Wednesday, November 25, 2020

Space Engineers: Wasteland


SUMMARY:
  • New Armor Block Variants
  • New Voxel Materials
  • New Planet, Scenario
  • New Rover Cockpit
  • New Features
  • Xbox Dedicated Servers
  • Premium Content
  • FAQs


Ready, Steady, Go! 

The new Wasteland update is here! Wasteland is all about racing, speed, dust, roaring engines, twisted metal, and especially, fun with your friends. We have focused heavily on the multiplayer racing experience, something we hope you enjoy with other players. Wasteland provides you with new choices when designing your creations. With this new set of blocks, you can now build even better vehicles, cars, and rovers. And we can't wait to see what you create!   


Free Content

As with every update, since Space Engineers moved out of early access, we are expanding the number of blocks, materials, and features with the Wasteland release. Expand your creative arsenal with new blocks, specifically created for this occasion, and new voxel materials designed to provide that “perfect” racing feeling. Take a seat in a new cockpit and cruise your vehicle across the landscape of a brand new planet, custom built for Wasteland. 

You can find the list of all new free game additions below. We are again giving you the opportunity to support the future development of Space Engineers by buying the Wasteland DLC, which includes even more thematic additions to Space Engineers.
 

Armor Blocks
  • Half Slope Inverted
  • Half Slope Corner
  • Half Slope Corner INV.
  • Sloped Corner Tip
  • Sloped Corner Base
  • Sloped Corner
  • Half Sloped Corner Base
  • Half Corner
  • Corner Square
  • Corner Square INV.
  • Half Sloped Corner


New Planet - Pertam

A sprawling (50KM) desert world. While it's barren landscape may seem somewhat alien, the atmosphere is breathable. With a world gravity of 1.2, electrical storms, and scarce resources, even hardened survivalists will struggle to carve out a settlement here.



Voxel Materials
  • CrackedGround
  • DustyRocks1
  • DustyRocks2
  • DustyRocks3
  • PertamSand


Rover Cockpit



Scrap Race Scenario

Scrap Race is a racing scenario designed for multiplayer. Custom craft a vehicle of your own, or select one of the pre-designed ones and compete against motorheads, thrillseekers, and speed-freaks from across the system. Get building, get racing, or get left in the dust.



New Features
  • Hydrogen Rebalance
  • Ultimate Spectator
  • VST Dedicated server support
  • Wheel and boot print decal support


Xbox Dedicated Servers

Since the release of Space Engineers on Xbox, dedicated servers have been a high priority! Not just as a requested feature, but as a single solution for many of our most requested community features.

Increasing the number of players in a multiplayer game, unlimited PCUs, and scripting were the biggest requests on our support forums from the community. The answer to all of these are Dedicated Servers.

From now on, you can join any public server in the Join Game screen:


The “Join Game” screen also features a favorites and a history tab, where you can find the last joined servers or your favorites. The “Friends” tab will list the servers where any of your friends are connected.

Starting today, there are multiple official public servers, available for free, for each major region.

You can even spawn your own Dedicated Server right from the Join screen, selecting our Nitrado partner logo. It will start their eponymous app, where you can set up the server however you want. If you don’t feel like having the server public, it can be password protected. 

You can also enable scripts there.

See our partner’s app for more details on pricing and server setup instructions. 

Other Xbox News

With this update, we have made numerous improvements to Gamepad controls and Xbox build overall.

You can now scroll through the block variants in the recent blocks, set the size of the GUI for TVs cropping your screen edges, improved block grouping, set exact value for any slider in the game and many many more. See the changelog for the whole list.

Last but not least, we have added support for spiders and wolfs AI to the Xbox build.

This update is packed with improvements for the Xbox community and we feel it finally got the attention it deserved. Please, let us know what you think!

Xbox Series X

With this update, players fortunate enough to own Series X console, will get some special treatment for their machines. It includes:
  • High graphics settings
  • 500000 PCU in experimental (up from 200000 for other consoles)
  • Better simulation quality in scenarios
  • Blazing fast loading times
  • Much better performance overall

Wasteland Pack

Similar to our previous major releases, we decided to give you an opportunity to support the further development of Space Engineers. We have created a pack that consists of cosmetic items that enrich your game visually. You can experience them in the free Wasteland scenario. None of the things in the package brings any advantage to players who purchase this DLC. The price of the Wasteland Pack is $3.99 USD, or your regional Steam equivalent, so if you wish to support us, check out the Wasteland Pack. 

