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 This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly.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.
Space Engineers 2
It is 3 days after we released the most important update since SE2 launched and we are still overwhelmed. Thank you for the warm welcome for Vertical Slice 2. Planets, Colonization and Survival Foundations is where Space Engineers 2 finally turned into a real survival game – planets, progression, story foundations, and the first version of core systems all working together.
And I have to thank both our SE1 and SE2 teams for their hard work. These past months were intense for everyone. VS2 touched almost every part of the game, so artists, programmers, designers, testers, audio, production, and support all had to push together. Watching both teams help each other, share ideas, solve blockers, and keep the whole project moving was inspiring. None of this would exist without their dedication.
Seeing SE2 through player videos, I am realizing how beautiful it actually is. I spend so much time deep in development that I mostly see the issues, the bugs, and all the unfinished parts. Watching players explore the planets, fly through the clouds, and build their first bases gives me a completely different perspective. It reminds me why we are making this game in the first place.
Players already discovered how to turn on water in Space Engineers 2 – unofficially, since water is planned for VS3 in 2026.
What you can expect now are daily hotfixes over the next few weeks. The whole team is watching your reports closely, and your feedback is already helping us fix issues at a very fast pace. Thank you for every ticket, screenshot, and video you send us. Please continue using our Support Portal – it really makes a difference and helps us track everything properly.
After the new year, we will move to the next steps on our roadmap. This means new sectors, expanded contracts, and more varied and fun objectives as additional gameplay systems come alive. VS2 is only the beginning. If you take a look at the roadmap, you will see how the survival and colonization experience will grow piece by piece.
I think that now most of you have a much clearer understanding of why we released VS1 earlier this year. It gave us the chance to test and polish our new building systems with the unified 25 cm grid, blueprints, modding, and the Steam Workshop – all essential for survival projection building you can now enjoy.
We have a plan, and it is clear that many of you are excited about it. We feel very honored by your trust, and now it is on us to deliver. What you are testing in VS2 are just the cornerstones of the full features that will come later.
Let’s take one example – Area Welding – coming in VS2.2. The 25 cm unified grid system gives you much more freedom and detail for your creations, but it also means it would be far too tedious to weld every single block one by one. Area Welding is the natural next step. The new grid gives us the precision, and Area Welding will give you the tools to actually build with that precision in a practical way.
Music Competition
We are excited to announce the winners of our Space Engineers Music Contest. This year we received an unbelievable 252 music tracks from our community composers! Join us on Friday, December 12 at 6 PM UTC, when we will reveal the winning tracks and celebrate the incredible creativity of our community composers. Thank you to everyone who submitted their work – the level of talent this year was truly inspiring.
We also revealed our new plushie astronaut and I have to say, I think he is really cute. It is always a special feeling to see Space Engineers come to life in forms outside the game.
Together with the plushie, we released new posters of Kemik and Verdure, and I love how they capture the atmosphere of both planets. These small things make me happy, and I hope they bring a bit of joy to your gaming space as well.
Question to you: Which VS2 feature has been your favorite so far – projection building, swappable batteries, the planets, or something else?
Share your thoughts in the comments below – I read them all, and they’re one of my favorite parts of making our games.
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Is there any good way to weld a blueprint? I can’t reach the blocks on the inside of mine, and I can’t weld the blocks on the outside before the inside. It’s paradoxical, please help.
Thank you for your openess on development, the spotlights on work going on and where you see the project going in the future. It’s exciting times to get into the game in a meaningful way to explore and survive. TY!
I believe the visual effects of the Area Welder, as well as the lore explaining how it operates, should be based on nanotechnology — specifically nanobots manipulating components (or even individual particles) through some form of controlled force. In practice, it would work like a highly advanced form of 3D printing. While this would imply far more sophisticated technology than a traditional welder — and its explanation might be more complex — it still feels much more believable than components simply materializing out of nowhere on the other side of the grid.
Oooh, good idea!
I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve played and seen of Vertical Slice 2 so far. One thing I’m curious about is whether the current ore distribution is final or likely to be adjusted.
Right now there are a lot of ore deposits, but each node is very small. I’ve seen others say this too — there’s abundance in quantity, not abundance in size. While I like the idea of finding many nodes scattered around, especially inside caves, the current small-node distribution tends to discourage long-term settlement because each spot is exhausted so quickly.
If nodes were larger, or if deeper “vein” versions existed, new players could still benefit from finding small shallow deposits early on, while more experienced players would have meaningful reasons to establish mining bases once pistons and deeper drilling setups are added.
My second point is more personal, and I understand you’ve said the FTUE may change — but I feel that right now you reach space very early.
