it has two major flaws. Firstly, it doesn't allow for changes to a design without major re-construction. Secondly, it makes the constructions look very much like a brick outhouse with engines.
So far I have only built small ships, but I now think that I am ready to move up a level. So, for me, this mini-series is most welcome, no matter how long it takes.
Cheers.
Thanks so much for the feedback :)
It's always a challenge in survival to build more when less will get you by as the resources can be a pain to gather, but when I've done gone to the extra bit in the past I've always been happier with the result.
I think the most important thing when it comes to survival builds are the hydrogen bottles.
Yep, those are right up there, especially if you're like me and are constantly forgetting to refill them :P
I use atmo and ion hydrogene is to make fly my enormous monstruosity of carrier overlordthis thing have 90k of blpck for 1 hangar and it have 2 hangar with 6 cruiser inside an difhter are all arround the hull because they have a role of secondary armor and onvasion or defense fighter because overlord cant land onn planet or will replace a part of the ground by a hole with some armor block damaged
I might be a few years late to the vid, but I love how consistent this game is so far. All of the tutorials and basic guides from like 5 years ago still help! (and this one is no exception)
Keen (the Devs) have been great about backwards compatibility throughout development. One of my series, I ran the same save through over 2 years of weekly updates without it ever breaking 🙂
@@Splitsie That's nice to know going on :)
Started a big build last weekend after see this video I feel that this weekend I may be using my grinder alot , Great video some nice tips Thank you
You're very welcome, there's more to come in the next few videos too, hopefully some good tips mixed into the rambling :)
Even after still playing this game on Xbox for probably a year now, I still feel like a beginner, these videos help out a ton when I’m starting a new project
I followed this tutorial, 3 times, and built three bricks... Am I just broken?
If they were sexy looking bricks then you learned everything you needed to learn ;)
@@Splitsie LOL
No, you just need a design. One of the hardest things to think up.
Ze Great Pumpkinani Build a T shape for starting
SHREK BRICK
"If human military designers had their way, every colour of the spectrum would be removed except for grey, green and black and we would all live in windowless boxes."
- Ranger Dulann, Babylon 5
Is this game worth buying
@@senorskellig9131 absolutely
You forgot tan
@@senorskellig9131 I dont usually buy games but I bought this ones and all dlcs just cause I thought this guys deserved more of my money. So yes. Worth it
@jose rodriguez
> "but I bought this ones and all dlcs"
Ah.. so you're part of the reason they're still releasing DLC to this day....
People told me when they added the first DLC (and I also said there was going to be more) 'it's just $3.99 it costs less than a pint at the bar!', 'why are you making such a big deal about the DLC, yeah some functional blocks are included but does it really matter? it doesn't cost that much.'
Now theres 5 DLCs and it's $19.95 for all of them, that's literally 4 cents under the full price of the main game.
And guess what.. they're releasing more news updates hinting at even more DLC, so it'll cost more than the game to buy them all shortly, Keen took the one game they made that had promise (and killed off all their others) and are draining it for all it's worth with low quality content, and you're encouraging it.
The game is going to die, the coders would rather port some furniture or have the art guys make a new skin and sell it for money (along with a couple blocks they should've added a LONG TIME AGO) on their obviously still early access title (that they released just to add DLC) instead of actually working on the gameplay loop, networking issues, bugs and general lagginess.
You might say "but they're using the money to work on the GAMEEEE"..
Nope.. they bought a mansion with the money.
They also blew a good portion of the money on Good AI, one of Rosa's other failed projects.
cant believe its been five years already. you are the reason I started space engineers, thank you.
Splitsie "this helps you avoid the brick" i feel personally attacked :')
lol :D
I’ve been watching since survival maybe, and you are by far my favorite creator, I’ve loved every series so far. I just got the game a few days ago, and have been rewatching these tutorials.
Brick design is the most efficient, how dare you blaspheme! Even our trusty starter ship is a brick.
Bricks are good for one thing: dropping onto other objects to see how exciting you can make the crash ;)
Splitsie or onto _people_ 😈😈😈😈😈😈😈
*no, that’s a sphere*
new to space engineers but pumped almost 30 hours into it now, and this video is so entertaining! some things i like to figure out myself, but when you say "its easier to start with the big blocks", it just helps a lot and i have a bunch of "ahaa!" moments during this video. thanks, really nice.
