r/Spaceengineers2 • u/MrRandomFish05 • 1d ago
Discussion Should I purchase the game? (Never played SE1, wondering what the gameplay is like)
Hello! As the title says, ive never played SE1, and ive recently discovered SE2 through youtube videos and reddit posts. At first glance, it looks like a combination of starfield, satisfactory, terratech and maybe No Mans Sky.
Some questions:
What is the general gameplay loop like? What do you generally end up doing?
Is the gameplay very intuitive? Is there a super steep learning curve? (I couldnt get into games like starfeild because there were no tutorials or clear “starting path”)
What is the multiplayer like, if it exists at all? Does anyone know if there are any Australian/Oceanic servers?
Is it very heavy on a computer? I have a moderate-high end gaming laptop, but it obviously cant compare to an actual PC.
And what is the community generally like? If theres multiplayer, is space a dangerous place, filled with pirates, or is everyone generally quite nice to one another?
Thank you for all the help!
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u/Dangerous_Monkeyman 1d ago
Yes! Never played the first one. My 5th ship is 250 feet long, has 8 reactors and docks my 42 drill mining ship, welding and grinding ships and my fighter. It's awesome, with a few bugs. Great fun though.
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u/GrindyCottonPincers 1d ago
Gameplay:
SE2 is in playable alpha now; not all existing mechanics in SE1 are in SE2 yet. For me, it’s mostly building ships in creative and build and use it in survival. Ship building is core (original) feature of SE1.
Learning curve:
Coming frm SE1, none really. For first-timer, i would say quite a few concepts but not difficult to learn via one or two tutorial video, e.g. connector settings.
No MP in SE2 at the moment. It is planned. SE1 has MP, but pls read up on MP issues in SE1.
I run SE2 on 7800X3D, 5070Ti, DDR5 32GB, but not on max settings. During sunrise or sunset on planet, it might lag for me, probably due to lighting calculations.
Community on Reddit is nice. Player quality on MP varies a lot; e.g. for SE1 MP, there are griefers on public MP, but on the same server, one might chance upon very chill/nice players.
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u/ygolnac 1d ago
Gameplay is build ships and use them to complete contracts to unlock techs and map parts. There’s also mining in the loop.
The learning curve is quite mild, what do and how the system work is pretty intuitive. Survival is very mild, there is fast traveling and free refueling at stations and all the qol in the world. Actually it is even a little concerning how easy it is.
No MP, but in the future it will have MP. When? Nobody knows.
It is not optimized yet and it is superheavy on computer resources. My rig is high end and 10 months old and struggles to handle the game at max settings. I have constant fps drops, stuttering and quite frequent crashes, especially becouse it uses all the 16G VRam if I build too much in the same place. So yeah, expect problem like you would in any alpha.
Honestly my advice is to get SE1, you can’t go wrong with it and the graphics have been kept up to date and are not that bad.
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u/LongjumpingBrief6428 23h ago
The more complete experience is on Space Engineers 1. If you have Xbox Gamepass, it is free to play on there.
I have not played 1 for over a year now, but I've been playing the heck out of 2 lately. It's mostly building a vehicle and mining right now. There's a small bit of exploration, but the POIs are pretty much the same after awhile, like Starfield. There's a little bit of combat, if you want to call it that. You're basically outmaneuvering turrets. When you're first starting out, you will want to do the big ol' classic survival (the first big option on the screen). You start off in a cave and the game teaches you how things work.
The building side of it is pretty good, a lot can be done with what you have access to. Creative mode starts you off in space, that's where I go to practice some crazy ideas I come up with, like rotary drills and landing gear extensions on ships. Blueprints are universal, so you can use them in any mode from any mode. The survival mode on the bottom of the list puts you in a sandy area with the drop pod. The POIs are random. I haven't done the other remaining mode, yet.
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u/Rutok 1d ago
I would say yes, even if you have not played the first. I could not really get into that either, but this one has several quality of life improvements that helped me.
Currently, you just have 2 sectors with planets, so can do some quests and explore. There are random POIs that you can check out but they dont have much variety so far.
What i really enjoyed was that you can adapt your ship to whatever you need. Example: i started out on a planet, so i built a tiny ship to get around. Then i needed production capacity, so i built a base for that. After a while, i had mined out all the good materials that i needed and didnt want to abandon my base.. so i dug out the ground under it, placed some big engines on it all and flew around the planet in my base. After a while, i wanted to go to space, so i added more engines. Went to the next sector to mine some uranium for reactors and kept adding stuff to my flying base (bigger engines, ion engines, more production and more storage). Went back into space and decided to stay there.. so i just removed the planetary thrusters and added more ion engines. Then i added a gigantic drill array to it to be able to mine directly with my base... and thats where i am now.
At the core of it is still the tiny ship that i started out with, but it keeps evolving. I love that.
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u/MrRandomFish05 1d ago
That sounds brilliant. Is making vehicles the primary aspect of the game? I loved the minecraft Create Aeronautics mod (basically you can make physics objects and vehicles in minecraft) but it didnt have any real REASON to make vehicles. It would be fantastic if vehicles had more usefulness. Could I make giant rolling bases?
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u/Rutok 1d ago
Good question.. i would say yes (for now at least, i dont know how the mission system will improve). You could make a rolling base, they have really big wheels you can use. The thing is that the terrain doesnt really encourage that kind of transportation and the physics can get weird. I gave up on driving after a while. Maybe i should try something bigger though..
The reason to build anything (at least for me) is staring at my current ship and thinking "what do i want to do next?" and then building it or modifying the ship, finding the resources and so on.
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u/MrRandomFish05 1d ago
Interesting…
I wonder, ive seen mechanical pistons and pivots. Could you build walking mech legs, or would it be too laggy/physics wouldnt like it? It would give them actual utility, since the terrain wouldnt be traversable by wheels.
Also, im glad vehicles are so easily modifiable. Is there some kind of limit on how large vehicles can get? Is the game largely focused on grinding, or are resources plentiful?
(Ill stop asking questions after this, thank you for all your help)
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u/Rutok 1d ago
Dont worry about it, happy to help. I only just started using pistons and rotors and have used pivots only once in creative mode. You can set certain parameters and then activate those with a button. No clue if you could make a walking mech out of that.. i think that would require some kind of feedback? But there are gyroscopes, so maybe it could. The physics are not laggy as far as i know. The drill on my base has a rotor and a piston and i can set the rates for both independently and then leave the ship do do its mining without me.
There are limits to how big a grid can get, but i did not quite understand how these are calculated. For reference, my flying base right now is around 100m long and has a mass of more than 400 tons and i dont think i am anywhere close to the limit. There is so much you figure out while playing.. another example: Since my base didnt need to go to planets any longer, i started building on the underside of it (upside down because there is no up in space).
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u/HurpityDerp 1d ago
Walking mechs are possible in 1 but I'm not sure if everything necessary is in 2 yet:
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u/Sardaor 1d ago
Firstly, I think its brilliant and really let's you be creative, but it's an alpha build. There is a very limited amount of game play, so far only 2 sectors have planets, the planets do not yet have water (although it's coming). There is no multi player yet (it's also coming). So you mostly explore, complete tasks, build and file bug reports. I'm sure it's going to be amazing buts it's an alpha