The “tutorial missions” can get a player into orbit within about an hour. I appreciate why: it’s designed to help new players onboard smoothly, avoiding the early-game grind that SE1 had. And of course, in SE1 you could rush a basic small-grid ship from the drop pod and go to space quickly if you wanted to.
But in SE2, following the guided FTUE, you skip over the natural progression that many of us enjoyed:
• setting up your first proper base planetside
• moving into rovers (once wheels are added)
• building atmospheric craft
• then finally designing a hydrogen ship for space
You can ignore the FTUE and play your own way, but right now the unlock system is tied to the contract system, which is only accessible on the orbital NPC station. That means progressing “naturally” (planet → rover → atmo → space) is discouraged if you want to unlock new blocks in a timely way.
I completely understand the desire to streamline onboarding, but I’d love if progression allowed the slower, more organic SE1-style path without being locked out of block unlocks until you reach orbit prehaps having a planetside version of the npc contract base.
That said the view of the planet from the station was pretty spectacular and yeah enjoying what i am seeing.
AS far as ores go, I would love to see something like Ares at War. Maybe have very large ore deposits spawn very rarely, and have much smaller pockets be distributed broadly.
THIS! I definitely agree that there needs to be larger veins of ores deeper in the earth that require building mining stations. Little specs of ore here and there are great at surface level but at some point there needs to be the “WOW! what a find! A huge vein of X Ore…I should make a base here.
This was one of my biggest pet peeves in SE1 because my first real base I built a mining rig and I got so far down before I realized the game only puts ore at the surface…..I was hoping the deeper I go I might discover new ores but nope, just more dirt.
I also agree that the game should start you on a planet and make it really hard to get off the planet, so when you finally do get to space it is an accomplishment. Perhaps this is just because of my playstyle, I like to build a “home” and it seems like SE2 tries to move you around the galexy too soon.
A simple solution to the progression problem would be to make it optional. For comparison, I usually switch off progression in SE1 because I’m not entirely happy with the progression system. But let me disable it and I’m fine. Besides, I would not want to re-do the same unlock missions for every new game.
Perhaps randomizing the ways to unlock new technology would keep things more interesting. I’m tinking of finding blueprints in some unknown signal.
About mining, I suggest a combination of small surface deposits and big deep ones. For the huge ships some players like to build, you would have to find and mine hundreds of the small nodes. At the same time, having to dig 200m deep to mine some magnesium is a chore.
Thank you for the feedback!
Ore distribution – I agree; I’ve been thinking the same. I’ll bring it up with the designers.
FTUE: reaching space in ~1 hour – Also agree. It’s a temporary setup while major systems are still in development. Once we add rovers, water, NPCs, etc., the FTUE will likely be reworked.
Area welding looks good, I wanted to comment on how tedious it is to work with 25cm grid. I enjoy adding the details but after an 8 hour stream I essentially had a small 1,5 room box. It was a detailed good looking box with a lot of decorative details, but still it was a very small base..
While on that, you should take a look at how blueprinting, copy, partial copy and paste etc is integrated better into survival – I suspect the base would have been bigger if I’d have the tools to make sections and copy paste them easily.
Sorry – one additional thing about the area welders – it should have a way to show how deep it goes as well. Sideways indication is nice, but after pasting in a blueprint of a ship I made in SE2 VS2, I realized I don’t even know where to start to weld that up. If it’s something bigger how do you know that the insides are properly welded, and how do you weld inner parts that are behind what the welder can reach?
Maybe make some new iteration of the “show only weldable” feature?
i think it would be nice to be able to view only a slice of a whole projected grid at a time — you view the desired slice, you weld it, you go to the next one, and repeat until the whole projection is built
Yes, we really need this feature! I’m not sure if this has already been fixed, but I ran into a similar issue when trying to weld a ship I had previously designed using projection building. I couldn’t weld the blocks that are fully enclosed on all sides by other projected blocks, even when they were connected to the main structure. You simply can’t target a projected block that’s hidden behind another one — and even if you step inside the projection, you still can’t build it because your character occupies the same space. When inside the projection, the welder doesn’t detect the block you’re aiming at; instead, it detects the block you’re standing inside.
The thing Arashi mentioned is what’s keeping me from playing right now. I foolishly slammed my starter hydrogen ship into a wall (completely my fault). So I went and designed a new ship in creative so that I could build it in suvival. But upon pasting it I relized there was no acctual way to weld it all up. To me there’s no real difference between building in SE1 and SE2, because I still have to weld each block as I place it. This makes it borderline impossible for me to build a ship completely from a projection. Still, everything else is amazing. Love the world, love the mission structure and love the focus on engineering solutions to problems (such as slamming a ship into a wall).
