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 This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly.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 1
I am excited to announce the upcoming Economy 2 Update for Space Engineers, arriving this May!
This update expands and evolves the economy systems with new gameplay features, improved contracts, deeper trading interactions – bringing more life to stations and the overall sandbox experience.
Stay tuned for more details as we get closer to the release!
Space Engineers 2
In the last few days, we released two very quick community feedback updates. We added a world option to disable Super Dampeners, as well as a cockpit option to disable target-based gyro and return to legacy ship steering. We also tweaked the speed particles to make them less obtrusive. These are relatively small changes, but they come directly from your feedback, and I think this kind of fast iteration is very important.
At the same time, we are also asking for your feedback on our latest experiments around the early game and starting experiences. We prepared a set of rapid iterations and released them first as mods and test worlds, because this gives us a better opportunity to explore ideas, learn from your reactions before implementing a classic start directly in the game. This is not a final solution, but rather a playground for ideas where we can keep learning and improving together.
Remote Control, LCDs, Coastal Flora
Allow me to give you another peek into the block creation process – this time focusing on the new Remote Control Block.
As you can see here, we explore multiple shapes, layouts, and functional details before landing on the final design – balancing readability, orientation, and that distinct industrial feel that fits naturally into your grids. This is how we iterate – from rough concepts to refined visuals
And I have to spoil our new design for LCD blocks. Would you like to go wide-screen? 🙂
And our Art Team is working on adding more variety and higher flora density to coastal biomes, bringing these areas much closer to what you would expect from lush, living environments. You can see richer clusters of palms, more natural spacing, and a better mix of vegetation
GoodAI Swarm Robotics
Our drone just completed an outdoor → indoor → outdoor mission through a window, smoke, and narrow corridors — without GPS or a pilot. We navigated it only on high-level by a few clicks of a mouse. It scanned the environment, built a 3D map, and found a safe path through the building and back outside. This is another step toward Prometheus: intelligent autonomous drone swarms for search & rescue, defense, and industrial inspection.
We scanned our offices using the lidar mounted on a drone, then post-processed the data to create a suitable simulator environment. The drone flies in the environment, creating a global map and a navigation graph. It then combines long range navigation (using the graph depicted with red nodes), and short range navigation. Short range navigation follows the global trajectory (chasing the yellow ball) and can react to changing conditions (obstacle avoidance).
Question to you: Are you ready for Space Engineers: Economy 2?
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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I would love the ability to adjust the controls so that i can scroll through block variants like in se1 rather than the hotbar 😀
yes, please! 🤩🤩🤩
Is it possible or would it be fun to use the Super Dampeners as a placable block? that way you start in the legacy mode but have to build the Super Dampeners in a correct axis/quantity/size to achieve the stablization effect similar to how gyoscopic stablization works with boats to reduce pitch/roll in waves?
I like the idea of having to unlock features first, either with blocks or through research. I’ve suggested this in the past. This could be used to partially explain things like the third-person in world (for example, as a swarm of support drones).
Dear developers,
I really appreciate your work and the game you’re creating. It would be really cool if you could implement a new feature for the music block or speaker in Space Engineers 2: the ability to add custom audio tracks to the game.
In the first part of the game I used a special program to add various audio tracks and create the desired atmosphere. However that program had its limitations and wasn’t easy to use. Despite this I managed to customize the game’s ambiance for myself and my friends. I added the bustling sounds of a city to my custom location the noises of an airport terminal for a large airport build the famous movie alarm signals to my custom‑built ships and the engine roar sounds to rovers that mimicked real vehicles. All these details helped to make the builds much more immersive and alive.
Adding the option to import custom sounds directly into the music block with settings for playback frequency looping volume control and fade‑in fade‑out effects would significantly enhance the gameplay experience and open up new creative possibilities for players. With an in‑game solution players wouldn’t need third‑party tools and could easily set up their preferred audio environment.
Thank you for considering this suggestion. I’m looking forward to the continued development of the game!
I second this! What a lot of production companies miss on is sound design – its like how we asked you, keen, to change the gatling to BRRT. Sound plays such a massive unseen part of what you are staring at visually, and its often overlooked. I have a saying, in production, you could have the best visuals ever, and poor sound, and it looks amateur. Or you could have some of teh worst visuals, but high quality sound, and you have a masterpiece. I would lay custom sounds down a lot, just to give life to my builds! I had some modded sound blocks in SE 1 and it completely changed the look and feel of my ships. Please Keen! 😀
Thx for making “Classic Survival Start” and “Balancing Iteration Mod” 😍
Looking forward for some more details and ideas about survival sandbox fundamentals of the game.
since you guys are looking at dampeners, please fix the dampeners the community be very appreciative of this
Palms look good, but the entire starter planet looks too much like earth, I wish there would be more alien stuff in the game.. It’s not realistic that a system thousands of years and such distance away look exactly like current day earth. Time and distance should alter existing plants if it’s earth, and if it’s alien, even more so it should be different.
Regarding LCDs: Please make sure that the image on them can be easily come from a local computer? Ideally I’d want them to play YT videos as well, but I’m settling for easy LCD content from local images that works in multiplayer as well. I don’t want to see any of that image to monospace text BulllShhite that’s in SE1! LCDs are a one of the primary angles for interior design and customization. They MUST be easy to change, and not just pre-made or modded in images. any and all image from local PC, or linked repository please!
Verdure has been seeded with Earth plant species – your character comments on it pretty early on
The swarm robotics is so cool to see! im working on something very simular in SE right now, using ingame cameras to create a terrain map, which are then paired with pathfinding algos to have drones and planes navigate through them. Its fun stuff