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 This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly.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
We have just released the biggest economy update in Space Engineers history. Trade stations are now places you’ll actually want to visit!
Economy 2 improves the overall game loop. It gives players more meaningful progression, more objectives to achieve, and more reasons to use the ships and bases they build.
The big vision here is simple: make the universe feel more alive, and make stations into real gameplay hubs – not just places with a terminal, but places you actually want to visit.
The Economy 2 Update changes how you play. Store entire grids and redeploy them when you need them. Repair your ship at a trade station without replacing a single component. Hunt bounties, haul cargo through pirate space, and sell scrap for credits. Trade stations now have NPCs walking around inside them. And further ModAPI improvements open new possibilities for modders, server gamemasters, and scenario makers.
Everything in this update is free. Alongside it, we released the Economy 2 Pack with new decorative blocks and variants to expand your creative options.
SE1 players who also happen to own SE2, will get the Almagest Plushie in SE1. Enjoy! There are never enough plushies.
Check our few of the community overviews for this Pack and Update:
Space Engineers 2
A few snippets from our internal build – we have working buttons and soon you will have them too!
Here you can see buttons activating the new timer block.
There’s also an overlay that shows what each button does, so complex control panels are much easier to understand.
And we will be introducing inventory access from any interactive element of a block, not just at conveyor ports. Sometimes ease of use and quality of life override strict in‑game logic, and this is one of those times.
On this Tuesday’s playtest, we reviewed the wheels and suspensions. They feel good, but we agreed that some tweaks are still needed – mostly around making the wheels feel like they have good traction and are properly in contact with the terrain.
We also tested the wind turbines, and I must say they feel very cool and give strong engineering vibes! The art is beautiful too. In this demo you can see the turbine spinning freely until wind is blocked, at which point it slows and stops.
Then we tested some of the new encounters where you have to build or repair something. I think these are one of the things that will make playing SE2 more meaningful – making the world feel like a place where things are happening, and more alive.
On the art side, the team has been busy. The Event Controller and Timer blocks are starting to look beautiful; they have a clean industrial design that fits naturally with other ship components:
And I can also share a progress on large and small Magnetic Plates:
VS2.3 – Explosions
Let’s talk about explosions!
In VS2.3 we’re introducing an explosion system into Space Engineers 2. We’re working on new warheads – check out our progress on Warheads – from first concept art to first in-game blasts!
We want explosions to feel powerful without being over the top, and to provide clear feedback about what happens when something goes boom.
Warhead 3D model was created by Abdullah Natour (from the concept art by Mike Hamlet): “The Warheads were very fun blocks to work on that break the usual shapes. These blocks had a very unique set of challenges – we wanted to introduce functionality that allows the player to tell when it is engaged from a distance and being fracturable when it is not – while keeping in account how it would interact with other blocks and how it can be mounted.
We introduced different motions that can indicate a powerful look: the large version featuring locks that move apart when engaged and a spinning core that changes colors. The small Warhead is a compact version that allows it to be used anywhere with a small locking mechanism.
These blocks were done in Blender (with custom tools we were constantly improving and creating) and rendered in Marmoset.”
More planetary fauna – introducing mighty Oak-like trees!
Expect dense canopies, thick trunks, and forests that look powerful enough to survive whatever engineers throw at them. Well… most of it.
Mirko Bartolini (our designated Treemaster): “This is a set of oak trees designed for temperate, mid-altitude environments. The set is intended to cover different growth stages, ranging from mature trees with larger, more developed canopies to mid-adult and younger specimens.
The trees were created in SpeedTree using custom texture atlases that include a variety of branch shapes. These branches are applied to plane meshes and chained together to build complex canopy silhouettes while keeping the polycount low.”
Question to you: What are your first Economy 2 impressions?
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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Marek I think I love you! ❤️
Thank you and a massive thank you to the team for making functional buttons. I can’t wait to get my hands on them! And timers. And event blocks!
The artwork you share each week is stunning. Such talented artists. I can’t wait to find some critters amongst those trees. And F***ing Warheads 😯 So impressive!
Question for you… “Do you think person detection for automatic doors will become a thing in SE2?” I think the bones of it are already there in VRAGE3 with object detection dummies.
Mangroves next!
I am loving the progress I am seeing. The game just gets better and better.
Hopefully, in the second part, the warhead will have an explosion function when destroyed.
In the first part, my friend and I spent a lot of time creating simple missiles without scripts, but we couldn’t achieve anything, because the rocket crashed somewhere and the warhead just broke without exploding.
It was a frustrating experience.
On my slightly larger missiles, I added an extra warhead under the main thrusters set with a long fuse/delay (5-10 minutes) that only started after launch. The main reason was actually to ensure explosion for my armor piercing missiles, but it doubles as an auto cleaning feature too since that warhead rarely gets destroyed via impact. SE1 has serious speed calculation limitations, and this was one solution I used to work around them
So we have a new update for SE1 — Economy 2 — which is one of the biggest updates so far, completely revamping the economy system and opening several viable progression paths. You can finally be a trader, a pirate, or a scavenger, doing missions and relying on the economy system… OR you can simply mine megatons of resources and get rich much faster 🙂
I mean, sure, it is a sandbox game. You can decide to do whatever you like, and it is also quite hard to balance different progression paths so they all feel equally rewarding. We still have game settings and mods to tune things to our own taste. But at the same time, the traditional mining/production path feels very outdated now.
