About This Dev Diary
Every Thursday, I share some of what we’ve been working on – the challenges, solutions, and ideas that caught my attention. This is my unfiltered dev journal, so my thoughts and plans may change quickly, and nothing here is set in stone. And if you don’t like spoilers, don’t read further!
Space Engineers 1
We have added so much to Space Engineers in the past years – and now our goal is to make the world of Space Engineers feel even more alive!
NPCs are an important part of that goal, and our team has been hard at work improving their ability to navigate complex environments while maintaining stability. In this month’s preview video, you’ll see NPCs pathfinding across grids that are actively moving and rotating in space, showcasing their ability to operate smoothly and correctly as conditions change around them. This is an exciting step toward bringing more dynamic encounters to your worlds.
Each day, as progress across various systems moves forward, I am growing more and more excited about what our upcoming Warfare 3 update will bring to Space Engineers. Can’t wait to show you more as development continues!
Space Engineers 2
Meet the Renegades – hostile NPCs and space pirates who are starting to appear across the Almagest System and make it a much more dangerous place. They are being built to fight back when you cross their path.
In our latest combat test, you can see a player taking on the first few brave Renegades directly. This is an early look at how NPC combat is coming together as we continue developing their behavior, reactions, and combat encounters.
NPC speed is the main thing we are solving right now – most likely will end up with a separate animation controller for the NPCs, with variable speeds, and animators will redesign the animations, to feel more grounded, heavy, realistic. The same for shooting animations or death animation.
Alice Vescio, Space Engineers 2 Character Artist: “My goal for Renegades was to create a grounded, threat-focused tactical asset. I focused heavily on material separation (contrasting worn metallic armor plating with heavy-duty fabrics) to give the gear an authentic, battle-tested feel.
While the emissives were originally blue, shifting them to red strongly reinforces the hostile “renegade” faction identity and improves gameplay readability. I love how visual storytelling touches, such as mismatched, scavenged armor pieces, spray-painted details like the skull decal, and etched tally marks, sell that improvised pirate/rebel warrior vibe and help establish character lore at a glance.”
Story & Lore
Recently I have also spent quite a lot of time going back through the Space Engineers 2 story and lore.
We already had years of material – Miro and Ivan, the Bering Project, factions, locations, ancient mysteries, the history of Almagest, and the overall campaign. But it was spread across many documents and written at different stages of development, so not everything still fitted together.
I have been consolidating it into one coherent version, cleaning up inconsistencies, strengthening the characters and their relationships, making the factions and locations more distinct, improving motivations and goals, adding better mysteries, surprises and foreshadowing, and connecting the story much more closely with engineering, survival and colonization.
And also simply removing things that were there only because they were written years ago, when they no longer make sense for the game we are building today.
The basic premise remains familiar: Miro Sokol and his younger brother Ivan arrive in Almagest aboard the colony ship Calypso, expecting to help build humanity’s new home. Instead, something goes terribly wrong.
The story is not supposed to be a separate linear campaign sitting on top of Space Engineers. It should live naturally inside the sandbox – through contracts, exploration, discoveries, the factions you meet, and the things you actually build, repair and change in the world.
At its heart, it is becoming much more about two brothers, the people they came to protect, and what it actually means to build a new home thousands of light-years from Earth.
I don’t want to reveal much more yet, because some of the things we are working on will be much better to discover in the game.
You came to Almagest to build a new home. First, you have to survive long enough to understand what happened to the people who came before you.
And there is another strange thing: Humanity crossed 10,000 light-years to reach Almagest. But when Miro arrives, parts of the system already feel strangely familiar.
Competition Results Livestream
Please join us Friday, September 4th, for the “Masters of Motion” – Mechanical Engineering Video Competition Livestream!
Celebrate the creativity of the Space Engineers 1 & 2 communities with us and watch the best mechanical engineering videos from both games!
📅 Friday, September 4th, 5 PM UTC
Livestream:
🛰️ Twitch: https://twitch.tv/keencommunitynetwork
🛰️ YouTube: https://youtube.com/user/SpaceEngineersGame
Question to you: How do you like the Renegade Suit
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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All looks good, pretty exciting stuff!
Perhaps will there be a compendium of some sort available with all the bits of relevant/miscellaneous story parts you find? Like a log or archive of PDA’s, cutscenes, npc dialogue and contracts related to the story that we can look at in the menu or block?
It can be difficult to remember everything over a 100-500+ hour save, especially as an adult when you may only have a few hours to play per week. That 100 hours may be stretched out over 9 months. Some sort of lore log would be great to look over for history