Lightning just needs to act a whole lot more like, you know, lightning. It should almost 100% of the time strike static grids connected to the ground, then mobile grids, then trees, and only THEN have a small chance of striking a player. Structural blocks like armour should take a small amount of damage, only functional blocks should be seriously hit (if they get hit). It should also have a huge preference for whatever is highest up, over the previous priorities, which should realistically be the only way a player will ever get struck; by prancing around on the roof in a thunderstorm like a maniac.
I agree - being hit by lightening while about 80m underground as I hand drill a tunnel is just plain silly. I just keep weather turned off now - sadly, I like the idea but not this Zeus powered stuff. lol
I think the lightning mechanic is awesome, the first time I got hit by lightning it killed me, then while I was respawning from THAT strike, I got hit again, which very nearly killed me, but did toast the medbay I spawned at. SENSATIONAL programming.
I still think there should be a lightning rod mod that can handle a strike and charge up capacitors, which then release power into the connected grid similar to a battery.
What you said about "perfect being the enemy of good": I've found that sometimes, "good enough" _is_ perfect for a given situation. The trick is to remember that.
I added the "no lightning damage" mod to all my playthroughs. It is too annoying, that the lightning allways hits me or my stuff without missing, doing more damage than actual combat. I'd rather fight the cyberhunds, or other enemyes, you can build defenses and get resources out of them. Hunger, thirst and sleepiness is also a good thing to have. Lightning is simply just frustrating, having a net loss of resources, with an "enemy" you can't fight back.
I agree, but was thinking if they added a lightning rod block that both protects you from damage and charges batteries a bit, the lightning would actually be a little useful instead of just annoying!
@@mandrakejake They have 1. It's called a decoy. IIRC, the decoy attracts lightning. Just stick a turned on welder underneath it. It can be defended against, but is extremely annoying. It's why the first thing I do is move my survival kit into a cave or underground.
@@chrishoppner7875 It *can* be defended against. It's just your early game defense options are more limited. I like to put my survival kit underground.
@@jarrod752 ah cool I hadn't thought of using a decoy. It won't charge your batteries though! I just thought a lightning rod block would make the lightning actually useful
While I hate lightning, that storm at the beginning that took out both drills... Epic, your pain and frustration was felt deeply... But I still couldn't help but cackle like a witch. Yet my evilness was nothing compared to yours, when you pushed that loyal, hapless battery into the pit... I had been thinking that it looked like a grave, but still hadn't expected that! I thought the rover would end up in it... I call for all batteries to re-volt and may you be shocked amp powerless to de-fuse the rebellion watt you created!! Great content as always, thanks for the laughs!
Regarding your PC Splitsie, sometimes having certain USB Devices plugged into the BIOS Flash port on the motherboard can cause the PC not to POST. Happened to me once after installing some new fans and then plugging a Blue Yeti into the BIOS Flash port. Computer wouldn't boot and motherboard lights indicated that it could not detect the CPU!! Weirdly any other device in that port works absolutely fine 😂Hope this helps!
Reset Voxel tool weaponized! Step 1: Dig a big hole. Step 2: Build your base. Step 3: Reset surface voxels. You are now camouflaged! Imagine a drill popping out of the ground on pistons with some turrets under it! Fringe maybe, but if done near a valuable ore mine, a trap possibly!
Exactly, my immediate thought was surrounding a base with underground mines with proximity sensors in MP, camouflaged by pristine voxels. Especially in MP, voxel damage is readily visible at high altitudes, being able to repair the voxel damage is *huge*. TBH, these are all arguments in favor of adding it!
Roundabouts, try the one in Hemel Hempstead in the UK, When I used to drive to and from Hemel, I avoided that one like the plague. (The only roundabout where you can go in both directions)
Decoy blocks aren't available in a vanilla playthrough until after you've got turrets, by that point many new players would already have had their survival kits wiped by the ridiculous lightning. It's bad game design to have it in, even worse if Keen want to keep new players.
53:31. I have a creative Rover build where there's 18 pistons, 2 lines of 9 pistons, as long as the piston head of the last piston in each line isn't scraping another block, the build wont klang, but if there's something scraping that piston head my build would fly away with a speed of 200km/h (the pistons that are connected to each other doesnt seems to have any problem scraping, just the last piston head)
I wish I had known about this last night with the hinge limits when I was fighting with my first large grid rover's drill arm. I also kept figuring out the turret controller would zero my rotation on my hinges which makes sense.
For adding Shields to the vanilla game, perhap a variation of that shield mod that just layers your blocks with a shield but balance it from an engineering perspective but limiting the amount, and type of blocks each unit can protect as well as drastically increasing the mass of the buildable block and a huge power consumption, even while not under fire. Still I would agree that armouring should be worked on long before Shields make it into the vanilla game
You know? It would be cool if you would have made the big miner/rover a mobile monorail drilling rig. With those 5x5 wheels. OMG!!! That would have been EPIC!!!
SE Lightning is so beyond Broken! I learned a valuable lesson when Lightning blasted through 3 blocks and annihilated my Medbay. I swiftly turned OFF weather after getting struck 6 times in one storm! Raiderbots, NPC's, Cyberhounds at least have the interaction of dealing with them when they show up. I never saw a Cyberhound as I got the game well after they were removed. but the AIEnabled Raiderbots while annoying, give loot when you kill them. shields are OK and have their place in those themed worlds where Shields are used. I would love to see Sloped Armor actually have real merit in the game as it does IRL by deflecting incoming fire and mitigating damage. small grids need a general buff to make them worth the effort to build and use in large scale combat as fighters and Bombers to threaten the big ships. a new block = structure, designed to provide the form of a vehicle, but offers not a lot of physical protection beyond the weather/elements to replace what the light armor essentially is now Light Armor
I'm with you on angles and deflections, but the concrete and materials isn't a possible thing without introducing a new block type. The concrete and various metal plating is all cosmetic. So they'd have to have something like "base block" or "dense block" for the concrete stand in and something like "ballistic rated armor blocks" for the heavier armor like depleted uranium. But at the very least, angle deflection NEEDS to be a thing. The armor as it is is pretty much weight and fashion. The heavy armor blocks only stand a little more beating than light armor blocks and that's really the only merit to them. If we're going to get into long range battles or close up slug fests with the current armor block settings, we might as well go for bricks since they have more mass and material and therefore a little more health. Although, small scale light armor all has the same integrity as other light armor blocks, so nothing matters as far as design. The light large grid, heavy small grid, and heavy big grid all have varying integrity values depending on the block shape, with the full block having the most integrity.
