What is this
Every Thursday, I will share a dev diary about what we’ve been working on over the past few weeks. I’ll focus on the interesting challenges and solutions that I encountered. I won’t be able to cover everything, but I’ll share what caught my interest.
Why am I doing it
I want to bring our community along on this journey, and I simply love writing about things I’m passionate about! This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly. Any plans I mention aren’t set in stone and everything is subject to change. Also, if you don’t like spoilers, then don’t read this.
Blog Site Upgrades
We made a small but important upgrade to this blog.
You can now subscribe by email and get notified every time I publish a new article. No spam, no sales pitches, no ads – just the article title and a link.
I know many of you follow along with Space Engineers, Space Engineers 2, GoodAI, or my other projects. Some of you told me you occasionally miss new posts unless you stumble upon them via social media. This should make it simpler.
It’s a small change, but I hope it makes it easier to stay connected.
PS: You can also subscribe via RSS if you like the old school route.
Space Engineers 1
I love the smell of burnin’ wreckage in the morning!
I am still amazed by the creativity of Space Engineers players. After more than ten years, I keep seeing new ships, stations, contraptions, and ideas that surprise me. It’s humbling and inspiring to see what you can do with the tools we built.
With Space Engineers 2, my goal is to give you even more freedom. I can’t wait to release the next set of features (after VS2 and planets) that will make building, engineering, and designing even better. I want SE2 to be the place where your imagination meets the most powerful tools we’ve ever created.
Space Engineers 2
Some of you are worried about our yellow submarine – thanks for thinking about her, she is fine. Here is the progress:
Improvements from our amazing Art Teams
I am also proud of our Art team. They are always searching for ways to innovate and speed up the workflow. Every improvement in our tools means more time for creativity and less time spent on repetitive tasks. We have already shown you MateriaLinker by Alice Vescio.
And now check out a preview of another tool, created by Asyraf Braza.
To speed up the workflow, he built a custom Blender add-on for faster block fracture processing:
- Quick presets for adding custom attributes
- One-click mesh separation, auto-renaming, and automatic attributes setup for construction stages
- More improvements that we plan to release to our modding community, so you can process block fractures for modded blocks just as fast as we can
Planets
Work on the Space Engineers 2 planets is at its high peak right now. Our team is fully focused on making planets, terrain, and biomes not just bigger and prettier – but also richer to explore and build on. Every detail matters: from voxel destruction and particle effects, to the look and feel of each biome.
And a funny thing – humans are actually pretty bad at judging the scale of virtual terrain without a clear reference point.
Let me help you – that tiny speck is actually a standing astronaut. Makes the cliff look a bit more impressive, doesn’t it?
We are also working on mining and voxel destruction particles, as well as terrain details. Here you can see particle testing on asteroid, sand, snow, and soil:
Both planets and all the planetary biomes also need its own unique style of rocks:
What planet – and what biome – will be the place for your very first base in Space Engineers 2?
Share your thoughts in the comments below – I read them all, and they’re one of my favorite parts of making our games.
Subscribe and get an email whenever I publish a new post!
GAHHH you give us so little in these dev blogs!! I’m starving for updates!
These dev updates are a pretty major highlight of my week rn, cannot wait to build an industrial powerhouse on verdure. (Also maybe with vs2 we should get a toxic sludge fluid? Would be completely unnecessary but there’s nothing like pumping sweet sludgy goodness into the environment (sorry art team))
There’s just such little info in them!! I need MORE!!
(If it isn’t to much trouble at least)
The rocks look great and add nice detail and scale to the landscape. What happens when you mine them? Are they all sub-voxel grids like in SE1, or do the smaller ones just puff into pickupable ores when you mine them?
First base? In the clouds of course (or wherever the game drops me).
The water looks great in the planet images. Do you think we can get a static version of it in VS2? Just so players know where water is and isn’t when building bases? I’d be fine with a flashing “Work in Progress” icon when you touch it and there is no effect. 😉
Yeah, or even just a variant of terrain that is just blue rock (and stone).
Here’s hoping there will be a jungle/rainforest biome on Verdure. If so that would be my first base location!
The movement through water seems too smooth for that speed, will water collision be implemented? or resistance and buoyancy?
But overall it’s an amazing job and I’m really looking forward to it!
And if buoyancy works, what will happen to the air pressure above the water level in the transfer tanks?
Can we float and sink underwater only with pumping air from builded water tanks to oxygen tank block (under pressure) ?
Maybe an electrolytic separator like the O2/H2 generators in SE1?
Amazing work
I feel the hand mining drill’s model doesn’t quite match its usage capabilities. The drill head is seemingly not much larger than a fist, yet it is capable of carving out large volumes out of tough material. This already felt off in SE1 and somewhat broke the immersion.
A larger, more bulky drill head would feel way more immersive and fitting considering the capabilities of the tool. Perhaps the player character could also be slowed down when having this ‘heavy machinery’ equipped to further reinforce the sense and immersion of operating such a powerful tool. 🙂
Would be interesting to not just randomly / evenly scatter the rocks. put them near cliffs and overhangs. That would look much more realistic.
The top right picture of the rocks on Verdure looks like someone went outside and took a picture of some trees and a small hill. Good stuff!
Will there be a system to make water surfaces more smooth for small lakes? I‘m imagining a mirror lake for example.
Something I would love to see in SE2 would be the ability to have a secondary colour for certain blocks. An example would be the industrial refinery in SE1, I always struggle with the railings and stairs that are part of that model not matching my paint choice for surrounding catwalk.
great work marek, keep it up
Can you create a visual representation in the form of a resource icon on the label when it is in range of the ore detector?
Wow, you got me at the first image on today’s blog. You must be planning a holiday resort there. I can see myself hiking and swimming there already. All I need is a hand glider to launch off of the cliff, a bit of rock pooling and the holiday would be complete.
Looks great.
Planets look really great and I can’t wait to play on them, but I have bad feeling about underground base building in SE2. Because if digging functionaly remains the same as in SE1, then underground bases will have the same issues which they have in SE1 and ngl they are a huge part of PVP survival, so they need to be thought of when designing digging mechanics. There are some videos on YT discussing such bases, one from LSG which I find pretty good covering that topic.
One digging mechanic I think would be good to try out is that with depth drilling becomes harder and requires heavier equipment. This would also potentialy make ore digging more interesting.
In regards to your comment about SE1 builds, I think the feature I want to see MOST in SE2 is the ability to project and build blueprints with subgrids in survival. It has always been strange to me that we can engineer complex grids with various subgrids but there’s no practical way to actually use these outside of creative mode. Builds in survival just feel like a compromise.
I know it’s probably a difficult thing to add but it really brings the creative experience full circle.
Marek. You get a sticker. A sticker that says GREAT JOB FELLOW ENGINEER.
I will chrash my first ship and then hike up a mountain. There i will use my suit-refinery to built a hut that hides the entrance to a massive mountain bunker-base. The base is just because it’s SE and i will want to build a ship at one point. But in reality it’s all about hiking and the hut. In regard of the mining tool i think we all wish the tools to be more than in SE1. More complex (different versions with different advantages/drawbacks). But i guess it’s all work in progress. Thank you
It’s very cool👍
Excellent update!
Thanks for the RSS and subscription feature 👍