Yeah, this is what we wanted to do. Basically you should be able to step into the hologram and weld only weldable blocks. I will be discussing with the team this week.
Hi, Marek!
I am captivated by the terrain and visual fidelity. It’s quite pleasing to the eyes.
Also have been enjoying the tutorial/story mode is a way, but I am a bit frustrated by having to fly to a objective 110km, then fly back to receive a new mission to fly back 110km again.
It would probably be less frustrating if the first sectors missions didn’t take about 10 minutes to complete. If I had to spend an hour or two in those missions then I would probably not care too much.
My one big gripe is that the POWER OFF and EXIT COCKPIT keys are instant action even if I am flying at 300 m/s. It would be really nice for instant entry into cockpits but HOLD (3 sec.) to exit the cockpit when there is movement. Other games use F keys differently so I either automatically mistake one key for another or just accidently (this one is rarer) hit it while moving my about on the keyboard between D and G or other keys towards that direction.
Thanks!
Thanks for you comment!
Distances vs mission time ratio – this will definitely get improved in the future when we add more interesting missions and thus prolong their time. Also if you will be able to start multiple missions at the same time, and do them one after another.
F key – we will be changing it from “press F to leave cockpit” to “hold F for a second or so”
Honestly I was a bit disappointed by the update. The graphics look not as good as I hoped (I always hoped it would look better in person than on screenshots) and the performance is worse than before.
Also the FTUI is a well crafted tutorial, but a bad start into a new world once you know the mechanics, because getting to space is way too fast and isn’t really an achivement. In addition, the spaceship isn’t really yours, so I don’t feel like I really arrived in that world.
And that’s why it’s still just an alpha — everything can still change if the players want it. I really appreciate the developers’ work so far. The game in its current state is still unoptimized, but that’s normal for this stage. As for the tutorial, I also think it feels a bit out of SE’s usual style. This is far from the final version. Maybe it’s just a matter of getting used to it, but even the production chain felt unintuitive to me at first.
Backpack building is definitely a plus. However, I still can’t get used to the absence of ingots. Perhaps it would make sense to limit the types of blocks you can build using the backpack and raw ores. That could encourage players to first build a small base, or at least a smelter, before producing more advanced blocks or constructing a ship.
The developers definitely need to balance progression so that the start is easy and inviting, but not too fast, while further development remains challenging without being discouraging.
I dont agree with you on graphics , and performance will come as the game develops. However i have almost 5000 hours in SE1 (I’ve played since the beginning!), and making my first hydrogen ship and reaching space for the first time is a stand out memory. We all remember our first ship (:
I wasn’t a fan of the planets in SE1, but I have to say, seeing them in this quality will change my mind. I’m looking forward to building a base and watching the sunset. What I also really like is the story, or rather, the ability to finally tell stories in SE. With cutscenes, a narrator, and so on.
Olá, gostaria que o SE2 tivesse variantes de blocos para naves espaciais, bases planetárias/lunares e estações. Independentemente disso, os blocos poderiam ser usados em qualquer tipo de construção, mas com penalidades no consumo de energia, eficiência e velocidade.
Right now there are a lot of ore deposits, but each node is very small. I’ve seen others say this too — there’s abundance in quantity, not abundance in size. While I like the idea of finding many nodes scattered around, especially inside caves, the current small-node distribution tends to discourage long-term settlement because each spot is exhausted so quickly.
If nodes were larger, or if deeper “vein” versions existed, new players could still benefit from finding small shallow deposits early on, while more experienced players would have meaningful reasons to establish mining bases once pistons and deeper drilling setups are added.
My second point is more personal, and I understand you’ve said the FTUE may change — but I feel that right now you reach space very early.
The “tutorial missions” can get a player into orbit within about an hour. I appreciate why: it’s designed to help new players onboard smoothly, avoiding the early-game grind that SE1 had. And of course, in SE1 you could rush a basic small-grid ship from the drop pod and go to space quickly if you wanted to.
But in SE2, following the guided FTUE, you skip over the natural progression that many of us enjoyed:
• setting up your first proper base planetside
• moving into rovers (once wheels are added)
• building atmospheric craft
• then finally designing a hydrogen ship for space
You can ignore the FTUE and play your own way, but right now the unlock system is tied to the contract system, which is only accessible on the orbital NPC station. That means progressing “naturally” (planet → rover → atmo → space) is discouraged if you want to unlock new blocks in a timely way.
