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 This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly.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.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all of you, Engineers!
As we reach the end of the year, I want to thank every one of you for being part of this journey. Your feedback, your builds, your videos, and your enthusiasm are what keep this project alive.
Developing Space Engineers 2 in such an open way is challenging, but your support makes it worth it. I hope the holidays bring you peace, joy, and some time to relax.
We have a lot of exciting things ahead, and I cannot wait to share them with you.
Space Engineers 2
We have been running some wild tests with our volumetric clouds. Our clouds are fully 3D formations that react to light, cast shadows, respect biome patterns, and change with the time of day.
Flying through them or watching them roll across the horizon completely transforms how the planets feel. What you see here is just us playing with the system, pushing it, breaking it, and experimenting to understand how far we can take this new layer of atmosphere.
These early tests are always a lot of fun, because this is the moment where technology stops being code and starts becoming part of the world.
Experiments like these take time and room to breathe. If you want to support us and give the team more space for this kind of development, you can help by purchasing the Pioneer Edition. Your support directly fuels the work that makes experimenting like this possible.
Laser antenna – from concept art to finished block.
Let me take you on a quick journey through SE2 block creation.
The process always starts with a simple black and white sketch to lock down the basic shapes and silhouette. Once we are happy with the form, our artists begin playing with colors, materials, and paneling to find a visual language that fits the rest of the SE2 block family. After that comes a series of iterations, refining details, proportions, and functionality until the design finally feels right.
When the final sketch is approved, the block moves into 3D modeling, where all the shapes become real geometry. And from there, it is on the way to the VRAGE3 Editor. This is the moment where concept art stops being a drawing and starts becoming something you can build, place, and engineer within the game.
The Passage set of blocks is getting its turn as well. These blocks may look simple at first glance, but they are an important part of how players shape the interiors of their ships and stations. Passages define the flow of movement, the rhythm of corridors, and the way spaces feel when you walk through them. Our goal is to make them clean, practical, and modular, so you can build interior layouts that feel functional and believable.
And thanks to our 25cm unified grid system you can add any details you want!
Question to you: Cloud planets – yes or no?
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!
I Love, Love the clouds and passageways. i cant wait to get my hands on some new blocks as they fire the neurons of creativity. this week I delved in to making my first mod. a simple detailling block. i managed to model it and get it in game before publishing to the workshop. one bit if feedback Id give is that VRAGE3 is cumbersome, overcomplicated and not very intuitive. the guides are out of date and not helpful. the block guide for example just tells me to enter values, but not why Im entering those values. without context or reference points, i didnt learn anything from it at all. i only succeeded by following a video tutorial from splitsie and trial and error. anyway…merry Christmas 😀
Cloud planets seem like an interesting challenge. Low visibility and all that. Exactly what form they should be in is the next question. A regular planet but with a perpetual thick and low cloud layer, or something like the planned water planet where there’s a few spots of land that peak out of an ocean of clouds?
Another point I’d like to make is that I’m glad you guys are making interior blocks like the passages. The new grid system is wonderful, but can be (currently) PCU intensive. So, detailing blocks like those passages (and interior wall block variations in SE1) are very efficient ways of adding detail to our builds.
I love the volumetric clouds. Definitely a huge part of what makes a planet feel real and alive. I’m not sure whether this is seen in real life, but one thing I did notice is that the distance fog seen on mountains doesn’t apply to the clouds in the distance. So the mountains look like they’re not visually aligned with the environment, if that makes sense? If the distance fog (atmospheric scatter) applied to the clouds and mountains, it might look more visually coherent?
The idea of volumetric clouds and all of the water physics makes me excited for the possibility of interacting with them if you fly through them with a big enough ship! It would be amazing to have the whole cloud have a big wake of air behind your ship sucking it in as you fly past! That could be a lot of work to make happen, though
Great work all around though! Very excited for V2.2 and its mechanical blocks!
Cloud planets – yes
Cloud planet YES, or at least a mist world. prehaps very storm with lots of lightning :}
Cloud planets would be absolutley amazing!
