G'day and welcome to another space
engineers tutorial. Today what we're going to be doing is turning this little
thing into a mining ship and doing some small expansions onto our base. The
reason I want to use this as our mining ship is if we hop in here and take a
look at our battery you'll see that it's got 94% of its maximum charge. When you
build a new battery you'll only start with 25% and I'd really like to be able
to take a few trips with this miner before it needs a recharge. The reason
I'd like to do that is I'd like to use the resources from the miner to expand
our power production capacity on our base so that it can then recharge the
miner. To me it feels like the faster way of doing things.
Instead of doing things
the way that I'm going to an alternative would be to grind down everything except
for the battery that's on this and then build from the battery. I quite like this
little design so I think I'm gonna build inside it just for something a bit
different the principles will all remain the same and this will still teach you
everything you need to know to put together a small atmospheric mining ship
at the beginning of the game. One of the things we'll need to do for this
survival pod is get rid of some of the excess weight, things like the o2 h2
generator and the survival kit the survival kit isn't just excess weight
though it's also our respawn point and I'd prefer to not have it on our flying
ship.
So let's move it over to the base first. Before I move it I'm going to
create a few steel plate and you'll see why in a second. If we go to our 'g' menu (remove those since we don't need them) add our survival kit, this is the
large grid version if I then press 8 again that's the small grid you can see
the only change in the components required is the steel plate quite
conveniently approximately the number of steel plate I just ordered up. So let's
grab those and I'm going to place a couple of blocks down here beside our
current base because I don't want to put the survival kit directly attached to
the refinery.
When you're placing the survival kit you probably want to make
it so that the survival kit label is facing the direction you want it to
because if I had it facing this way I'd have to walk around the other side to
recharge from this. Let's go grab the rest of the parts from the original
survival kit but before we grind it down let's get
rid of this gravel. To get rid of the gravel you transfer it to your personal
inventory and then you can drag it up to this drop item section, sadly you can't
drag directly from the survival kit to that drop item you have to move it to
your personal inventory first.
Then we'll grind this down and be very very very
careful not to die now because I no longer have a respawn point. Until I
place this on the base I have nowhere to respawn and I would have to start in a
new drop pod. I could eventually find my way to this base and continue but that
would be a major hassle. Now that we've got our survival kit complete we should
be able to recharge from it if I hold F on that screen, yep recharging.
If you
find that this screen flickers or you find that you're not able to recharge, it
may be due to the lack of power production from your turbine. The best
solution to that is simply to add another turbine with a decent amount of
clearance between this one and the next that way they won't block each other's
wind. And now, on to why I left this gap. If I go to this inventory access point
and I go to production we will drop straight into the basic assembler, which
is what we want because it's our best assembler we've got on this grid. If
however I had the survival kit right on this spot I would be accessing the cargo
through here I would then click on production and I
would be taken to the survival kit.
Every time I want to produce something I'd
want to change to the basic assembler and use it to build stuff because it's
better. I don't want to have to do that so I leave a gap and later on I will
fill this gap with a cargo container. The next thing we'll remove is the o2 h2
generator which has a light on the outside, that light was something we
hadn't built so we've just unlocked a few things by grinding it down very
carefully and then welding it up.
If you find that you accidentally grind it all
the way down which is incredibly easy with the light we will be placing some
later so you won't have to worry about unlocking it now. Like we did with the
survival kit let's empty out the o2 h2 generator and then let's grind it down.
Those tubes are not going to be happy so let's get rid of them as well. For our O2 H2 generator let's place another couple of blocks, let's even place an
extra ramp or two to make this easier and then let's grab our O2 H2
generator and pop it down connected to our
survival kit. The o2 h2 generator requires a lot of steel plate, rather
than having to mine out enough stone to generate the hundred steel plates that
we need we will build this miner first and get it to do that for us. Next thing
let's get rid of this seat and get rid of a couple of these outer blocks at
this end. Of these blocks that we've got here the only ones that we need to weld
back up to unlock something from are the beacon so let's do that and this small
conveyor here.