You're welcome, glad it gave you a few aha moments :)
You are like the Bob Ross of Space Engineers. Happy Little Ships. :D
Lol :)
As a new player that wants to build a big ship this actually helps me alot
Awesome :)
It's always nice to hear that these have been helpful
Ships in the expanse (at least the books) and a few in the show are brick like, but also have enough detail and unique shapes to look good. This gives me inspiration for designs in se
The expanse is a pretty decent series to take inspiration from given the tech level isn't too different from SE so you can do a decent job of nailing the style :)
I really enjoy your videos. Even with having over 600h playtime i still have struggle with the extended game mechanics i really have never the intresst to look over it playing alone but with your tutorials i have the feeling its worth to look closer into the game even with playing alone. I hope really that you will make some tutorials about more extended mechanics like rotating blocks on bases or some usefull shipdesign to mine massiv amount of asteroids materials. You really make a good job at your tutorials.
(sry for some bad english i´m not really used to it ^^)
You must be doing pretty well with english to be able to understand an Australian accent like mine :)
I'm glad you're enjoying them though!
When you say rotating blocks, do you mean using things like rotors and pistons? I've got a plan to do a tutorial on those in the future. I'll try to come up with a vertical miner or something like that and do a series similar to this ship build on it if I am happy with the design :)
Splitsie i wish i had an australian accent mate
I will admit it has it's upsides when in North America, but not so handy in New Zealand or England :P
Splitsie I understand you perfectly, I am non native english speaker and my english teacher were more british, UA-cam probably helped for the other accents.
Splitsie, thank you. you are a lifesaver (the title, not the gummy. just to be clear.) ive been needing a staging ship for touching down to space, and making my first space station
Last time I played space engineers was roughly when planets first came out, and even then, I didn't get far. Decided to come back to it, but needed a refresher. Thanks for the guide.
I always like building the interior first, yet the dreaded brick still often takes hold of me, especially when I build something with a hangar bay.
That is a big risk with a hangar bay due to their very large space requirements, but one approach that can help is to have the entrance be at an unusual location, try top, bottom or rear of the ship like the orville and you can end up with a different design. The other thing is to make sure that the rest of the ship is to scale with the hangar bay. The best designs I've looked at on the workshop have a hangar bay that only takes up a small portion of the ship which also helps avoid the brick :)
Splitsie I just want to say that your videos are excellent and I've learned so much about this game watching them. Thanks!
You're very welcome, glad they've been helpful :)
I can’t play this game, (I have no PC) but I find it very satisfying to watch these videos.
It releases on Xbox early April. 😁
I built my first ship recently and I can firmly say I’m proud of it so far. I just need to add the Armor and I’m 99% sure it won’t become a brick!
This is the Birth of the Talisman. Holy Crap! Splitsie, You've helped me and my crew for years now and I'm just now seeing this vid. Lil late but I caught it. I built my own take on the Great Fox (to scale) and never knew about this...
I'm glad I've been able to help you build some fun stuff :)
This is helpful for me coming back from about a year hiatus on this game. A lot has changed and it’s nice to relearn from you
Thanks, glad it's been useful for you :)
This will help me when I start my Xbox game for the VERY first time if EVER playing on space engineers when I’m trying to make a large ship with hangar, and eventually a asteroid base
I’m sooo excited!!! Literally a immeasurable anount of excitement due to a very boring quarantine
Again you saved me, I just got comfortable building small grid ships and then loosing them too the dark void in space by running out of hydrogen and not having Ions “Because I finally discovered they run off of batteries” thanks again man great work! Time too not loose another ship! Maybe...
Glad I could help again :)
FINALLY SOMEONE BUILDING A SHIP WITHOUT SPEADING UP !
LIKE NORMAL !!!
Took me a while to work out how to best edit around those builds for SE :)
this old video really helped, thank you so much
I do not know if it still works but, if you hold shift and use the scroll wheel you can change the distance the ghost block sits. Making it easier to place the bigger items.
I'm not completely certain, but that often doesn't work for me in survival (always works in creative)... I'm not sure if I'm just being derpy or if it's meant to be that way :P
@@Splitsie i do believe it still works in survival, it works for me anyway, not sure why it wouldn't be working for you.
I know it's not exactly a unique process but I found it very interesting seeing your design process and how similar it is to mine. I begin with a function over form and then iterate until I get a vehicle that looks "nice". I usually go through 2-6 passes of redoing the external design shifting around internal functional blocks to better suit flow throughout the vehicle.