I completely understand the desire to streamline onboarding, but I’d love if progression allowed the slower, more organic SE1-style path without being locked out of block unlocks until you reach orbit
I’ve enjoyed Vertical Slice 2 so far, but I’m curious whether ore distribution will be adjusted. Right now there are many deposits, but they’re very small, meaning they get mined out quickly. This makes long-term settlement less rewarding even though I like finding lots of nodes, especially in caves. Larger or deeper veins could preserve accessibility for newcomers while still giving veterans meaningful reasons to build mining bases later.
My second point is more subjective, but I feel the FTUI gets players into space very early. The tutorial can have you in orbit within an hour, which skips the natural progression of building a base, then rovers, then atmo ships, and finally a hydrogen ship. You can ignore the FTUI, but block unlocks being tied to the orbital contract system discourages that slower route. I understand why onboarding was streamlined, but it would be great if the natural planetary progression remained equally viable.
are the voices in the starting cutsean real or ai and if ai will they be real
They are real humans 🙂
I was there during the online recording so I can confirm.
My favourite feature is definitely the planets! They are easily the best planets in gaming right now, I still can not believe how freaking fantastic they look! Even Star Citizen’s don’t look as good to me, and of course those aren’t even destructible at all. I’m already enjoying VS2 way more than I ever enjoyed survival in SE1. I can’t believe this is only the first iteration! I can not wait to see what it will become in the future!
Thank you so much for all of your fantastic work on this so far! It feels so amazing to be so excited to play Space Engineers again.
The update is amazing in almost every aspect but the flight physics need to be better, not being able to go down in a ship without down thrusters unless you turn dampeners off, and the super dampeners make flying quite unpredictable in how the craft will act
i really think the flight mechanics are really better, it feels more like a flight simulator, i have over 4500 hrs in SE1, and the feel is different, but is more cluncky in SE1, lets give the devs a little more time and see…..
What I really appreciate the most is that the campaign missions, while currently a little mmo-fetch-questy, are intended to make this feel more like a game with a purpose where you act as a space engineer to solve the problems rather than just tinkering for the sake of tinkering. The missions just need to feel like you’re actually colonizing and building a connected colony system rather than fix-this-do-that quests that you forget where you even went and never go back.
This is a huge change and I think if done right and refined will make the game soooo so so much more inviting for regular people (not actual engineers and nutters like myself).
There’s no reason elements like these cannot be inserted into a sandbox mode, where you can have a purpose while not necessarily following a linear storyline too. I think everyone can be happy with this.
Please work out a good progression system – for reference, look at mekanism mod in minecraft – in your first moments, you have wood/stone tools right? Those are like mk1 tools in space engineers, these help you make your first machine – the machine would basically permit you to DOUBLE the processing of your ores, but the machine is somewhat slow, but also allows you to make new components to upgrade your tools for convenience – you can gate upgrades or machine upgrades behind using this machine and requiring upgraded welders to make the next step, like upgrades to processing output TRIPLING, speed modifiers, sound mufflers, etc.. There is opportunity to use the future water system in SE to really flex and make a fully upgraded processing system that requires water lines. Investigate these minecraft gamemodes and you will find proven processing loops that feel rewarding rather than punishing.
Water cooling machines would be awesome, but if you spawned in space it might be an issue. Maybe some sort of ice melter? And maybe make it optional, but a feature to overclock it doubling speed?
SE2 is awesome so far, I can’t wait to see how it turns out when its fully released, its going to be epic. Congrats to everyone on the dev team for making such a great game
I want to also say that I would like to be able to take a slower and more open run of the FTUE and build the ships myself. It would be nice to have access to enough of the progression early game that I am able to craft the necessary parts to get to space of my own volition.
This is definitely better for a vertical slice since getting players far into the game so that they can see/test everything and give feedback. That said, I hope someday there is a longer and more deliberate start where I have to build my own ships and go through the progression systems on the planet itself before making it to space. It might be good to put a contract provider somewhere on Verdure itself so you have to make the progress to building ships with hydrogen thrusters/engine yourself to get to the contracts in space.
My feedback:
-Beautiful world, Thanks!
– Getting to space should not be so easy. I said this before but its fine if in the starting missions we get to space TEMPORARILY to accomplish something and give us a taste of space, but then send us back to the planet, destroy the game-given ship and make us build our own ship and earn space!
– Many players want to build extensive mining bases, PLEASE give us larger/longer ore veins deep in the earth to explore and mine!
Keep up the good work!
I’m not sure I like the idea of having area welding, but I’m sure it will be really useful for intrincate ships. My favorite VS2 feature is, of course, the planets. I just stand there and look at the horizon.
Please add the 2560×1080 resolution for all the ultra wide players! I have a 21:9 monitor and I only can use 3440×1440 and that`s too demanding for my pc. The only other options I have are different aspect ratios which is unplayable without playing windowed. But windowed has 0 immersion.