Cloud planets – yes or no? Hmmmmm….. now that is a rabit hole, flying into clouds to harvest them for water or gases. Some could be corrosive, radioactive, positively or negatively charged either draining power or causing lighting to hit your vehicle the possiblities are endless. Thanks to you and your teams hard work, it been a pleasure to be along for the ride and im looking forward to seeing what is to come this next year.
cloud planet..
I can imagine Destroyed planet, floating derbits, remainig only parts of surface, huge shells and rocks/mountains with melted still glowing magma (Iron) core. Diving in, seeing layers of planet from inside.
Full of clouds of dust and debris, swirling in weak and maybe multicengered gravitationl field of biggest remainings parts o what Once was planet.
Navigating thru it, with changing visibility, roks in every direction, and changing gravitational forces, with the prospect of high profits, as it is “easy” to access previously inaccessible deposits of precious ores hidden deep within the planet.
What a Picture! 😌
Cloud planets – YES! Huge massive yes.
i think gas planets would make a logical and great addition to SE2. you would just scim around the upper atmsphere and get crushed if you fly to low.
I second this idea. Gas giants would be really neat. You would need to create a bouyant base, and be careful not to fly too deep. There could be flora and fauna that rely on bladders of gas to keep them aloft. Giant ones would host a habitat for smaller winged creatures and plant life on their backs.
Cloud planets look gorgeous, but the most important thing is what sort of function they have in the gameplay. In other words, what sort of unique engineering challenges they introduce. Currently, planets are wasted because the progression system makes no real use of them and I don’t think the way contracts are designed is indicative to exploring planets.
Here’s my idea. Make the cloud planet the “floating base” planet. Increase the power of atmospheric thrusters (higher density!) and add balloons to the game that decrease effective gravitational mass of the grid at the cost of increasing inertial mass. Make the surface damage unprotected Engineers to encourage either staying above the clouds or staying indoors. Lastly, make contracts open-ended and encourage players to create their own ships.
Cloud planets – yes or no? Of course yes!
It would be wonderful if a red giant could exist as a fully-fledged planet, similar to a real gas giant with its multi-layered clouds and powerful atmospheric storms, rather than just being a simple texture without any detail. We could observe its majestic atmospheric phenomena, track the movement of gas flows, and watch the formation of vortices, just like what happens on Jupiter or other gas giants in our solar system.
I would only want a cloud planet if Gas Mining becomes a feature.
Love the work and behind the scenes looks. Merry Christmas!
Clouds all the way, just need Navigation Tools (collision warnings, terrain visualizers, night vision…) to not crash into a mountain while flying!
Have you guys thought of Clouds in Space? Gas clouds, to collect rare gases! That would be beautiful and add new activity to the game! Dangers could wait in the space clouds as well! I think your cloud system could do it!
A planet with floating mountains would be cool as well – there are gravity generators ingame so a quirk of gravity like that wouldnt be too exotic.
Also need a flat planet for rovers, the current planets are a bit too mountainous.
I wish encounters had some critters/automatons to shoot at for a bit of excitement!
As for High Speeds and Orbits, I recommend the Elite:Dangerous flight model. I think it would work well for SE2. Basically have regular speed (up to 300m/s), and high speed with warp drive (beyond 300m/s up to infinity). At high speed only planets/moons/stars are loaded, you phase thru small objects without collision or loading (ships, stations, asteroids). To approach ship/station/asteroid, game guides you to slow down at right timing, then you get to “load in”! And game slows you down as you approach a planet as well, so planets have time to load.
This way, no ramming into ship/station/asteroid at 0.35c.
No ramming into planet either, engine slows you down as you approach.
It would be very ambitious, but SE2 certainly has the potential to take on the competition. Just steal the mechanics that work, like E:D flight model!
I would also like to see a full FPS weapon system with randomized weapon stats and maybe even attachments/upgrades. Make looting fun! Always chance to find a better weapon, never know what youll find! Space critters and automatons to shoot at!
Also instead of Hard Limit for backpack inventory, add Soft Limit, encumberance mechanic! So you can always carry that one extra component that doesnt fit, youll just accelerate/walk slower, be encumbered. Lots of games do this, for a good reason. Its smoother experience.