About 20:50
Spawning on a burning wreckage on an asteroid is just great. If it’s still powered on, you should be able to fix everything.
enjoyed this video, I'm currently designing my first large ship and appreciate another point of view about how to go about doing this. The way you've gone about this is very interesting, I was going to go about it by building the interior you can walk in first and building the hull around it. Can't wait for the next video in this series!
I've done things that way before as well, I tend to do things that way when I'm building in creative because in don't need the ship to function until it's complete. For survival I find it handy to have a working ship first.
It's good to have a few different approaches though, stops you getting frustrated when things aren't working :)
I liked how you used Light Armor Slopes to create air tightness but also preserve space. Hadn't thought of that.
Thanks, glad you got a helpful tip out of it :)
Pro tip for us playing on 1x1x1: Make a welding ship before starting on a big ship. Building this with 400l inventory will take ages.
So very true, it's one of the things I love about x1 inventory (and why I'm happy with the changes coming in the survival patch). Being 'encouraged' to engineer around painful problems like running back and forth a thousand times is a good thing in my book :)
maybe I'll finally be able to build a ship that both works and looks good, now. Thanks!
Hopefully so, fingers crossed my design ideas are worth learning :P
Thank you so much for all you’re videos! Just bought the game and built my first ever custom miner (also my first build):) took 3 tries but in the end I got it. Thought about building a larger ship so I can explore the galaxy and was 100% sure I would build a shoe box. Thanks!
im such a noob before this video I was building armor first and ignoring the essentials, great tutorial thanks, now im getting better at building.
Glad it helped :)
Anyone else notice how in this video he always says "oxygen generators" but uses only H2/O2 generators? Lul. Thanks for the video, mate! As always heaps and heaps of solid advice and insight that one can only gain from spending countless hours breaking their brain learning to build. We thank you for your sacrifice.
Actually back then they were still labeled in game as oxygen generators, it's taken some time but I now mostly remember to call them by their new name :P
The ship I was building was a brick, and this video helped me redesign it to look more unique
Thanks, glad it helped :)
Really great video just started playing the game few weeks back and learned alot of things from your videos
This is a pro tip, watch more of splitsie's videos!
Thanks :)
if anyone is watching this in 2019 here's my tip; use references.
It doesn't even need to be a ship space or naval. most of my designs i think of ww1 or ww2 tanks, like german design philosophy and such things.
it also doesn't need to be something like the aforementioned, I like what splitsie said in the beginning, ""U' shaped". take that and run with it. make the whole ship a giant "U". it sounds silly to some but it really works.
maybe this helps maybe it doesn't; personally I can't make bricks, it against my nature.
Yep, pretty much pick a shape you like the idea of and run with it, the weirder the object you start from I find tends to make for some really cool designs :)
Sounds about right. We're 5 guys playing on a server, and we litterally building a mothership in the form of a picnic table
I've never played space engineers but I've been planning to make a game like it for a long time, where you're a robot with a spaceship who travels the galaxy gathering metals for weapons,space ships, argon lasers, different robots to switch between and upgrades for them, and gas from gas bubbles in space for fuel. So you can pvp or build a giant base on a planet or astroid. It really sucks I came up with a lot of this thinking I was ahead of my time but this games shows that I'm behind asf. I love space engineers and I'm glad I know it now so I don't steal any of the mechanics.
I started playing the beta for Xbox and every large ship I’ve made has been a brick, but thanks to you I have made my first ever amazing dreadnaught 😊
Nice, glad it helped :)
We want a brick design tutorial, God dammit!
At this point in SE development, I can defenitely tell that many of the design limitations, like the conveyors right next to the cockpit area that could only be covered by ramp armor, have been alleviated thanks to newer blocks like armor paneling.
Thank you Keen!
What would be cool is to see this ship as a basic lander for other planets. Have some giant cruiser or mother ship that you use to jump between planets for material gathers and just general RP. It'd be pretty sick.
brick is a good shape. It is slim without splitting, has simple up down an sides and can be split between engines, utility and weaponry
But it's so dull :P
I like building the bridge first, then an industrial bulkhead, then my larger blocks, as I Usually end up having a large enough cross section for a centerline. H2 tanks and usually large storage containers, I've come out with some nice design from it. It also gives some semblance of weak points, since I don't wanna deviate too much from the bridge cross section. I also love doing nacelle based ships so I can shove a bunch of stuff in secondary sections and not just everything in line.
