10 of My Favorite Upgrades: Space Engineers Tutorial

New(ish) player here. Been playing about 20 days, and you have NO idea how jealous I am of your builds. They are literal works of art.

My obscure tip to add is that while "Door" and "Offset Door" can pass air through them, no oxygen seems to actually be stored in their block space. This means that while an airlock made from two back-to-back sliding doors will vent out two blocks' worth of oxygen into space every time you go through it, the same kind of airlock but made instead with offset doors (or normal doors if you don't have Frostbite) will keep all of the air inside (when operated correctly). This can be kind of useful if you don't like "Keen airlocks" but still don't feel like building a fully proper airlock, and hate venting oxygen into space. Great video btw, thanks for the tips!

Small personal hack: If you're using a docking camera on a small grid ship connecting to a large grid, when you build the large grid connector orient it in a way that the little side lights will be in line with where your camera will be on the small grid ship. Those side lights make great aiming references. For example at 14:47, I would rotate that large grid connector by 90 degrees so that one of those side lights is on top, and now the camera will be staring directly at it. It will also help with seeing the connection status.

I love using the defensive block to increase the turret automatic target tracking range. That's an awesome trick! Definatly adding that to my guide.

I didn't know about the range difference between the antenna and decoys for lightning strikes. I'm never counting on an antenna for lightning defense again. I knew about curved block airlocks before, but I really liked seeing how you implemented them in your ship. You have airtight integrity between sections of your ship, like watertight integrity on IRL naval vessels.

I knew most of them but did not know about the seat having a target lock detection. An addition to the door closing repeater that can be done: if you never want to have the door closing in your face but don't want to wait 20 seconds, you can add an event controller that detects the opening of all the doors and then it starts the timer to close all the doors, you can set it up to 3-5 seconds instead of 20 seconds. My favourite thing to do on any ship I pilot: is to make a group of all the breaking thrusters and have them turn on/off on the first control bar (I always set it up at position 9). That way you can save a lot of energy\fuel by just gliding, and the nose is always pointing in the direction you are going: which is better than turning off the dampeners in 0 gravity

A nice quality of life upgrade I've done for a few years now on my smaller ships is a 1-button startup/shutdown... well, really 2, as it's 2 timer blocks. Shutdown is pressed after I dock with a connector. It shuts off all the gyros, antennas/beacons, thrusters, lights, etc., and sets batteries to recharge, and O2/H2 tanks set to stockpile. Startup is the same thing in reverse, switching everything on, then unlocking the connector. With the Automaton update, I was able to make it even more seamless by setting up event controllers. Now, when I dock with a connector, shutdown sequence occurs. I still prefer a manual startup, which ensures everything is running before disconnecting the connector. It makes life much nicer aboard my ship, and doing quick outings.

That airlock concept is legit awesome. Just having a single piece of curved glass looks weird and feels cheaty, but incorporating it into a real airlock is a cool way to prevent wasting air.

Important note, the target lock detector applies to friendly target locks aswell, and some people will target lock friendlies to check grid name, distance, relative and approach velocity, etc, with the targeting info, so if you are using the third upgrade, make sure it wont do anything you wouldnt want to happen in the event of friendly lock, or just make sure they know not to lock on you lol

The curved blocks are nice. Easy to hide. Thanks for the vid!

I knew some of these, but today I learned about the AI target locking and turrets! Great vid!

I've well over 1k hours in the game and you just explained something I ran into only a couple days ago! I was positioning a blueprint and it vanished. I thought I took too long to position it, but every time I reloaded the blueprint it would instantly vanish. I thought the block was bugged so I ground it down and replaced it, making sure I checked the box in time so I wouldn't run into (what I thought was) a bug again. I had no idea it was the alignment that was making it go away! (I always thought it was timer based) Thank you! Also, I've seen demonstrations of the curved block airlock before, but they were usually quite awkward looking. You did a nice job incorporating them into your design. I may just start using them now. 😀👍

The airlock & periscope, I really like!

Knew most of these but the airlocks stuff was new! Thanks for the video :)

Exactly the information I was looking for in the past couple of days! Thank you greatly!

For the decoys, yes the lighting will hit the decoy as you have stated but it also has an AOE for damage. Now this AOE can be negated by placing the decoy on a sub grid. The reason is that indirect damage does not travel through sub grids.

A small tweak on the automatic closing doors, set an event controller to check if any door has been opened, then start the timer block with ~5s delay, doors only shut after you open them

This video is so helpful, I’ve been playing for many years and have forgotten how the projector functions, thank you so much!

What I use instead of just a timer for my doors is an event controller along with a timer block. Any time a door on my base is opened the event controller starts the timer block of 5 seconds to close all doors on the base/ship. The reason I don't use the timer block by itself is because there are annoying times when you go to open the door just as the timer block activates to close the doors on you.

All excellent tips with super-easy application. 👍