Space Engineers 2: Beginner's Guide & Best Tips

I Lost My First Three Ships To Fucking Ice

I've got 1,400 hours in Space Engineers 2. Not flexing. That's me admitting I've crashed into asteroids more times than I've landed properly. The game doesn't tell you shit. The tutorial is a half-assed afterthought that teaches you how to weld a light armor block and then throws you into the cold void like "good luck, nerd."

You're probably here because you booted up Survival Mode, spent two hours building a mining ship, and watched it tumble into a planet's gravity well because you forgot to check your gyroscope override. I've been there. I've alt-F4'd so many times my Steam friends think I'm rage-quitting Halo again. This game is gorgeous — jaw-dropping, modded-skybox, "I can see my ship's reflection in a gas giant" gorgeous — but it's also the least forgiving sandbox I've ever touched. And I play Kerbal Space Program.

This guide is me handing you the cheat codes I wish I'd had. Not the official wiki's sanitized "press G to open toolbar" garbage. The real shit. The stuff that stops you from hurling your mouse across the room at 2 AM.

Why Most Players Quit Before They've Even Built A Good Ship

Let's call it what it is: Space Engineers 2 has a learning cliff, not a curve. You don't gradually learn. You slam into the wall until something clicks. Here's the four things that made me rage-quit more than any boss in Dark Souls:

• Inertia is a cunt. Your ship doesn't stop because you let go of W. It keeps drifting. Forever. You will pancake into your own station because you tapped backwards for 0.3 seconds too late. The game doesn't explain dampeners properly — they're on by default, but only if you have working gyroscopes and thrusters in every direction. One missing thruster on your left side? Enjoy spinning into a sun.
• Power management is hidden garbage. You think you have enough batteries. You don't. You think your reactor can handle that jump drive charge. It can't. The game doesn't show you peak draw vs sustained draw in a way that makes sense. I've had entire ships go dark mid-dogfight because my refineries kicked on and pulled 12 MW that my grid wasn't designed for. There's no warning. Just silence. Then you're a tombstone.
• Conveyor systems will break your soul. You spent an hour routing tubes from your cargo container to your assembler. Nothing moves. Why? Because you used a small conveyor tube on one connection, and your large components can't fit through. The game doesn't color-code this or flash a "YOU DUMBASS" indicator. You just sit there wondering why your steel plates are stuck. I've rebuilt entire ships over a single conveyor sorter set to the wrong direction.
• Multiplayer desync eats ships. This one's not your fault. SE2's netcode is held together with tape and prayers. You'll be flying, rubberband, and suddenly you're inside an asteroid. Your ship clips through the ground. It explodes. You respawn on a medical bay that's now floating in space because your station despawned. It's bullshit. It happens. Learn to save your blueprint after every major build.

These aren't skill issues. These are design gaps. The community has workarounds, and I'm about to give you every single one.

Your First Day: How To Not Starve, Suffocate, Or Explode

You spawn in a respawn pod. Congratulations. You have a survival kit, a basic hand drill, and about 15 minutes of oxygen if you're on a planet with a breathable atmosphere. Here's exactly what you do, in order, with no wasted steps:

Step 1: Scan your surroundings. Press K to open the antenna. Make sure broadcasting is on. Look at the HUD for nearby points of interest — you want "Ice Lake" or "Snowfield" markers if you're on Earth-like. Ice is your oxygen and hydrogen. If you're in space, you need to find an asteroid with "Platinum" visible on the ore detector. No platinum? No ion thrusters. You're stranded.

Step 2: Hand drill like a crackhead. Punch the ground. You need 200 stone for your survival kit to make basic components. Do not wander off. Do not try to build a base on a hill. Stay flat, stay near ice, and grind that stone until your arm hurts. The survival kit processes stone into gravel, iron, nickel, and silicon at a pathetic rate, but it's all you've got. Set it to repeat "Basic Component" blueprints and let it cook while you gather more.

Step 3: Build a wind turbine. You need power. Don't even look at solar panels — they're finicky, expensive, and need rotors to track the sun. Wind turbines are cheap, work at night, and if you place them at 7+ meters off the ground (build a tower of light armor blocks), they hit 100% efficiency even in low wind areas. One turbine powers your survival kit, a basic assembler, and a medical bay. That's your entire starter base.