I'm a bit more experienced now so I integrated the welder/decoy into my rover base design so it helped build modules as I added them. However as Splitsie said this is about the new player experience and they are likely to just get frustrated as I first did. I do however enjoy watching the lightning strike the decoy and the welder repairing it back up again.
2:16:45 - Ah, did you run into the same inertial problem I have? I've had this problem for a while where both hinges and rotors, if they're perfectly stable (not wobbling even slightly) simply find themselves completely unable to move their attached mass despite the fact that they *should*. And if anything disturbs it even slightly, they start moving again normally. The disturbance be anything like changing the limits so it jolts the machinery or another non-stuck subgrid hitting it slightly causing it to move.
That does seem consistent with my experience. Was mucking around for the thumbnail and found the hinges would sometimes move if I wobbled the turret controller back and forth :/
On the power creep of having shields. If the more of each type of power creating and storing devices connected there are, the less efficient they become. But to make it interesting, grids should be set up so they only work properly with all energy defense and offense. Or traditional armor and projectiles. Grids would need to be made with separate power systems and armor blocks, this would allow separate tweeking to balance fighting.
If the lightening would act IRL and hit the closest high spot, A mountain or hill that was close. It would make more sense. Another mechanic that would be good maybe is, if the height of a grid is below the efficient height of wind turbines. It gets ignored. Add a turbine and its a lightening rod. People rarely get hit directly by lightening. Its usually by standing near a high object like a tree tower building or some such.
really enjoying this vanilla scenario :) and cant wait for your next Wrong Way Up episode either :) btw at the end of your video it looks like your antenna didn't finish building...
Pulling from WEG Star Wars, you would have either full shields and/or sectional controlled shields. It would take A LOT more power usage, but I would say would be something like your building projectors. In order to have 360 shields, would need 4 projectors to cover each quadrant. They would absorb damage % of damage until they fail.
1:14:53 There is actually a way to remove floating shrubs after mining, but it involves creative tools. Use voxel hands to place a voxel around it and then delete it. At least that worked for me, don't know if it works all the time
There are any number of ways that you could use to make shields work. For example you could make shields give a % chance to deflect incoming hits rather then tanking it until they break so the shield isn't adding "Hit Points" preventing the ship being invulnerable until the shields are down.
I think the simple solution is to just make them a lot less powerful. Shields should stop small-scale damage but in a large grid ship fight they should go down rather quickly.
@@AdmiralKarelia I could honestly take or leave shields before but since the latest changes that turned everything into explodium I am more in favor of shields
so my whole thing with shields, i think it should block bullets, not grids, that way you could have specific Kinetic kill vehicles that can penetrate the shields to take out the shields, opening up your opponent to gunfire, and visa versa, once you build your first shield, the AI should be like "Oh, we can start making suicide drones that can specifically target shields and batteries and engines. that will make them more complicated and easy to get around, but also protective enough in my eyes to be worth it. you could even make it so large grids cant get past the shield but little ones can so that big ships have a reason to build small drones and 3d drone printers for ship to ship combat.
got a question is there a way to place wind turbines on pistons and hinges and make them work, I have place a piston to anchor down to the ground and that allows me to place turbines to my vehicle blocks but I have no luck with placing the turbines on pistons and hinges, I have a awesome build idea if anyone knows how this can be done.
Short answer is: No. You cannot have a wind turbine on the end of a piston/rotor/hinge and have it function as it is then on a mobile grid since any subgrid that can move is mobile. To get around this on rovers I have put turbines and a landing gear on the **same** subgrid and locked the gear to voxel to make them work, so there are some workarounds but they're clunky
@@Flipsie Yes On my Moble miner I have drop down pistons with the square docking pads on them which I have set to lock only when I tell it to. then once my moble miner is lifted off the ground and stable level, I lock the docking pads then I can put wind turbines on any part on my miner so long as it isn't a piston or hinge or rotor. everything else works, I'll be live streaming sometime the next few hours showing off my build.
As far as shields goes, I think that the problem is that the mod just makes a kind of bubble all the way around. Cosmoteer has a better solution with shields only projecting in an arc and having a limited range as well as having rather high power depletion rate when under fire. It makes it more of something that you use strategically as need be to protect sensitive parts. I would not mind seeing Space Engineer trying something similar.
"I don't play with the Cyber Hounds mod because I hate the idea of killing hounds." A man of culture. Similarly, I'll probably never turn on the "Arachophobia" setting in Satisfactory because I'd rather slaughter giant scary spiders than swing at mutated cats.
IMO the problem with shields is that they encourage an "unlimited power" gameplay dynamic. Spam enough reactors, and you can get unlimited shield power and be almost invulnerable. Which only causes your enemy to spam more guns and make combat more boring than anything else. If there is a mechanic that gives you diminishing returns for more shield capacity or make adding power sources more challenging (like reactors that put out an area of effect radiation, so your ships have to be BIG) it would make shields more balanced and more like a different tool in your toolbox, so you have to build smart. Quality should be worth more than quantity.
i think keen should keep the lightning, just change how it acts based on the 'safety' of your game. If you are playing in apocalyptic, lightning should chase you down, if its safe, it should have a REALLY low chance to hit an antenna block only.
@@axeleverttv I'd like to see the lightning do something positive in addition to the destruction of the blocks. like maybe you get a supercharge on some batteries for half a second and maybe you got (x)kwh across all your batteries.