The package includes the following items:

Off-road Wheels: Make your vehicle stand out, with the new Off-Road Wheels


Exhaust Pipes: Use the Exhaust Pipes to decorate your ride with new particle effects


Buggy Cockpit: Drive in style in the new Buggy Cockpit


2 Viewport Blocks: Update your crew quarters with the new View Port block


Barred Window: An ultra-rugged reinforced steel window.


Offset Light: A variation of the interior light with a brand new look.


Offset Spotlight: A proper looking headlight for all your vehicular needs.


3 Storage Shelves: Spice up your garage, storage room, or shop!


Concrete Armor Skin: New skins allow for structures and vehicles like never seen before in Space Engineers.


Dust Armor Skin


Heavy Rust Armor Skin


Retro Future Armor Skin


Scavenger Character Skin: Brave the wasteland in the Scavenger suit.


2 New Character Emotes: “Drunk” & “Bite Me”


All the items in the pack are cosmetic only. We would love for you to send us screenshots of how you used the items from the Wasteland pack in game. We will post the most creative ones on our social media.

What's Next? 

We plan to continue with the development of Space Engineers for both PC and Xbox platforms. With this release we are aligning the content between PC and Xbox, so all players on Xbox have the same content available. Our focus is also on further performance improvements and optimizations on both platforms.  

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why are you releasing another DLC? 
A: As with our previous DLCs, this release gives us the opportunity to explore new ideas and provide more unique content the community wants. We have kept the same approach, all players will be able to interact with the blocks, but only those who own the DLC pack will be able to build them.

Q: Should we now expect that we will get a new DLC every three months? 
A: Free and paid content releases support the continued development of Space Engineers, as well as bringing new things to the game. All paid DLCs are not pay-to-win, but rather cosmetic. We think this is the right way to bring interesting content to the game and keep the game improving. We bring a lot of free content to all players. This content is usually highly requested by our community. 

Q: Can we expect some special promotions in the future?
A: We are always looking at new ways to bring Space Engineers to a wider audience. Special promotions are good opportunities for this. We just had a massive promotion on Steam and we have a number of exciting promotions planned for the future, which includes both game and DLC content!

Hiring

If you’re interested in working on awesome games like Space Engineers, we’d love to hear from you! 
Check out the open positions at Keen Software House and don’t forget to send us your English CV/resume and cover letter.

Remote collaboration is possible!

  

Follow our social media to get the latest news!


If you want to let me know your feedback, please get in touch via my personal email address marek.rosa@keenswh.com, or use our Keen Software House support site. I welcome all of the feedback we receive and we will use it to learn and provide better services to our players.

Thank you for reading this blog!

Best,
Marek Rosa
CEO, Creative Director, Founder at Keen Software House
CEO, CTO, Founder at GoodAI

For more news:
Space Engineers: www.SpaceEngineersGame.com
Keen Software House: www.keenswh.com
Medieval Engineers: www.MedievalEngineers.com
GoodAI: www.GoodAI.com
General AI Challenge: www.General-AI-Challenge.org


Personal bio:
Marek Rosa is the CEO and CTO of GoodAI, a general artificial intelligence R&D company, and the CEO and founder of Keen Software House, an independent game development studio best known for its best-seller Space Engineers (4 million copies sold). Both companies are based in Prague, Czech Republic.

Marek has been interested in artificial intelligence since childhood. He started his career as a programmer but later transitioned to a leadership role. After the success of the Keen Software House titles, Marek was able to personally fund GoodAI, his new general AI research company building human-level artificial intelligence.

GoodAI started in January 2014 and has over 30 research scientists, engineers, and consultants working across its Research and Applied teams.

At this time, Marek is developing Space Engineers, as well as leading daily research and development on recursive self-improvement based general AI architecture - Badger.