I've learned from my own building experiences that it is also possible to snap glass to metal catwalks for an edgeless finish. :)
it looks really nice! next time i'm on SE i'll try something like this myself
The idea of spending hours on a ship and flying it into space, and seeing that I MADE THIS and THIS IS ACTUALLY USEFUL AND WORKS, is just amazing, I'm getting there, still building rovers, and mining, but one day...
That is certainly one of the highlights of space engineers - and kerbal space program :P
the refinery along one axis is 2 large-grid units thick, BUT becomes 3 when you add yield modules. So I count that into the overall measurement. helped me keep my novice level bare bones miner-refiner ship balanced.
This video is definitely beneficial in helping buiild smaller large ships. XD My first large ship was WAY bigger and I thought it was small XD. I actually built the blueprint first, then structured the ships hull around that blueprint, and that worked well enough. It did help that i had an idea of what i sort of wanted it to look like and what kind of rooms i wanted. Definitely wishing i had more room for hydrogen though. All in all itll be about 6 rooms including the storage/foyer/armory area, which makes it a pretty decent size. Not quite a capital ship, or even a frigate.. but its big enough. Its home. :3
One thing that i do want to point out is to be careful with the air vents, as they cost a TON of energy now. Not sure about back 3 years ago, but now they cost iirc around 150kw per tick which is nuts.
That's a good point on the air vents, I don't think they were that expensive back then but I certainly notice them now
@@Splitsie Yeah.. Its something im struggling with right now. Also i just checked, and it looks like its around 330kw. It originally was 0.33kw. Maybe a typo? But the dev team say its by design so i have no clue what the were thinking...
Me: *has 456 hours on record*
Also Me: "huh....it looks like a dorito.....spicy..."
700h and More 🙃
I usually just build rocket style ships with overexposed engines, but then all of my designs are or were civilian so I guess that's fine.
A good shape I've found for not being confusing to assemble but also look great is a flat oval so like angled corners and build it vertically so similar to a rocket so the top of the tube would be your cockpit the front when flying the bottom would be the thrusters and maybe even the docking point if you want it to be a mother's hip kind of thing that your smaller ships can port in
Love this video! This is just what I needed to know to make my builds better!
Thanks and you're very welcome :)
In all large ships i build, i have an abundance of hydrogen generators to not make it a "Station Ship". I then always add a stowable 6 axis drill arm for gathering ice. I am thinking about upgrading to 8 axis so that i can curve it and make good turns in tunnels. This drill can also be used for mining regular ores, as it is connected to the rest of the ship. After i add this, i make a small rover miner. as backup. Most H2 Generators i've had were 62.
This provides me with "Unlimited Range" and makes me truly mobile.
I know you made these videos ages ago, but I think they‘d be even better either without music or with less… loud music. I know it‘s the soundtrack of the game, but then again, I also never thought the soundtrack ever fit the game at all. It‘s the first thing I muted back then. :P
Other than that, it‘s a *really* good set of tutorial videos, even after five years. Thanks a lot!
Starting to build my first big ship.
If it's a ship I never plan on landing planetside, would you still use hydrogen thrusters, or use ion instead?
If I have the platinum I'd probably go with ion, maybe with a few hydrogen available for extra bursts of speed (such as when running away from something) :P
LCS.Thanks for vid :) pre-build tour comment of previous vid doesn't apply to bigger builds as I can see from the playlist this build took many vids before reaching the stage when you could show the finished article and that without all the time editing, checking sound, sourcing music. many of your subs appreciate your regular uploads(becomes routine to watch between bathtime and bedtime :p ).. much appreciation for the share volume of work off cam that goes into making your vids. mahusive thankyou an much luv :)
This method of construction is definitely an option, personally I find it clunky and a bit frustrating.
My suggestion is to either remove the drills from your hover miner and add a welder in their place, or (my favorite method) build a small hover vessel with a welder on one end and a grinder on the other. Add a remote control unit on the back of your ship plus a view camera, every time you need to grind something, you switch to remote control and turn the little ship around.
If you play with realistic inventory size, it will spare you thousands of trips to your storage, you simply dock your builder ship, load it up with materials, get back to building, not to mention jetpack fuel.