My argument is that random damage gameplay without effective mitigation options are awful (and you can't mitigate lightning in vanilla until you've built turrets and by then you've already potentially lost your whole base/drop pod). Lightning as it is implemented is potentially ruining the game for new players and needs to be turned off by default (can still have the flashes but they should cause no damage). There are plenty of other areas in the game where Keen should spend their time to improve it, so for now they should just get rid of the lightning damage and move on - hopefully to interesting NPCs
I recommend watchng a few vids from a channel called PandemicPlayground. He has a fair few really cool and intersting vehicle builds, like a flying welder and grider combo where he's mounted 2 welders and grinders on 2 rotating arms and mobile drilling platform with removable storage containers. That last on isnt actually very practical, but the way he had set it was pretty cool, it was basically 2 "legs" made up with pistons, a drill in the middle, and a platform on top with 2 connectors for 2 lagre containers.
I was trying to replicate your drill arm, what are the settings on the hinges that fold it back on itself? Also... what did you finally decide to do to center the drill head hinge?
Those hinges are just maxed out on torque with one set to rotate through 90degrees and the other through 180 with a little jiggle to get them going when they seem stuck. For centreing the drill head I just switch off that hinge when it's about in the middle - went low tech :P
In regards to Never Surrender, I didn't end up using the new weapons, but I did go through after Warfare 1. Instead of building a huge ship, I built what I call the War Hen. She laid eggs. These eggs, contrary to what you might think, didn't explode. Instead, they shot at anything they didn't like. I was able to use IIM to stock them with ammo and manage the assemblers that built the parts for the eggs. As it turns out, you don't need rail guns to kill the enemy. An irresponsible amount of good ol' gatlings will do just fine.
I want to see bauxite and AL in the vanilla game. AL in light armor blocks, more attention on AL reducing mass, and steel in heavy armor favoring protection.
The lightning feels like you're stood on a mountain top wearing a copper hat, flying a kite stood in a bucket of something highly conductive shouting "cmon ya bastard do yer worst!" The theory of lightning and weather is ok but the implementation just isn't fun, thankfully you can mod the damage off and keep the rest of the weather stuff.
nope! by default, I run with my Suit Beacon off to keep drones from homing in on me. doesn't stop Lightning one bit from finding you, even underground!
Lighting is a bit annoying with how often it strikes important items. It would be awesome if it was really rare, but when it struck it would damage the item and all batteries on that grid would be charged 100% 😆
Shield combat in Empyrion is good, because the combat is balanced around it. SE combat is balanced around armour and mass/block count, + the unreal inaccuracy of the weapons.
Some times when it thunder stormed in space engineers I say some one made thor or zuse mad because lightning keep striking my cars bildings and my ships some times even me
I recon lightning is good it provides some environmental challenge it's more realistic and splitsie I will help you convince keen if you turn off lightning in real life so if I don't get lightning here in Branxton for a year or two
I don't want realism in my games, I quite like it when the real world inspires an interesting game mechanic, but I don't want realism per se. Lightning that strikes the player and their stuff at random with next to no sign of what has just happened with no ability to protect from it until after you've built a turret is simply bad game design.
Lightning should do this: turn off random blocks across the entire grid (and subgrids), nerf the damage down a bunch, injure player like it does now, make all lights on grid vary rapidly in intensity and range, and maybe spread targeting to something other than player, wheels, and antennas. (It targets wheels for some reason.) Just like real life you would have to go around and restart stuff and flip switches, turn on suit lights to get out of where ever you were. It does do too much damage right now. Even just making it a fixed percentage to grid weight would make it more fair. It can end your game early if you get unlucky.
Roundabouts are good as long as they aren't designed in the US, otherwise they end up overly complicated with like 3 roundabouts all connected together with like 6 lanes each
Maybe add the DLC behind the drill cockpit door that says. Attention to all that is not operating this machine. If you die while near this it is not their fault but yours for not reading this in the first place.
I've steered well clear of plugins. I really don't want to have to go through removing them + mods + whatever else, whenever something goes wrong. There's not enough for me to gain to go through that pain when things inevitably break :/
"I'm going to annoy Keen to turn lightning off because it makes the game too hard for me to play". You could just turn the weather off. Pretty sure there's also a mod that turns lighting off or nerfs it. It's not like you don't have options already.
It has nothing to do with difficulty, I constantly make the game more difficult for myself. It's about good gameplay and bad gameplay, random unmitigated and unavoidable (since the decoys contribute to be bugged) damage is bad gameplay, especially for new players - that's who I'm advocating for.
If you mouse wheel up you get the circle if you mouse wheel down you get the list (at least that has been my experience having just started using the mod) Edit: Build Vision
I've had issues with sometimes posting sometimes not posting that were related to a dodgy stick of ram. try booting the PC on a single stick at at time until you identify the culprit.
Shields only work if they make sense, which in vanilla or official DLC or most QOL modded games, doesn't make sense. I don't understand why an energy shield "magic"s away a kinetic round in a science and physics based game. If there's energy weapons, which there are some mods for, then yes; shields fit in. But they have no place even with the Warfare II DLC. However, the armor needs a serious rework because currently there's no merit to designing anything that will go into battle. You build a brick, because full blocks have the most health, slap guns, thrusters, a seat, and batteries on it and you've got just as valid of a fighter as anything else currently. The armor doesn't matter and it all gets eaten up all the same. We need ricochet and deflection angles because the current system, if a block of any size at any angle is tickled by a bullet in the damage box, it takes the full brunt of that bullet with no resistances being calculated and no real interesting reactions going on. You build a 5 layer thick brick with guns and backup guns and thrusters, you basically cannot lose due to your "health pool" just being that much more superior to a nice looking fighter. It's sad, but that's the current system. But in short, if we want shields as an actual vanilla in game thing, we need appropriate energy weapons to fit them. The current solution we do need is a revamp on the current armor blocks, which are the solution to the current physical kinetic rounds. That being said, I think a low powered shield specifically for lightning would be fair and cool. Nothing else, just lightning. Like each lightning strike has a chance to explode a battery, so you need a grounding block to dissipate the extra energy or have a capacitor to convert that lightning into energy for your batteries. But yeah, a shield against lightning would be prime. An adequate solution against "force wall" spamming would have the shields use a ton of energy whenever they actually do block anything AND have every shield react to any projectile that falls within its range. So a single bullet could overload someone's entire power supply and shutdown their shields. It becomes more of a gamble and tactical planning at that point. Spam shields and reactors and just have a practical bomb rolling around in space or do you place them around ammo containers and hydrogen tanks to protect them while armoring up everything else standard. I think there just needs to be a constant upkeep cost of energy or some resource input to make it fair and to have them have a spike demand of that resource whenever they do go off.