The old problems with “stone” and long refining times are still there after years. And we are still wandering randomly in circles with ore detectors or hopping from asteroid to asteroid hoping to find resources. There are tons of possibilities for improvement here.
Resource distribution, scarcity, and the challenges related to extracting resources could breathe new life into mining gameplay. Regular asteroids can be nerfed a bit, while real asteroid clusters with more interesting spawn patterns could create meaningful POIs in deep space beyond just planets and moons.
Planets themselves could also have much more interesting resource generation. Biomes could play a larger role, and some rare veins could be much larger.
And of course: stone. Hated by many 🙂
I really like the idea of environmental voxels in SE2, where you get different resources from different voxel materials. This is already much better than having one universal “stone” everywhere. We could go even further and collect voxel materials as they are (same as ores), with each voxel type having different compositions and concentrations of elements. That would make exploration and prospecting much more engaging, while also turning rich environmental deposits into valuable POIs on planets and moons.
Now about production.
The refining wait times in SE1 always felt exaggerated. I understand they were meant to limit mining efficiency and make alternative playstyles more appealing, but trading the player’s time for that is probably not the best solution.
With a proper refining step, production could depend much more on energy and infrastructure instead of arbitrary waiting times. Speed modules could become far more effective, and we could have a larger variety of production modules overall. Advanced speed modules should genuinely compete with yield modules.
Reactors could become extremely important for large-scale industrial infrastructure where you want to massively scale refining operations without building hundreds of refinery blocks.
And yes… gravel ingots. Almost useless right now, but there is one magical word: concrete 🙂
And please, let us place voxels back into the world in survival. There is SO much potential there. Repairing holes, fixing terrain mistakes, building landing pads, ramps, roads, bunkers, smooth surfaces, and much more.
Give us proper terraforming tools both in Creative and Survival. A smoothing tool, a leveling tool in Creative, and some kind of flat excavation/building tool in Survival. Drills are basically spheres — we need cubes too 🙂
There is still so much underused potential in this game, while the engine itself already seems capable of supporting many of these systems.
And honestly, most of this also applies to SE2 as well.
I’m really happy that diverse trees are being added, that’s awesome. But I’ve been wondering, will we ever get a variety of animals on the planets? I checked the feedback site and saw that most animalrelated suggestions have been moved to the archive, which honestly made me a bit sad.
Of course, having human NPCs in Space Engineers 2 is already a huge breakthrough in itself. But it would make perfect sense to add animals alongside them, tailored to different environments jungles, deserts, snowy plains, swamps. Animals wouldn’t just be decoration. They could create new gameplay dynamics: human NPCs fighting dangerous beasts in certain regions, or scientists studying newly discovered species. That would give players a real sense of discovery, danger, and life on the planets. Human NPCs alone are great, but together with animals, the worlds would feel truly alive and complete)
I can’t wait for the automatization functions 😀
Regarding fauna: Please improve the look of grass. It’s a such sharp contrast to the detailed ground materials to have this simple and rather uniform grass.
I’m not a big fan of the inventory being accessible from any access point and not just conveyor ports. It doesn’t really make sense, but it also means that you don’t need the plan out your layout for conveyor access.
Please make any dumbed down systems like this an optional setting.
ive never been much of a fan of interacting with conveyor ports either. i feel like i’m cheating if I dont go to the cargo container itself.
id like an inventory access point. maybe a terminal that goes over an empty conveyor port so you can place them where you like.
even if they do give us this new way to access inventory from any terminal, it doesnt mean you have to use it that way. play in uour own style
Continue to love the weekly cadence of these dev blogs and insight into the design and visual philosophy – you all have a great team!
suggestion; Speed limit settings
One quick note, especially with the growing button and event control block pieces. In SE1, we had a speed limit option for wheels that could then be easily increased or decreased with buttons of a cockpit control set-up. I’d love to see that setting not only brought into SE2 wheels but also SE2 thrusters – you could either place that universal setting on a cockpit (intuitive) or place it on individual thrusters/wheels (allows fun engineering options). Big picture – this creates a quality of life feature that allows engineers to optionally determine what their grid should regularly perform at, then can customize their buttons/tools to change it quickly in a pinch. an example – im taking my empty mining ship out at full speed and can fly fast, mine until full, then can lower speed limit on the way back to base to avoid a fatal crash without needing to disrupt the flying experince with a constant pulse of the forward key.
thanks all, keep up the good work!
I don’t understand the part about “over the top” explosions.. 😀
Oak looks good, but not mighty at all. trunk would need to me wider and the entire tree to be 2x larger to call it mightly.
can we get an update on how combat will work in se2 ?
Would be cool the lights from the timer block were with a effect “Neon”
Would be cool the lights from the timer block were with a effect “Neon” or “glow”
Stop teasing us with wheels. I wanna see them!!!!
Event controllers!!! I’ve been excited for timers and event controllers ever since you first showed of the unified grid system, it’ll be so nice to be able to make large ships with complex automation without taking up the massive space required for large grid blocks, or dealing with sub-grids