Step 4: Find ice and process it into oxygen. Run to the lake. Fill your inventory with ice — each stack of ice is 1,200 L of H2O. Bring it back to the survival kit and turn it into ice -> oxygen -> hydrogen bottles. Keep 3 full bottles of oxygen on you at all times. I died six times because I thought "I'll just run to the next lake." No. You won't. The planet is bigger than you think and your suit runs out in 4 minutes without a tank.

Step 5: The first vehicle. Do NOT build a large ship yet. You don't have the materials. You don't have the patience. Build a small-grid rover with a medium cargo container, an ore detector, and two wind turbines on top. Put a cockpit on it and a basic drill on the front. This is your mining rig. It handles better than any flying ship in gravity, carries more ore, and won't flip over if you sneeze. I still use rovers for planetary mining even with end-game ships. They're underrated by every guide I've ever read.

The Stuff The Wiki Won't Tell You (Because Nobody Maintains The Wiki)

After you've got a rover and a basic base running, the game opens up. But it also gets harder. Here's my hard-earned knowledge from 1,400 hours of trial-by-fire:

Gyroscopes are not optional. I don't care if your ship is a brick with thrusters. You need at least one gyro for every 2,000,000 kg of ship mass. More if you want to turn faster than a supertanker. The default gyro override is 0.5x strength. Bump it to 1.0x on combat ships. For mining ships, keep it low (0.2x) so you don't fling yourself into a cave wall because you sneezed on the mouse.

Batteries are superior to reactors for 90% of your playtime. Reactors consume uranium — which is rare and only found on planets with high danger zones. Batteries store power from wind or solar. Build a bank of 6 batteries for your base and set them to "Recharge" during the day, "Discharge" at night. Connect them through a timer block on a 24-hour cycle. I've run entire bases on battery banks for months of in-game time without touching uranium once.

Jump drives require a warm-up. Most players tap the hotkey and wonder why nothing happens. You need to hold the jump button (default J) for 3 seconds before the charge completes. The drive consumes 5 MW during charge-up and all your power for the actual jump. If you're under 20% power when you start the charge, you'll drain your batteries and the jump fails. You'll just sit there, dead in space, with no power to your dampeners. I've drifted for 15 minutes waiting for solar recharge because I didn't check my battery levels.

Welding ships repair themselves for free. You know the welding ship blueprint in the terminal? Grind off the default tools and put welding heads on it. Fly it over your damaged ship. The welding heads automatically repair adjacent blocks using components from your inventory. A single welding ship can fix a frigate-sized vessel in 20 minutes if you've got enough steel plates. This is faster than hand-welding and safer than EVA repair. I built my first one after losing a ship to pirates and spending 3 hours hand-welding in low orbit. Never again.

Oxygen farms can be stacked. A single oxygen farm at 100% sunlight produces 1.5 L of oxygen per second. That's not enough to fill a bottle in reasonable time. Build a tower of 5 farms — they clip through each other if you place them on the same grid. 7.5 L/s fills an oxygen bottle (1,000 L) in about 2 minutes. This is how you breathe without ever touching ice again. Place them on a rotor with a timer block to track the sun. Or just put them on the roof of your base. They work fine vertical.

Check out my Kerbal Space Program guide if you think you're good at orbital mechanics. The same concepts apply here: prograde burns, retrograde burns, transfer windows. SE2's physics aren't as punishing as KSP's, but you can still yeet your ship into an escape trajectory if you burn wrong. I watched a buddy burn toward a planet for 10 minutes, overshoot, and spend 20 minutes burning back. He ran out of fuel. He's still floating out there.

Five Ways I've Killed Myself (And You Will Too)

1. Forgetting to enable dampeners before exiting a ship. You park your fighter next to your station. You hit T to get out. Your ship is moving at 0.5 m/s relative to the station — that's a gentle drift, right? Wrong. Without dampeners, the ship keeps drifting. It hits your station. Your station is not reinforced. Your station explodes. Your ship explodes. You're in EVA with no jetpack fuel. This is how I lost a 40-hour survival world. I still have the screenshot of the wreckage as my desktop background as penance.

2. Building a hangar door too small for your ship. I built a beautiful underground base on an alien planet. The hangar entrance was exactly the width of my mining ship. I adjusted the door's piston settings wrong. The door opened 0.5 meters short. I flew through. The door clipped the edge of my ship. The ship exploded. The explosion chain-reacted to my stored uranium. The base was a crater. I've done this four times. Measure your ship's bounding box with a projector block before building the hangar. Trust no one.