QOL changes that I personally think they need is to change the ore deposit textures of silver, platinum, silicon, uranium, cobalt, and magnesium. I get we can whip out our drills to see what's what, but we shouldn't have to second guess everytime we come across a meteor crater, deposit on planet, or asteroid. We should be able to tell better right off, that's reflective "bluish white" so silver. That's very white and reflective compared to the dark dull gray around it, so it's platinum. This speckled dark stuff is silicon, while this more craggly stuff is uranium. This deep blue hue is cobalt while this nearly neon blue is magnesium. Something like that. I hate having to second guess and go and get an ore detector to reverify my finds just to be disappointed every time. We could also used a bigger battery. Like how he have the small and large cargo containers, I feel like having a large battery for large grid would make things a bit easier than slamming 10 batteries into a capital ship. It'd be just as expensive if not more, but it'd push players to consider making welding ships/apparatuses. While it's not perfect by any means, have you never used Digi's Concrete tool? It only lets you splat out the concrete texture for voxels, but similar to the paint gun, you build a concrete tool and you make concrete mix with gravel and you can fill in voxels with it in survival (ie, it's a tool instead of voxel hands.) It's a bit wonky at times, but I think that's what you generally would want. It just would need to be made vanilla.
I'm not getting into the shield debate as that's something Keen very likely already hotly debated and decided wasn't worth it. Unless of course they're not into testing game design decisions.
I have over 3k hours in this game, and i refuse to play on Pertram because of the lightning, its just not fun or interesting to deal with unlike other weather like fog on Triton killing your wind generation, which makes you rethink base design, lightnging storms are just annoying, they break blocks for no reason, target wheels of rovers and can hit you through a cockpit, none of which makes any sense for how lightning actually works.
I think your distaste for lightning is biasing your opinion on how it's going to feel in the new player experience. I think it's amazing, having that extra element of fear. Space Engineers is tough on new players yes but that fact is kind of it's charm really
Hey Flipsie/Splitsie, has anyone recommended to you a playthough using the deep ores mod? It makes setting up dedicated drill stations a requirement and it might make an interesting playthrough for you and Capac as a side step to large rovers skimming the surface for everything. I'm going through survival with a collection of mods that seem to work well together for the deep ores mod. Since I can't comment with links, the file id on steam workshop is id=2766227303. Finding it via the search is almost impossible so manual URL entry is recommended...anyway thanks for the mods and great videos to watch. Cheers.
I've played with deep ores a few times (though not in any published series) and other than having very deep holes through which I had to get to the ore it didn't change the gameplay for me much. It's why when I started Survival Impossible I went with a custom ore distribution that made it rare instead of deep as I felt that would make things that needed different solutions more viable. I've been contemplating different ways to avoid the issues that arise from 'stone makes everything' (or nearly everything) but haven't come up with anything that I'm keen to do just yet
@@Flipsie Your not wrong, i say as im in the deep iron hole i had to bore, digging another deep hole to get cobalt 300 meters lower...i guess it wouldn't make good views... I was just imagining You, Capac and the others exploring the depths of the planet in some digging monstrosity as clever as your rover designs. Then I remember how SE doesn't really handle a lot of terrain modification well and think about the disaster that will ensue from desync issues. One can dream..(and pray the tiny voxel that you missed digging doesn't destroy your ship)....but hey If challenge is needed, there is always industrial overhaul or the water mod with the more NPC encounters (they added water mod support post v6).
Lightning just needs to act a whole lot more like, you know, lightning. It should almost 100% of the time strike static grids connected to the ground, then mobile grids, then trees, and only THEN have a small chance of striking a player. Structural blocks like armour should take a small amount of damage, only functional blocks should be seriously hit (if they get hit). It should also have a huge preference for whatever is highest up, over the previous priorities, which should realistically be the only way a player will ever get struck; by prancing around on the roof in a thunderstorm like a maniac.
Prancing around the roof like a Capac.
I agree - being hit by lightening while about 80m underground as I hand drill a tunnel is just plain silly. I just keep weather turned off now - sadly, I like the idea but not this Zeus powered stuff. lol
I think the lightning mechanic is awesome, the first time I got hit by lightning it killed me, then while I was respawning from THAT strike, I got hit again, which very nearly killed me, but did toast the medbay I spawned at. SENSATIONAL programming.
Hey Splitsie, thanks for supplying your videos during lunch break! Breaks up the monotony in home office!
Hope you had a tasty lunch to enjoy it with :)
Monday is the worst, having to be distracted by Wrong Way Up!
@@Flipsie You bet!
I still think there should be a lightning rod mod that can handle a strike and charge up capacitors, which then release power into the connected grid similar to a battery.
Go write it!
What you said about "perfect being the enemy of good": I've found that sometimes, "good enough" _is_ perfect for a given situation. The trick is to remember that.
So true :)
This gameplay is so chilles that i saw it at 1.5x and could hear and understand everything even with my bad english. Loved it! Thanks!!!
Meant to write Chilled, not chilles
I added the "no lightning damage" mod to all my playthroughs.
It is too annoying, that the lightning allways hits me or my stuff without missing, doing more damage than actual combat.
I'd rather fight the cyberhunds, or other enemyes, you can build defenses and get resources out of them.
Hunger, thirst and sleepiness is also a good thing to have.
Lightning is simply just frustrating, having a net loss of resources, with an "enemy" you can't fight back.
