Open asanagisae opened 4 months ago
tsunamayo
commented
4 months ago @asanagisae Hi, thanks for reporting issues, the next time you see a bug could you please book a separate case for each? So that I can track what is fixed and what isnt. thanks!
asanagisae
commented
4 months ago Ah, now I remember what I was thinking. I was using this issue to keep notes about my play-through. Some of these, I expected to come back to and attempt to gather evidence for. I didn't expect them to be read or actioned before I was finished.
Yes, separate issues makes more sense. It seems other players have been opening issues for similar bugs already.
Apologies for that.
Editing as I go along, in no particular order.
Bugs
The ones I can reproduce, I've created separate issues for. The remaining ones I'm just writing down so I can try to reproduce them later. The play through was not hindered by the bugs (and did not require abusing beneficial bugs), so my impressions will not factor in the bugs.
It's possible to fly through the ground. I believe I aimed the camera up, held forward+shift to get really high (where gravity weakens), then aim at the ground and hold forward+shift (to gain extra speed while gravity pulls down).
My first assembler refused to build anything until I restarted the game.
If you have two assemblers, sometimes they refuse to build items in their queue.
Grids with starter blocks sometimes move when placing/removing blocks. Sometimes it's by gravity.
Impressions
I played about 10 hours on this run with plenty of breaks in between. Most of my time was spent building my ship (and it was slow purely for aesthetic reasons). Overall, the experience is starting to feel like a real game. It was generally positive for me.
The starting planet, which feels both familiar and unfamiliar, was an excellent introduction to the world. However, there's no other inhabitable planet (oxygen and water) in the rest of the solar system, and so achieving light cruise feels a little empty (since you can't feasibly move to a new home unless you also build the warp drive).
The default -g jetpack mode is great. I leave my spaceship to explore an asteroid, and the orientation helps me find my way back to my ship with ease.
Progress can be divided into phases.
The Wreck You start off at the wreck of a ship (presumably yours?). The mining beam doesn't hit what's under the crosshair, it instead hits just right of it, which takes some getting used to. It's nice that the mining beam has AoE. The scrap is enough to get you started with the crafting bench, crucible, and starter block. It's not enough to build an entire ship out of, however. For that, you'd have to salvage 3 or 4 entire wrecks, and salvage feels rather slow (but understandable). A mining beam on a hover vehicle could help here.
Crafting Bench Finding trees was quick, coal is plentiful. Ore patches have lots of ore, especially if you find a second or third patch of the same type. Compared to the space engineers early game, SEVO has richer ore deposits with more locations and you spend less time digging (which is good).
However, progressing past the early game depends entirely on finding gold. Some players have found it within 30 minutes, I think it took me 2-4 hours before I found my first patch. The rarity isn't bad, but I think there should be something useful you can do before you find it.
Space engineers has an "ore detector" block available fairly early on. You can build it before you find silver/gold or rarer ores. If we had that in SEVO at this stage, it should solve the gold problem quickly and advance to the next stage. Also, in SE, your early game base is about accumulating electricity in batteries to power your early vehicles - you can do plenty before you have your advanced assemblers and refineries/furnaces.
Assembler By the time you've found gold, you'll have a couple hundred chunks of the other ores, plenty to build a capable spacecraft with. My greatest challenge was returning to base with several thousand rocks in my toolbars, occupying slots with 10 different colors. I couldn't put entire stacks in cargo, they were far too heavy. And so I was stuck using shift+right click to drop them in 10 at a time, waiting for the arc furnace to process them. (I wanted the silicon, I was greedy.) This part was cumbersome.
Space engineers usually starts you off with a working survival kit block, which processes stone as an ingredient and creates trace amounts of ingots from common ores (iron, copper, silicon). It's not efficient, but it's guaranteed to help you build your first vehicle with an ore detector even if you don't find any ores.
At this stage, I spent most of my time building and planning my space ship. I prepared a small base with a flat runway to build on. It turns out the other players just made their base fly. I was a fool. 😃
Light Cruise Filling a spaceship with hydrogen is difficult. You can put a fuel scoop on the body of the ship and fly the ship into water, but the water physics will toss the ship uncontrollably if it is small. If thrusters are on, you burn fuel faster than you can generate it. If thrusters are off, the ship may be lost to the waves, forever.
If you use a mechanism to stick a scoop into water from far, you run into this issue (in the current build): #5463.
I don't know if it is feasible to use a "shipyard" on the base along with a "kiosk" for selling fuel to yourself. I've had trouble with shipyards where the ship will attempt to park in the right location but it will ram every other ship in sight first. This is likely user error. 😁 Otherwise, it isn't possible to fill the ship with hydrogen stored at the base.
For this step, I used the codex and "Refill tanks".
Once in space, the trip from the planet to the asteroid belt was quick and beautiful. Usually, I find crystals on the 3rd or 4th asteroid, which is quite fast. I didn't see any ores on asteroids, so I believe most of my mining would be done on the planet surface. Mining asteroids isn't worth the increased difficulty of flying fuel and oxygen up from the planet.
Overall It's easy to get lost in this game. Once you reach space, the planet's geography is a little too random and also a little too self-similar. There's no clear north/south poles, no clear continents to remember your starting home by. The craters are all different, but you have to stare at each one for a while to determine if it's the one near your base.