There we go we've unlocked what we need what we can from these. The
next thing I want to look at is this hydrogen thruster, it has four metal
grids we're going to be using those four metal grids later on when we add some
atmospheric thrusters which also require one metal grid. Because we didn't go and
collect Cobalt last time and because metal grids require cobalt those are
going to be our only metal grids we've got for the moment. The reason I'm
showing it this way rather than mining the Cobalt first is that you can do this
sort of remodeling on your pod before you ever find cobalt, so you may be able
to use your pod to help you search for it. So it's grind down our hydrogen
thruster and grind down the rest of this stuff that's in the way.
Now we've got a
mostly gutted ship there are two more blocks we need to remove these landing
gear. Landing gear only have an attachment point on top so these landing
gear are no longer part of this ship. If you leave them here when the ship
unlocks from the ground you will most likely hear an explosion and you will
lose part of your ship. So let's get rid of them before they can cause us any
problems. These parts of the ship will be best kept intact so let's pop a couple
of armor cubes in there and there which will also give us an unlock for more
shapes and make this a bit more secure We want to keep this area clear. So let's
leave it like that for now let's take a look at what we need to add to this to
make it into a flyable ship.
Go to our G menu, we're going to need some way to
control it that's going to be on small grid either a cockpit a fighter cockpit
or a remote control. For the cheapest method of control remote plus passenger
seat works quite nicely but for the easiest let's just use a standard
cockpit. So we'll press control two to open up our second hot bar, right-click
on the cockpit to add it to our list the next thing we need is a drill we also would like some cargo capacity and we're going to need some of these small
conveyor tubes and a connector.
If you followed along you should have all these
blocks unlocked if you're missing something
hop over to the progression queue and see if you can find it either with the
search bar or by scrolling down. There are a couple of blocks that we need that
we are currently missing, we need the atmospheric thrusters, and we need a
gyroscope and to unlock them we need to build a cockpit so let's build it first.
I'm going to come around this side and pop the cockpit in where the survival
kit was before. Right there will do, then we just need a few displays and a few
computers and this thing will be functional. We do not need the
bulletproof glass to get the cockpit working, that's just for safety, when
we're able to we may add that later. And now we've got the cockpit complete we
should have access to the gyroscope and thrusters. So gyroscope and atmospheric
thrusters the next thing I want to put on here is the medium cargo container, it
has large ports on either end and it has small ports on two of the remaining
sides.
We want to be able to have the small ports lining up with our cockpit
so that we can connect the two of them. We'll need to leave a space in between
them because they're not going to line up properly with one another. The other
thing we want to connect here is a connector, a connector has a large port
on the back side and then for small ports around it, so to have this
connected to our medium cargo container we should probably have one of these
large ports facing downwards so we can have a down facing connector so our
medium cargo container would be placed like that. I'm not going to weld this up
just yet though, that's because I can't get in here to build the small conveyor
tubes that I want to connect these two up. If I place that there there is no way
I can get in there to weld this up without causing myself harm, so let's get
rid of this placed medium cargo container, let's weld this up and build
the connections we require first.
So that's going to be a curve and
another curve here. You don't need to connect both of the ports on the cockpit
you just need to connect one of them and the connection will work, because we're
only passing all through here we don't need a large connection. Then we place
our medium cargo there and we should be able to place our connector, right there.
Collect a little more stone so that we've got the parts we need for the
connector and there's our connector. The next thing we're going to build is our
gyroscope, let's place it on the back of the cockpit there and weld it up. With a
gyroscope, a control seat, these four thrusters and a power source
this ship is technically capable of flying. It's ungainly and it's quite
difficult to fly and I can't imagine it would be particularly useful as a drill
ship in this configuration because you'd want to have more control.
So to give
ourselves more control we're gonna hop up the top here, we're gonna add four
more thrusters, one in each direction. The place I think I would like to put them
is where these little slopes are here. So let's grind these bits out then we'll
place our thrusters on here and let's make these thrusters blue. To make them
blue you can press shift P to pick up the same blue that the pod is made out
of, then we can place our thruster there and do the same on the other three sides.
The exact placement of these thrusters doesn't really matter except for one
important factor, you want to make sure that the nozzle end of the thruster is
clear from blocks, it will damage your blocks if you get this end of things
with something in front of it.
So if I had a block right there
this thruster would damage it, that damage goes out for a fair few blocks so
for your early ship designs make sure you keep it nice and clear and you won't
run into any problems. I placed only one thruster in each direction because these
will each use one of the four metal grids we got from the hydrogen thruster
earlier Right now we've got thrust in five of
the six directions for this vehicle, the sixth will be provided by gravity since
we'll mostly be sitting horizontal allowing gravity to pull us down.