I agree, but was thinking if they added a lightning rod block that both protects you from damage and charges batteries a bit, the lightning would actually be a little useful instead of just annoying!
@@mandrakejake They have 1. It's called a decoy. IIRC, the decoy attracts lightning. Just stick a turned on welder underneath it. It can be defended against, but is extremely annoying. It's why the first thing I do is move my survival kit into a cave or underground.
@@chrishoppner7875 It *can* be defended against. It's just your early game defense options are more limited. I like to put my survival kit underground.
@@jarrod752 ah cool I hadn't thought of using a decoy. It won't charge your batteries though! I just thought a lightning rod block would make the lightning actually useful
@@mandrakejake It's not decoy, it's antenna that attracts lightning. I have no idea if it still takes damage though.
I like the way the integrity field in Avorion works, all blocks in area take damage instead of just 1, increasing the overall health of the ship,
While I hate lightning, that storm at the beginning that took out both drills... Epic, your pain and frustration was felt deeply... But I still couldn't help but cackle like a witch. Yet my evilness was nothing compared to yours, when you pushed that loyal, hapless battery into the pit... I had been thinking that it looked like a grave, but still hadn't expected that! I thought the rover would end up in it... I call for all batteries to re-volt and may you be shocked amp powerless to de-fuse the rebellion watt you created!!
Great content as always, thanks for the laughs!
" I dont like shields because it make SE like Empyrion!" Says the man who has almost no empyrion videos lol. Love your stuff man keep goin
1:08 in and I'm suprised splitsie hasn't built an airvent on depressurise to fill his o2
20:06 Even with full context the statement "Oh this is just suffocating" made me crack up.
Regarding your PC Splitsie, sometimes having certain USB Devices plugged into the BIOS Flash port on the motherboard can cause the PC not to POST. Happened to me once after installing some new fans and then plugging a Blue Yeti into the BIOS Flash port. Computer wouldn't boot and motherboard lights indicated that it could not detect the CPU!! Weirdly any other device in that port works absolutely fine 😂Hope this helps!
Reset Voxel tool weaponized!
Step 1: Dig a big hole.
Step 2: Build your base.
Step 3: Reset surface voxels.
You are now camouflaged! Imagine a drill popping out of the ground on pistons with some turrets under it! Fringe maybe, but if done near a valuable ore mine, a trap possibly!
Exactly, my immediate thought was surrounding a base with underground mines with proximity sensors in MP, camouflaged by pristine voxels. Especially in MP, voxel damage is readily visible at high altitudes, being able to repair the voxel damage is *huge*. TBH, these are all arguments in favor of adding it!
@@tinsoldier314 There are currently 10234 people playing on this server. 3 of them have interacted in the last 24 hours.
Roundabouts, try the one in Hemel Hempstead in the UK, When I used to drive to and from Hemel, I avoided that one like the plague. (The only roundabout where you can go in both directions)
Yeah, you guys take roundabouts and put them on steroids 😂
Decoy blocks work great to prevent lightening. Just put a welder under them
Decoy blocks aren't available in a vanilla playthrough until after you've got turrets, by that point many new players would already have had their survival kits wiped by the ridiculous lightning. It's bad game design to have it in, even worse if Keen want to keep new players.
53:31. I have a creative Rover build where there's 18 pistons, 2 lines of 9 pistons, as long as the piston head of the last piston in each line isn't scraping another block, the build wont klang, but if there's something scraping that piston head my build would fly away with a speed of 200km/h (the pistons that are connected to each other doesnt seems to have any problem scraping, just the last piston head)
I wish I had known about this last night with the hinge limits when I was fighting with my first large grid rover's drill arm. I also kept figuring out the turret controller would zero my rotation on my hinges which makes sense.
For adding Shields to the vanilla game, perhap a variation of that shield mod that just layers your blocks with a shield but balance it from an engineering perspective but limiting the amount, and type of blocks each unit can protect as well as drastically increasing the mass of the buildable block and a huge power consumption, even while not under fire. Still I would agree that armouring should be worked on long before Shields make it into the vanilla game
You know? It would be cool if you would have made the big miner/rover a mobile monorail drilling rig. With those 5x5 wheels. OMG!!! That would have been EPIC!!!
SE Lightning is so beyond Broken!
I learned a valuable lesson when Lightning blasted through 3 blocks and annihilated my Medbay.
I swiftly turned OFF weather after getting struck 6 times in one storm!
Raiderbots, NPC's, Cyberhounds at least have the interaction of dealing with them when they show up.
I never saw a Cyberhound as I got the game well after they were removed. but the AIEnabled Raiderbots while annoying, give loot when you kill them.
shields are OK and have their place in those themed worlds where Shields are used.
I would love to see Sloped Armor actually have real merit in the game as it does IRL by deflecting incoming fire and mitigating damage.
small grids need a general buff to make them worth the effort to build and use in large scale combat as fighters and Bombers to threaten the big ships.
a new block = structure, designed to provide the form of a vehicle, but offers not a lot of physical protection beyond the weather/elements to replace what the light armor essentially is now
Light Armor
I'm with you on angles and deflections, but the concrete and materials isn't a possible thing without introducing a new block type. The concrete and various metal plating is all cosmetic. So they'd have to have something like "base block" or "dense block" for the concrete stand in and something like "ballistic rated armor blocks" for the heavier armor like depleted uranium. But at the very least, angle deflection NEEDS to be a thing. The armor as it is is pretty much weight and fashion. The heavy armor blocks only stand a little more beating than light armor blocks and that's really the only merit to them. If we're going to get into long range battles or close up slug fests with the current armor block settings, we might as well go for bricks since they have more mass and material and therefore a little more health. Although, small scale light armor all has the same integrity as other light armor blocks, so nothing matters as far as design. The light large grid, heavy small grid, and heavy big grid all have varying integrity values depending on the block shape, with the full block having the most integrity.
I'm a bit more experienced now so I integrated the welder/decoy into my rover base design so it helped build modules as I added them.
However as Splitsie said this is about the new player experience and they are likely to just get frustrated as I first did.