Those are what have been on my mind lately.
Merry Christmas! I wish you all to live in peace and a deep, balanced and diverse survival experience 😉
Roters, Pistions and most Importantly Multiplayer when?! I have already purchased SE2. But I have at least twenty friends that are waiting to purchase because no multiplayer!
Sigh.
Read and understand the roadmap. Explain it to your friends to set the right expectations.
Merry Christmas, Marek and everyone at Keen. Cloud (gas) planets? Yes, without a second of doubt. Perfect for putting a station in orbit with a straw plunging downwards to drink the gas and make fuel. Apart from that, I realized that the holding points of the grinder still have the same orientation and it feels dangerous to hold.
cloud planets yes please, building a bespin or something similar would be super cool. you could say that cloud planets have an amazing atmosphere for building 😆
Would love full on Gas Planets, with just a small, barely visible core.
Not every planet has to be fully interactable. That makes the ones that are even more interesting!
Would rather go for more variety than having 10 visually different but gameplay and geologically wise similar planets.
yesss, I would love cloud/gas planets. it would be so interesting to be able to make a gas mining station like Cloud city on Bespin, wether it’s functional or not
Cloud planets, yes, but then we absolutely need an artificial horizon and altimeter!
i like cloud planets but there has to be something else to make them cool
I agree maybe they could use a density constraint on the full gas planets where buoyancy is a factor i.e. the deeper into the atmosphere a player goes the more dense it becomes causing a player to need more downward thrust or heavier ships. Maybe have some type of gas scrubbers for some type of resource collection and the deeper a player goes the more efficent the scrubbers work at collecting said gas.
(Cloud Planets: Yes or No?)I would LOVE to have like a gas giant thats completely filled in with clouds, it would be soo cool to make a floating city in it.
Kinda like Crusader in Star Citizen.
there is actually a modded planet I forget the name of (I think its called Calios or something). It is a gas giant with an absolutely beutiful interior cloud layer, it would be cool to have something like that.
in one word :
Aerodynamics
Merry Christmas everyone
100% this please
Cloud planets would be quite interesting. A challenge for sure, but interesting.
As to your question of cloud planets. I would say yes. But use the clouds to place a constraint on players i.e. solar wont work well in the area. Another way this could be done is to have a low lying thick fog bank with mountain tops poking out above the clouds. players in the thick fog bank must build towers to get above the cloud line for solar to work. Visually it would be cool to see a sea of clouds with island/ mountain tops spire mountains and maybe some waterfalls that fall through the clouds
Cloud planets, like gas planet or intense foggy rock or water/liquid planet? From these i would take the latter, and make it interfere signals to hide pirate bases 😂
The idea of cloud planets is amazing. But I think what would take this to the next level is floating rocks to have places to build on and it is super cloudy all around.
I love the idea of cloud planets. I think what would take this idea to the next level is having floating cliffs/rocks all around and also covered in clouds. That type of environment is so beautiful and would give us land to build on as well.
Merry Christmas! And yes to cloud planets! Haha. I am in love with clouds. I reaaaaallllllyyyy want to see multiple layers of clouds, and tall clouds with cool shapes I can fly through and between.
Also I can’t get over how amazing the new 25 cm grid system is. The fact you can just place lights anywhere in those passages so seamlessly is just AWESOME!
Keep up the fantastic work! And expect a Pioneer edition Christmas present! 😀
Planets covered in clouds? It would only be better if you could camouflage your beacon/antenna to your team’s frequency and only be identified by enemies with radars or sensors.
can use pioneer players get the same early access buffs as yt people
Cloud planets yes, IF there is some gameplay associated with it.
Will they have something I need or want? Will there be a new way of orientation that require me to make interesting choices?
Every time when new features are added, I think, for the kind of goals that I set myself in a sandbox game, when would choosing this new feature be advantageous? In the cloud case: Will I be able to hide from drones or PvP players in clouds? Can I harvest something from them to turn around an emergency? Can players build a custom lowflight LIDAR out of sensors and other blocks, so that the one who builds the best crashes last?