The reason you can't remove the drills from a mining ship and simply put a welder in their place is the size of the conveyor tubes. Because almost none of the components for construction can pass through small tubes you'll be unable to get anything into the welders or out of the grinders, a purpose built ship is almost always necessary.
As to building with a ship, it's one of the best reasons to play with realistic inventory settings, they really force the use of engineered solutions like that. The downside is always that ship welders and grinders are unfortunately slower than the upgraded hand held (something that I wish was the other way around), so even with x3 inventory it's normally faster to weld and grind by hand :(
Almost quit space engineers on my first day, as i had next to no sleep and i am playing it on xbox one, which lacks good tutorials, so i almost had a fit at the game because it kept freezing and after i installed it and tried to make a new world it also failed to load. But i gave it a while and now i am having fun making bricks that did not in fact fly well for a brick.
Dis man needs 100k!
It's not too far away now - which means I need to think of something special to do for it...
I like to build my ships in sections for what i need after the other, this ends up with a slight brick but still nicely curved. i start the first one with the bridge with the medbay, which sits on the front of my ship with large H2s under it and the a set 2-4 refineries with 8-16assemblers on the ends of the refineries with a cargo area attached of 18-24 large cargos. then the section for drills and grinders which are placed on a few pistons, and i have large ion engines in all directions in this section for small maneuvers. then a section with about 24 large H2 tanks and O2/H2gens in between and place 8-12 jump drives that then make up the wall between the Fuel section and the drill section. then i start placing the hull around it and place large and small H2s on all places that have free connection points. after i place 2 large hangar bays on each side for small ships. Batteries, O2 tanks, and all other small blocks are placed in the free areas. for power i place all of the power production plants, so i have solar "sails" on the hangars, windmills on top, reactors somewhere in the ship and H2 gens somewhere in the back with the fuel.
this makes a really large ship but one that has all you could need and you can also place a ton of guns on it for the perfect battlestation, it takes a few days to build and fuel up tho.
Thank you so much you’re so helpful!
You're very welcome :)
Been eyeballing your tutorials a lot. Great stuff! About the brick: Yeah it can be fugly, but unless enemy can penetrate your hull (and/or see inside), he has no idea where you have your stuffs ;)
Really this is just a defend for the sakes that my first ship is practically a flying (giant) brick.
Thanks, agree with you about the pvp benefits of a brick design. I'd still probably end up with all sorts of greebling though ;)
you usualy avoid as much as possible to start with the Hull, i always start with the Internal components like reactor, piping, cockpit, thrusters and so on. after im happy with my results i then start building the hull, i use the diagonal parts as muhc as possible, that way at the end it mostly wont look like a boxshaped ship.
If doing things that way works for you that's awesome. For my own builds I prefer doing a mixture of hull and internal components. Where the parts are large I need to put them down to get an idea of what sort of space I'll require but then the same can be true of hull shapes. If there's a particular curve or other larger shape I want to include in the armour I will put that in first then create some internal structures and facilities to fit to that.
If you're building something with an industrial feel you might want to stick to largely squared off shapes, though I still find that adding diagonals to corners helps. The shapes you use should be dictated by the function or aesthetic you choose - which is very much a personal thing and I wouldn't dictate that to anyone, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that. This little series of videos was not intended to be telling people that there is only one way to build, instead it was meant to give insight into what works for me to guide people who might otherwise be struggling :)
when you watch one of the later videos then recognize the build while watching an older vid.
"Is this... the Talisman?"
lol It is indeed :)
I have now seen it's origin.
How did you weld like that, with all the parts magically appearing?
Ah, that's what happens when you place a block in survival mode and because you want to get the recording done quickly you switch to creative mode rather than having to make all the components. When you weld up in creative mode it adds the components to match the level of construction :)
@@Splitsie well that'll do it lol
Awesome! Cant wait for the next video!
Thanks! Coming soon :)
Being able to see the entire build process along with mistakes being shown and all that is a nice touch :D I will say though that this style compared to the other tutorials feels more like sitting in a classroom (not that is a bad thing or anything 😇) while watching the teacher use a projection screen and pointing out piece by piece while keeping their tone of voice mostly around the same level. Granted it still does a great job to hold your attention. Kind of curious if you end up making the ramp portion a rotor based thing like your other builds though :P
I didn't use a mobile ramp for this one as I couldn't see a way it would fit without looking worse than the awkward permanent ramp, but I'm glad you appreciate the approach I take. When I'm recording tutorials I imagine I'm explaining things to someone beside me which means I don't need to yell/scream etc and if I think a mistake is a nice way of highlighting a potential point of frustration then I leave them in too :)
Jusy got into pc gaming (I'm from xbox) and lord it's like minecraft, mine i have slop front armor, this guide is super helpful!