I do however enjoy watching the lightning strike the decoy and the welder repairing it back up again.
2:16:45 - Ah, did you run into the same inertial problem I have? I've had this problem for a while where both hinges and rotors, if they're perfectly stable (not wobbling even slightly) simply find themselves completely unable to move their attached mass despite the fact that they *should*. And if anything disturbs it even slightly, they start moving again normally. The disturbance be anything like changing the limits so it jolts the machinery or another non-stuck subgrid hitting it slightly causing it to move.
That does seem consistent with my experience. Was mucking around for the thumbnail and found the hinges would sometimes move if I wobbled the turret controller back and forth :/
On the power creep of having shields. If the more of each type of power creating and storing devices connected there are, the less efficient they become. But to make it interesting, grids should be set up so they only work properly with all energy defense and offense. Or traditional armor and projectiles. Grids would need to be made with separate power systems and armor blocks, this would allow separate tweeking to balance fighting.
If the lightening would act IRL and hit the closest high spot, A mountain or hill that was close. It would make more sense. Another mechanic that would be good maybe is, if the height of a grid is below the efficient height of wind turbines. It gets ignored. Add a turbine and its a lightening rod. People rarely get hit directly by lightening. Its usually by standing near a high object like a tree tower building or some such.
The exploding dogs you could actually do something about! I even built a base that negates them entirely within the first week.
really enjoying this vanilla scenario :) and cant wait for your next Wrong Way Up episode either :)
btw at the end of your video it looks like your antenna didn't finish building...
Pulling from WEG Star Wars, you would have either full shields and/or sectional controlled shields. It would take A LOT more power usage, but I would say would be something like your building projectors. In order to have 360 shields, would need 4 projectors to cover each quadrant. They would absorb damage % of damage until they fail.
1:14:53 There is actually a way to remove floating shrubs after mining, but it involves creative tools. Use voxel hands to place a voxel around it and then delete it. At least that worked for me, don't know if it works all the time
@splitsie Regarding force wall blocks. It could increase in weight when active. Even more heavy than comparable set of armor blocks.
There are any number of ways that you could use to make shields work. For example you could make shields give a % chance to deflect incoming hits rather then tanking it until they break so the shield isn't adding "Hit Points" preventing the ship being invulnerable until the shields are down.
I think the simple solution is to just make them a lot less powerful. Shields should stop small-scale damage but in a large grid ship fight they should go down rather quickly.
@@AdmiralKarelia I could honestly take or leave shields before but since the latest changes that turned everything into explodium I am more in favor of shields
so my whole thing with shields, i think it should block bullets, not grids, that way you could have specific Kinetic kill vehicles that can penetrate the shields to take out the shields, opening up your opponent to gunfire, and visa versa, once you build your first shield, the AI should be like "Oh, we can start making suicide drones that can specifically target shields and batteries and engines. that will make them more complicated and easy to get around, but also protective enough in my eyes to be worth it. you could even make it so large grids cant get past the shield but little ones can so that big ships have a reason to build small drones and 3d drone printers for ship to ship combat.
got a question is there a way to place wind turbines on pistons and hinges and make them work, I have place a piston to anchor down to the ground and that allows me to place turbines to my vehicle blocks but I have no luck with placing the turbines on pistons and hinges, I have a awesome build idea if anyone knows how this can be done.
Turbines only work on static grids not vehicles I'm not sure about sub grids tho hope that helps
Short answer is: No. You cannot have a wind turbine on the end of a piston/rotor/hinge and have it function as it is then on a mobile grid since any subgrid that can move is mobile.
To get around this on rovers I have put turbines and a landing gear on the **same** subgrid and locked the gear to voxel to make them work, so there are some workarounds but they're clunky
@@Flipsie Yes On my Moble miner I have drop down pistons with the square docking pads on them which I have set to lock only when I tell it to. then once my moble miner is lifted off the ground and stable level, I lock the docking pads then I can put wind turbines on any part on my miner so long as it isn't a piston or hinge or rotor. everything else works, I'll be live streaming sometime the next few hours showing off my build.
Would it be interesting if you could have a block that catches lightning and turns it into power and explodes or launches lightning when destroyed.
As far as shields goes, I think that the problem is that the mod just makes a kind of bubble all the way around. Cosmoteer has a better solution with shields only projecting in an arc and having a limited range as well as having rather high power depletion rate when under fire. It makes it more of something that you use strategically as need be to protect sensitive parts. I would not mind seeing Space Engineer trying something similar.
Yeah the cosmoteer solution does add more engineering and tactics requirements making it much more interesting to engage with
I kinda want a summary with all the falls from the rover and a counter x)
"I don't play with the Cyber Hounds mod because I hate the idea of killing hounds."
A man of culture.
Similarly, I'll probably never turn on the "Arachophobia" setting in Satisfactory because I'd rather slaughter giant scary spiders than swing at mutated cats.
lol Seems fair :D
IMO the problem with shields is that they encourage an "unlimited power" gameplay dynamic. Spam enough reactors, and you can get unlimited shield power and be almost invulnerable. Which only causes your enemy to spam more guns and make combat more boring than anything else.
If there is a mechanic that gives you diminishing returns for more shield capacity or make adding power sources more challenging (like reactors that put out an area of effect radiation, so your ships have to be BIG) it would make shields more balanced and more like a different tool in your toolbox, so you have to build smart. Quality should be worth more than quantity.
i think keen should keep the lightning, just change how it acts based on the 'safety' of your game. If you are playing in apocalyptic, lightning should chase you down, if its safe, it should have a REALLY low chance to hit an antenna block only.
Decoy blocks are targeted more often than any other blocks. So they have use in PvE too.
@@axeleverttv I'd like to see the lightning do something positive in addition to the destruction of the blocks. like maybe you get a supercharge on some batteries for half a second and maybe you got (x)kwh across all your batteries.