Merry Chistmas!
Cloud planet with constant lightning storms would be awesome. Silly question but will weather be tied to the cloud system? i.e it will only rain or snow when there are clouds overhead. And will enclosed interior spaces have weather effects (including shaders) removed?
If by cloud planets you mean gas giants then yes, I would love to have them, but I’m not sure if there’s room for them because all the planets closely orbit delfos the dwarf star in a similar way that moons orbit gas giants, maybye one day in the future there could be a distant sub system with a gas giant and It’s own planet-like moons, but not for a long time
Agreed with the cloud planetss with a small mumber of mountains/plateaus raising up and out. long term, would love to see the clouds on a cloud planet have a harvesting value, like hydrogen, or a rare resource
Cloud planet? Not sure. I have not yet gotten into SE2 as I am waiting for a few more big updates to flesh out the survival experience (water, npcs, multiplayer) but I worry that adding more planets with no real purpose other than they look different, can water down the experience, not enhance it. SE1 had this problem where you didn’t really have any reason to visit other planets as you could find everything you needed on 1 planet or in the astroids. Also SE1 planets (like Earthlike) were big but mostly just the same thing all the way around, so I’d rather have a tiny planet full of content to explore, rather than a large planet or multiple planets where aside from them looking different, don’t really offer anything new or progress you further in the game.
If for example the proposed cloud planet had some locally unique resource but had to be explored/hunted/surveyed and then needing to build the machines to process that resource while defending your base against natural and/or NPC enemies – then it would be worth it in my mind.
Volumetric clouds look unbelievable!
I just wanted to leave my two cents about the passage blocks: they will not really be modular until you can build one passageway section from parts.
The current passageway block system in SE1 is still missing a lot: top/down intersections, level transitions (a.k.a. stairs), illuminated intersections, open side blocks (to build wider rooms like atriums or junctions).
The existing blocks have issues too: windows won’t align with half-width armor or e.g. desk heights (and there’s no full-size window passageways too); or that the whole thing being non-symmetrical can sometimes require separate left/right door blocks etc.
I hope SE2 addresses all that. For example, you could go with passageway floor/wall/ceiling panels instead of whole blocks, so players can assemble any interrior they can imagine. Or at least to separate features like lighting or windows into separate set of blocks players can apply as they wish.
Oh, and please let me one more wish (I promise I was a good builder this year!): I with passageways integrate well with other blocks right from the start. Like timers/assemblers/reactors/containers or any other block with a functional side you may want to access from the interrior – it would be awesome if they could form a nice flush seal without gaps or obstruction.
Merry christmas!
Clouds are just for Christmas …. an artificial horizon is for life.
Just saying 🙄
Cloud planets with constant lightning storms would be awesome. Silly question, but will the weather system be tied to the clouds? i.e it will only rain or snow when there are clouds overhead?
Laputa, Last Exile, Stormhawks, all had sky islands in a sea of clouds and all of them were brilliant. It could have been the setting that inspired the mood with a background of isolation on the floating islands and the freedom in the veil of the clouds. Cloud planets, yes please.
Cloud planet like a gas giant? No land? I’d say yes on the condition that there is a very good reason for wanting to setup a base there. Or just perpetually cloudy planet? I dunno. Space Engineers 1 benefitted from really cool physical systems but suffered from having a lack of reasons to use those systems. Be extremely focused on making this a game that’s fun to play and prevent us from feeling like we’ve made our big ship – now there’s nothing left to do.
I would also like a six way corridor
I find the lighting and the cloud system more facinating than water at the moment. And playing with the clouds in the dev menu has entertained me for hours now. But, I found myself wondering about weather? And when it will be introduced?? Mainly, because I think the cloud system can be used for very effective dust storms in the desert biomes or on Kimek? If you can change the cloud color and altitude they spawn at, as well as added sound effects. The hazy particle effect looks alot like heavy moisture in the air, or with some slight modification, like dust to me.
Cloud planets sound intriguing! it would be good to have some “IFR-grade” instrumentation on ships in order to transit through cloudy regions in a safe manner.
What about clouds in space? galactic-scale nebulae?