3. Overconfidence with jump drives. You see a distress signal on the map. It's 200,000 km away. You have a jump drive with 20,000 km range per jump. You calculate: 10 jumps. Easy. You ignore the recharge time on the drive (30 seconds per jump after the initial charge). You start jumping. On jump 6, you're tired. You misjudge your orientation. You jump into an asteroid field. Your ship is shredded. I've done this in front of my friends. They still bring it up.

4. Not balancing your conveyor sorter's directions. You read the wiki. You set your sorter to "Drain All" so it moves items from cargo to assembler. Great. But you forget to set a filter. Now your sorter is draining ALL items from your cargo — including steel plates you needed for repairs. Your assembler fills up with gravel and your ship is missing. I spent 2 hours trying to figure out why my base wasn't producing components. The sorter was set to move everything, but not the components I wanted. It's always the sorter.

5. Fighting a pirate fighter with a mining ship. You see a small pirate fighter approaching. You think "I have a front-mounted drill. I'll ram them." No. You won't. Pirate fighters have 3x the firepower of any civilian ship and their AI is cheap — they'll circle you until you run out of power. If you don't have a dedicated combat ship with at least 4 gatling guns and 2 reloadable turrets, run. Run far. I tried to fight with a mining ship once. The pirates disabled my cockpit. I floated helpless while they shot my ship to scrap. I had to respawn at a distant station and salvage my own wreck. It took 6 hours to rebuild.

The Questions You're Too Embarrassed To Ask

Q: How do I grind down a ship without it exploding?
A: Hand grinder is fine for small blocks. For large-grid ships, use a grinding ship with multiple grinder heads. Set the grinder ship's "Terminal" to "Show on HUD" — that way you can see its location when you inevitably fly away to recharge. If you grind a reactor while it's active, it explodes. Kill the reactor first by grinding the conveyor tubes connected to it. Then grind the reactor itself. Learned that after losing a full cargo of uranium to a reactor explosion that took out half my base.

Q: What's the best planet to start on?
Earth-like. Period. Don't try the alien planet. Don't try the dead moon. Earth-like has oxygen, water (ice), and low gravity. The only downside is the occasional meteor shower, which can be disabled in the world settings. I played on the alien planet for my first save. No oxygen. No ice within 10 km. I died of suffocation while trying to build a base. Start on Earth-like, learn the mechanics, then move to challenge planets.

Q: How do I stop my ship from drifting?
Dampeners are on by default when you sit in a cockpit. Check the status bar at the bottom of your screen — you'll see a Dampeners: On/Off indicator. If they're off, press Z to toggle. If they're on but you're still drifting, you're missing thrusters in one direction. The game shows you thruster status in the control panel. If your Forward thrusters are green but Backward is red, you need a backward thruster. I spent 15 minutes trying to stop my ship before realizing I forgot the rear thrusters.

Q: How do I find platinum?
Platinum only spawns on asteroids in space. It doesn't generate on planets. You need a ship with an ore detector set to 150m range, then fly to a group of asteroids. Platinum ore glows white with a blueish tint. It's rare — maybe 1 in 20 asteroids has it. Once you find it, dig it out with a hand drill or a ship-mounted drill. You need platinum for ion thrusters and high-end reactors. Without it, you're stuck on atmospheric thrusters forever. I once spent 4 hours asteroid-hopping before finding a 0.2 kg vein. It's scarce. Grind it.

Q: Is multiplayer worth the headache?
Yes, but only with friends on a private server. Public servers are laggy, filled with griefers, and the desync problem is 10x worse. I've lost entire ships to "I rubberbanded into a wall" on public servers. Private servers with 4-6 players are the sweet spot — you get the co-op fun without the lag. Use torch server hosting if you want reliable uptime. Or just play single-player like me. The game is built for single-player. Multiplayer is the afterthought.

Q: How do I survive a pirate attack on my base?
Build a defense perimeter of interior turrets on the roof. Interior turrets target players and enemy ships within a 150 meter radius. They don't need ammo if you set them to "Target: Hostile" and fill them with Gatling Ammo Boxes. Each box holds 1,200 rounds. Four turrets with two boxes each will shred a pirate fighter in about 6 seconds. Don't bother with rocket turrets — they miss small targets. Gatling turrets are your best friend. I survived a wave of 5 pirate ships using only 4 gatling turrets. They took out two ships before I even got to my cockpit.