My argument is that random damage gameplay without effective mitigation options are awful (and you can't mitigate lightning in vanilla until you've built turrets and by then you've already potentially lost your whole base/drop pod). Lightning as it is implemented is potentially ruining the game for new players and needs to be turned off by default (can still have the flashes but they should cause no damage). There are plenty of other areas in the game where Keen should spend their time to improve it, so for now they should just get rid of the lightning damage and move on - hopefully to interesting NPCs
I recommend watchng a few vids from a channel called PandemicPlayground. He has a fair few really cool and intersting vehicle builds, like a flying welder and grider combo where he's mounted 2 welders and grinders on 2 rotating arms and mobile drilling platform with removable storage containers. That last on isnt actually very practical, but the way he had set it was pretty cool, it was basically 2 "legs" made up with pistons, a drill in the middle, and a platform on top with 2 connectors for 2 lagre containers.
I was trying to replicate your drill arm, what are the settings on the hinges that fold it back on itself?
Also... what did you finally decide to do to center the drill head hinge?
Those hinges are just maxed out on torque with one set to rotate through 90degrees and the other through 180 with a little jiggle to get them going when they seem stuck. For centreing the drill head I just switch off that hinge when it's about in the middle - went low tech :P
In regards to Never Surrender, I didn't end up using the new weapons, but I did go through after Warfare 1. Instead of building a huge ship, I built what I call the War Hen. She laid eggs. These eggs, contrary to what you might think, didn't explode. Instead, they shot at anything they didn't like. I was able to use IIM to stock them with ammo and manage the assemblers that built the parts for the eggs. As it turns out, you don't need rail guns to kill the enemy. An irresponsible amount of good ol' gatlings will do just fine.
Gats tend to be particularly effective once you reach that critical volume of excess :D
I want to see bauxite and AL in the vanilla game. AL in light armor blocks, more attention on AL reducing mass, and steel in heavy armor favoring protection.
totally agree!
The lightning feels like you're stood on a mountain top wearing a copper hat, flying a kite stood in a bucket of something highly conductive shouting "cmon ya bastard do yer worst!" The theory of lightning and weather is ok but the implementation just isn't fun, thankfully you can mod the damage off and keep the rest of the weather stuff.
lol I love that description :D
Restoration of voxels. I used the Concrete Tool mod for filling in errors in drilling, or meteor craters.
I wonder if turning off broadcast on your suit would reduce lightning strikes on players.
nope!
by default, I run with my Suit Beacon off to keep drones from homing in on me.
doesn't stop Lightning one bit from finding you, even underground!
Lighting is a bit annoying with how often it strikes important items. It would be awesome if it was really rare, but when it struck it would damage the item and all batteries on that grid would be charged 100% 😆
Camera on drill heads?
15:30, Clang almost got his due.
Shield combat in Empyrion is good, because the combat is balanced around it.
SE combat is balanced around armour and mass/block count, + the unreal inaccuracy of the weapons.
Some times when it thunder stormed in space engineers I say some one made thor or zuse mad because lightning keep striking my cars bildings and my ships some times even me
I recon lightning is good it provides some environmental challenge it's more realistic and splitsie I will help you convince keen if you turn off lightning in real life so if I don't get lightning here in Branxton for a year or two
I don't want realism in my games, I quite like it when the real world inspires an interesting game mechanic, but I don't want realism per se. Lightning that strikes the player and their stuff at random with next to no sign of what has just happened with no ability to protect from it until after you've built a turret is simply bad game design.
Lightning should do this: turn off random blocks across the entire grid (and subgrids), nerf the damage down a bunch, injure player like it does now, make all lights on grid vary rapidly in intensity and range, and maybe spread targeting to something other than player, wheels, and antennas. (It targets wheels for some reason.) Just like real life you would have to go around and restart stuff and flip switches, turn on suit lights to get out of where ever you were. It does do too much damage right now. Even just making it a fixed percentage to grid weight would make it more fair. It can end your game early if you get unlucky.
That's why my survival kit goes underground at the start of every game :/
This episode reminds me of that no suit series
Can you hear, can you hear the thunder? Better run, better take cover..
🙃🙃🙃
Next rover name "Fried Out Combi"
Yooo wheres that cheeky modlist? ;)
Completely off topic from this video, but would you consider uploading more up to date tutorials on large ship building?
Hey splitsie can you upload the skybox so us on Xbox can use it to
Roundabouts are good as long as they aren't designed in the US, otherwise they end up overly complicated with like 3 roundabouts all connected together with like 6 lanes each
That sounds like your standard UK roundabout :D
Maybe add the DLC behind the drill cockpit door that says. Attention to all that is not operating this machine. If you die while near this it is not their fault but yours for not reading this in the first place.
Is this series streamed and if so when do you stream it?
Yeah both have been streamed over at twitch.tv/splitsie but without any set schedule
@Splitsie, did you ever upload that colorful skybox to the workshop?
This was fun watching!
Thanks :)
I used shields up until the point they buffed armor at one point.
you would have more iron with a strip mine type drill set up
This drill was for reaching ores, not getting stone and it managed to reach the ores as well as I had hoped :)
If you want to dive into plugins, I saw one that saves toolbars.
I've steered well clear of plugins. I really don't want to have to go through removing them + mods + whatever else, whenever something goes wrong. There's not enough for me to gain to go through that pain when things inevitably break :/
No O2, tank n vent, cockpit n vent.
"I'm going to annoy Keen to turn lightning off because it makes the game too hard for me to play".
You could just turn the weather off. Pretty sure there's also a mod that turns lighting off or nerfs it. It's not like you don't have options already.
It has nothing to do with difficulty, I constantly make the game more difficult for myself. It's about good gameplay and bad gameplay, random unmitigated and unavoidable (since the decoys contribute to be bugged) damage is bad gameplay, especially for new players - that's who I'm advocating for.
If you mouse wheel up you get the circle if you mouse wheel down you get the list (at least that has been my experience having just started using the mod) Edit: Build Vision
This should be named Scuffed Survival...
You dont need shields you need active armor plates
I've had issues with sometimes posting sometimes not posting that were related to a dodgy stick of ram. try booting the PC on a single stick at at time until you identify the culprit.