I made a A-10 warthog type ship and by that I mean to say I designed it around the main gun, in this case a rotary rail gun. It looks nice ish but I’m bad at making things blocky so thanks for the help ima try to sleek it up
Just remember that everyone starts out with bricks, but with enough time you'll start to learn more an more block combos that look good and it gets easier and easier, or at least faster :P
Loving your videos. Thank you
Thanks and you're welcome :)
With my interest in SE peaked, been watching some videos. Like this. For most of time I prefer to built a "chassis" or a "skeleton" of the ship with the general shape I'm looking for. Like making a T, where the upper part of the T is for forward thrusters, filling up with redudantly with power, first focusing on the "center piece" of the shit like what makes this ship more special. Is it a small ship toting gratious amount of guns, a big broadsider with ridiculous rocket salvo sides protected by hangar doors? or a large industrial ship carrying small, maneuverable miners? Once the function and form is done, gotta take it for a test drive. If it handles way too well, spins bit too fast, acceralted and decceraltes on dime, it's good to go for the final phase
Then I hide the outer side of skeleton with light blocks and start shaping the form from there with just the full blocks, depending on the usage, this allows me to either give a hollow shell or give multiple layers of armor, usually the 1-3 outer layers being hard armo. All military ships get their shaped blocks heavy.
Anywho, might be two years old, but this build video series at least starts on strong note and Splitsie speaks with that warm patience that makes just listening a guy speak about space legos interesting..
That's certainly the way that I sometimes go about it, I tend to vary my approach dependent on what's most important to me with that ship. If it's form, I'll start with that and try to cram as much in as I can, if it's function I usually end up with something ugly that works, then spend multiple iterations adjusting it until it looks adequate :P
And thanks, that last sentence made my day :)
Your allowing the function of the ship to completely dictate your aesthetics, this limits your design choices, efficiency in design can come in other forms. However it is simple for beginners and thank you for the very helpful tutorial, your vids are informative.
True, it's just one way of approaching design. I couldn't think of a simpler method for helping people to improve and avoid the brick at the time though, hopefully it helped a few people be happier with their builds :)
You either want to run nice, or efficient ship. Repairing
"nice" ship after combat is extreme pain. After few pirates it looks like borg design :D
Excellent process - Hope to meet u out there
Thanks, hope you found it helpful :)
Just one oversight to point out, you could have attached conveyor tubes to the cargo containers and then added thrusters there.
There are plenty of spots you could add extras, I had a look in mind when I started this build, in a lot of ways I was just lucky that it actually flew ;)
Thank God, I need something like this! All my ships are bricks or cubes or something lame.
i personally love brick ships . especially one with 3 large shield generators, just brick everything .
for the sake of the ship's longevity I build the hull first, with the larger blocks in mind with space around certain sides for maintenance
That's certainly the approach I use sometimes, I change up my approach dependent on the needs of the ship: for looks, design shape first then squeeze everything in, function first, build all the core first, leaving enough space and then try to make it look at least half decent.
