This is the genre that encompasses sandbox games, survival games, anything wherein you both craft things and wham things. Kind of a continuation of this thread.
The quarantine has got me playing a lot more of these with friends. They’re a great, leisurely way to dick around and talk to each other without it being like a white-knuckle-all-business gameplay experience.
I’m having a blast with Space Engineers, in which you are plopped into a random spot on a planet, moon, or region of space, and you have to drill for resources, create parts, and build vehicles/bases to more efficiently survive and explore.
I’d say the big things that stick out to me are:
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The world is massive and infinite. You can take off in a spaceship, aiming upwards, leave orbit, and visit other planets or moons around you. My brother decided to start on the moon while the rest of us started on Earth, and it’s been fun working towards the ambition of “rescuing him” off the cold lifeless lunar expanse.
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A ship or vehicle you create is nothing more than a collection of pieces you’ve put together. So if there’s a problem, or if something isn’t working, you have to get into the guts of the thing and troubleshoot. There’s something very cool to me about that. The vehicle can take any shape whatsoever, and all you have to do is make sure everything is powered and connected.
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The “progression” is more of a “how do I automate this?” process, where you mine by hand until you have the minerals you need to create a mining ship, which allows you to drive into mountains and into the ground to gather much larger yields of mineral. You can then go further and create drones that either you or an AI script run, or create a drill that goes straight down, mining forever, to save yourself the labor. The goal is always to make it as automated as you can, which is fun.
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Lots of random NPC vehicles around to capture or battle, which leads to you sometimes lucking out and getting a really nice ship to fuck around with for a while.
Downsides would be some jank, some resource limit issues on the server, requiring admin cleanup, and the fact that there isn’t really any clear GOAL to all of this. There’s no pirate asteroid you have to defeat, or planet you have to reach, it’s just a sandbox. I wouldn’t have minded a job board that gave some real useful rewards or ship designs, etc.
Anyways here’s some of what we’ve made so far:
My first attempt at a ship, based on some Babylon 5 designs where the engines fired in all directions.
A mining rig we built on a frozen lake.
My friend’s “3D printer”, which is a wall of welders on a wall of pistons, which runs through a “blueprint”, which is when you save a design you made by looking at it and ctrl+b, then you build a projector, project the design, and just stand there welding, with all your resources going into it. This wall of welders is attached to his resource pool, so once the weld starts moving back, it “prints” the vehicle from the blueprint.
My brother (who is stranded on the moon) attempts his first mining ship. At the front are two drills, behind them storage tanks, behind that thrusters.
My brother’s solar array, to gather power on the otherwise barren moon.
Our first test flight to break atmo.
Found this crashed NPC ship. Went it, rewired everything so it’s owned by me, repaired what I could, and slapped a big thruster on the back.
Got it out of the hole, onto the ground, but upside-down. Eventually installed helicarrier-style VOTL engines, lifted it off the ground, and rotated right-side up.
My brother’s attempt at a solar-powered scout/ore detection ship. Worked pretty well.
Version 2 of our interstellar ship is essentially an entire base contained in a ship. We all piled in and went to explore the solar system.
Floating through the cold void of space…
We find some kind of ice planet, make a landing.
There is jack shit on this planet besides some enemy bases, so we gather as much ice as we need to refuel the hydrogen generator, and take off.
Next stop, visiting my brother.
We bring with us… a great deal of enemy ships.
Including “reavers”, a mod we added for shits and gigz, that is in fact maybe way too aggressive:
Another friend begins building a space station between Earth and the moon, for refueling. First he has to survive the raiders.
Once that was one, he moved on to creating “THE MAW”, his attempt at a ship that you could drive into other ships, turn on the grinders, and grind them up for resources.
Truly nightmarish.
So yeah, fun game.