All such tests were done at the start. It's odd that the cause appears to have been a faulty SATA power cable of all things
Shields only work if they make sense, which in vanilla or official DLC or most QOL modded games, doesn't make sense. I don't understand why an energy shield "magic"s away a kinetic round in a science and physics based game. If there's energy weapons, which there are some mods for, then yes; shields fit in. But they have no place even with the Warfare II DLC.
However, the armor needs a serious rework because currently there's no merit to designing anything that will go into battle. You build a brick, because full blocks have the most health, slap guns, thrusters, a seat, and batteries on it and you've got just as valid of a fighter as anything else currently. The armor doesn't matter and it all gets eaten up all the same. We need ricochet and deflection angles because the current system, if a block of any size at any angle is tickled by a bullet in the damage box, it takes the full brunt of that bullet with no resistances being calculated and no real interesting reactions going on. You build a 5 layer thick brick with guns and backup guns and thrusters, you basically cannot lose due to your "health pool" just being that much more superior to a nice looking fighter. It's sad, but that's the current system.
But in short, if we want shields as an actual vanilla in game thing, we need appropriate energy weapons to fit them. The current solution we do need is a revamp on the current armor blocks, which are the solution to the current physical kinetic rounds. That being said, I think a low powered shield specifically for lightning would be fair and cool. Nothing else, just lightning. Like each lightning strike has a chance to explode a battery, so you need a grounding block to dissipate the extra energy or have a capacitor to convert that lightning into energy for your batteries. But yeah, a shield against lightning would be prime.
An adequate solution against "force wall" spamming would have the shields use a ton of energy whenever they actually do block anything AND have every shield react to any projectile that falls within its range. So a single bullet could overload someone's entire power supply and shutdown their shields. It becomes more of a gamble and tactical planning at that point. Spam shields and reactors and just have a practical bomb rolling around in space or do you place them around ammo containers and hydrogen tanks to protect them while armoring up everything else standard. I think there just needs to be a constant upkeep cost of energy or some resource input to make it fair and to have them have a spike demand of that resource whenever they do go off.
QOL changes that I personally think they need is to change the ore deposit textures of silver, platinum, silicon, uranium, cobalt, and magnesium. I get we can whip out our drills to see what's what, but we shouldn't have to second guess everytime we come across a meteor crater, deposit on planet, or asteroid. We should be able to tell better right off, that's reflective "bluish white" so silver. That's very white and reflective compared to the dark dull gray around it, so it's platinum. This speckled dark stuff is silicon, while this more craggly stuff is uranium. This deep blue hue is cobalt while this nearly neon blue is magnesium. Something like that. I hate having to second guess and go and get an ore detector to reverify my finds just to be disappointed every time. We could also used a bigger battery. Like how he have the small and large cargo containers, I feel like having a large battery for large grid would make things a bit easier than slamming 10 batteries into a capital ship. It'd be just as expensive if not more, but it'd push players to consider making welding ships/apparatuses.
While it's not perfect by any means, have you never used Digi's Concrete tool? It only lets you splat out the concrete texture for voxels, but similar to the paint gun, you build a concrete tool and you make concrete mix with gravel and you can fill in voxels with it in survival (ie, it's a tool instead of voxel hands.) It's a bit wonky at times, but I think that's what you generally would want. It just would need to be made vanilla.
Shields should be in vanilla, and should be a selectable game option
I'm not getting into the shield debate as that's something Keen very likely already hotly debated and decided wasn't worth it. Unless of course they're not into testing game design decisions.
If you upload a video of Mobile Frame Zero, the game will get SO MANY new players!
Hopefully, it seems like a fair bit of fun 🙂
about an hour in you said you would choose wierd, how is that possible, a wierd person would always choose the wierd option.
I have over 3k hours in this game, and i refuse to play on Pertram because of the lightning, its just not fun or interesting to deal with unlike other weather like fog on Triton killing your wind generation, which makes you rethink base design, lightnging storms are just annoying, they break blocks for no reason, target wheels of rovers and can hit you through a cockpit, none of which makes any sense for how lightning actually works.
Agreed, it's just not fun.
I think your distaste for lightning is biasing your opinion on how it's going to feel in the new player experience. I think it's amazing, having that extra element of fear. Space Engineers is tough on new players yes but that fact is kind of it's charm really
This game is so full with bugs, still.
In keens defence i would like to point out they are pretty regurlaly updating and adding things to se.
(Sorry brainfart cant spell hehe)
C C
Almost vanilla is like saying joe Biden is almost honest
Hey Flipsie/Splitsie, has anyone recommended to you a playthough using the deep ores mod? It makes setting up dedicated drill stations a requirement and it might make an interesting playthrough for you and Capac as a side step to large rovers skimming the surface for everything. I'm going through survival with a collection of mods that seem to work well together for the deep ores mod. Since I can't comment with links, the file id on steam workshop is id=2766227303. Finding it via the search is almost impossible so manual URL entry is recommended...anyway thanks for the mods and great videos to watch. Cheers.
I've played with deep ores a few times (though not in any published series) and other than having very deep holes through which I had to get to the ore it didn't change the gameplay for me much. It's why when I started Survival Impossible I went with a custom ore distribution that made it rare instead of deep as I felt that would make things that needed different solutions more viable. I've been contemplating different ways to avoid the issues that arise from 'stone makes everything' (or nearly everything) but haven't come up with anything that I'm keen to do just yet
@@Flipsie Your not wrong, i say as im in the deep iron hole i had to bore, digging another deep hole to get cobalt 300 meters lower...i guess it wouldn't make good views... I was just imagining You, Capac and the others exploring the depths of the planet in some digging monstrosity as clever as your rover designs. Then I remember how SE doesn't really handle a lot of terrain modification well and think about the disaster that will ensue from desync issues. One can dream..(and pray the tiny voxel that you missed digging doesn't destroy your ship)....but hey If challenge is needed, there is always industrial overhaul or the water mod with the more NPC encounters (they added water mod support post v6).