@@Splitsie that seems like a good strategy, maybe during the design process you can add extra components if your design allows it. I will definitely give your approach a try in my next ship
I like brick ships, they can take an unimaginable amount of punishment in multiplayer
One of my mates built a replica of the USS Enterprise NCC1701 and challenged me to a duel
I threw together a cube in about 20 minutes, covered it in turrets and won 5 times in a row, my cube didn't get repaired and didn't have shields at all
His one was completely replaced after each battle and had shields
The it took him 5 battles to finally take out my reactor (which was covered in about 10 layers of heavy armor)
There's a reason military devices tend to be bulky and generally pretty ugly (many aircraft being the obvious exception, but they're a special case), when you're aiming for pretty you should be doing it because that's where you find the fun - I don't enjoy flying around in a brick, even if it's going to survive as it just doesn't make me happy :P
@@Splitsie true, when I'm playing in single player or if the server has shields and not too many OP weapons, I tend to design ships that look cool and just put stronger shields on it
But if I'm playing on a server without shields or there are massively OP weapons, I usually just fly bricks into combat because they last longer
My bases are almost always solid bricks of armor, my current base on the server I play on is 20 blocks thick of heavy armor on all sides which is embedded in the voxel, it took AGES for me and my mate to actually get the resources and build it
during the construction of this base, we lived in a Borg cube style ship with a shield on it and covered in turrets, so far we have been attacked 12 times (4 during construction and 8 after completion) 5 have cracked the shields, but only 2 of those 5 ships have been able to crack the shields and do real damage to the base other than breaking a few armor blocks
The worst one was when someone who also liked to use brick ships came in with a series of pulse cannons (mod weapon) on the bottom of the ship and simply started drilling through the armor, the base shield dropped within 20 seconds and the turrets outside his ship tore our AI controlled fighter drones to shreds (patrol waypoints programmed into the RC block)
Only thing that managed to drive him away was when I crashed my battleship into his (we had teleport pads in the server, so I TPd from the war room to the ship and rammed him into the ground)
Apparently he barely had enough thrust to stay aloft let alone arrest a 280m/sec fall (the speed limit was modded)
The damage to the base was extensive and I ended up putting my battleship just above the hole for the 2 days it took to rebuild and get the shields working again (there wasn't much left of his ship and this world is VERY stingy with ore deposits to encourage PvP)
That was the greatest day in my SE career and is the very essence of PvP fun
You know what, Chinese players said:力大砖飞. It means :force big brick fly.
I really like the videos! i'm new to the game and these are a big help!! thank you so much
You're very welcome Brett, I'm glad they've been helpful for you :)
Is there a blue print for the atmospheric ship splitsie has in the background? I really like the design, just curious how he has it designed and layed out. I tend to make ships that look bring like, I always struggle with designing something that looks cool.
I'm guessing you mean the old atmospheric lander, that's the ship that you used to start the game with and I suspect there's a blueprint of it somewhere on the workshop if you search for 'atmospheric lander' or 'original atmospheric lander' :)
Great tutorial :)
Thanks! It's really nice to read that people like this stuff :)
*ALWAYS BUILD YOUR SYSTEMS FIRST* then frame it, but good tutorial
Not necessarily, though it is the way I often build, these days I can build with a mix of armour design and internals and that can improve the end result as I'm more inclined to leave extra space between certain functional parts to allow for a more complete armour design at the end :)
@@Splitsie
I just got the notification for your reply. Thanks youtube.
Anyway. Thats also a good way to build, although i think it would take longer. But still good.
Love your videos. Keep on going.
Wow, I think that's one of the latest notifications I've heard of UA-cam doing, it appears they're smashing their own records over and over ;)
@@Splitsie
I didnt get this one either. I just came back to re-watch the series and found you had replied.
Keep going, best tutorials and videos ive ever found.
Great video!
Personally how I avoid bricks is laying out a series of steady drives (inward facing enclosed thrusters in a box of armor blocks 6 point movement and it's hidden so you FPS stays good and you minimize the amount of space used for thrusters on the outside) i space the drives out with with beams long enough to put my systems in, and then i "even" out the contours so the shape of the ship forms. then final detailing is that much easier.
I do similar block style building when I'm making ships in Avorion, I find it helps at times to think of the ship that way, but it's probably just because of the excessive amount of time I've spent in Space Engineers and Minecraft :P
SE is not a game, it's a state of mind.
Sounds like something Xocliw would say at the end of an update video
unless symmetry is not available in that release USE SYMMETRY but keep up the good work and thank you
This is survival mode, symmetry has never been available there, would be nice if we could build like that onto a projection but I don't think that's likely to happen
I really like this.
If you're playing official, because of the psu limit (the amount of blocks you can place) dont use the advice of this video. Test a design in creative and figure out its psu. Psu on official atm is 6250 which is very little. Hopefully it increases so you dont have to worry as much. Bricks are normally efficient and perform the task its intended to do while keeping psu down.
I might build this for myself in my survival game.
In addition to that I would have also added a piston and hanger doors for the ion thrusters , Atmospheric thrusters ,Hydrogen Thrusters , and landing gear .
Protip: bricks are fine given enough detail. Bricks with ribbing, exposed tubing, and wings looks really good on the right scale.
It's not really a brick at that point though :P
It's a greebled brick shaped thing