Where
the local gravity is high enough so Mars earth or the alien planet I tend not to
use downward thrusters at all, one because if I have downward thrusters I
tend to push myself into the ground at high velocity and that ends badly but two
because using gravity is the efficient way to go. We don't need a thruster we
don't need to use power for that thruster so we save in the long run. And
now back to mining so we can get all the motors and construction components and
other bits and pieces we need for these four thrusters.
With our thrusters
complete the last thing we need to add to this ship is a giant drill on the
front, the drills have attachment ports on either side as well as one on the
rear, so we should be able to line up the rear one perfectly with our cockpit,
we'll also change this back to grey and pop it on there. With our drill
complete this thing is ready to be used we can certainly make it a bit prettier
and we can add a few extra pieces which we'll do towards the end of the video,
for now let's hop in the cockpit and I want to tell you about something really,
really important something that will prevent you from suffering a lot of
heartache and a lot of lost ships in the future. Do not unlock your ship with P, P
is bad, P is bad in so many ways because when you use P and you're controlling a
mother ship that's got multiple smaller ships connected to it, you will also
disconnect every ship that's attached, if you use P when you're on a base you may
disconnect other ships that you don't wish to and they'll fall to the ground
and get damaged.
Don't use P, never use P, the best way to
control your landing gear or your connector or whatever method you are
using to attach and detach from a base is to press G for example grab your landing
gear switch lock, grab your connector switch lock, then you can simply press
that hotbar item and disconnect from the ground that way. We're not going to
disconnect just yet because there's something important with this drop pod
that we need to do first, right now, if we have a look at our thrusters you'll see
that this one is not spinning, but these ones we just placed are, that's because
these four are on and the four lifting thrusters are off.
Let's hop back in our
cockpit and have a look. In our control panel we'll see the four thrusters that
are giving us our lateral thrust but we can't see the others that's because they
are hidden and if we click this button here we will
then be able to see them and you can now see four upward thrusters, let's select
all of those, click on the top one, shift click down or control click between them
or just do them one at a time. Click to turn them on. To make them visible and
have them show up in the terminal you could click on here but we don't really
need them in our terminal. The next thing we want to do is add our drill to our
hot bar, there are two ways you can add a drill to your hotbar, you could have it
as the block, which is in the all blocks menu and select it and go toggle block
on/off, this is handy when you're wanting to be drilling out some resources as the
drill will just stay on it and you don't need to hold your mouse button down.
You
can also go to block tools and select this one, this one allows you to left and
right click drill, that means you can do the voxel distruction method like with
the hand drill with a ship drill you unfortunately cannot do that with this
toggle on/off, the toggle on/off is only the equivalent of left click. So now we
are ready to fly, let's press 1 to unlock our landing gear and let's take off,
let's get a little bit of altitude so that I can show you a couple of things
to note about a ship with this sort of design. We've got four lifting thrusters
they can comfortably lift the amount of mass that this ship has, however a single
thruster, like we've got in the forward direction or left, right and backwards
direction cannot keep us up, we are going down.
So try and keep the ship very level
until you've got more thrusters added in those directions. Over time you'll be
able to make a balanced ship that can handle pretty well in most orientations
or if you like me you'll build something that can only fly relatively level but
can hold a whole lot because you haven't needed to spend the extra weight on the
thrusters in the other directions.
Let's have a look at a difference between ship
drills and hand drills, like I was mentioning just before we've got our
left click mining which will collect a small amount of stone as we go if you
look at my weight down in the bottom right you'll see that I'm accumulating
stone and if we go into our inventory you'll see that there's some stone in
there. If I right click I can delete a whole bunch of terrain at once and make
a nice big deep hole which can be quite handy.
The thing that you can't do with ship drills is double click, if I double click
nothing happens but if I double click with my hand drill it will stay on until
I click again and you can use either mode with that double click with your
hand tools if you double right click it'll stay
on and if you double left-click it'll stay on if you do the same with your
grinder it will stay on and your welder as well.
As we fill up a ship you'll see
our weight increasing, it's important to keep an eye on this because there will
be a point where we may not be able to fly at all if we let this get too high.
We're up to thirty seven thousand kilos and our cockpit is full and medium cargo
container is full, our connector is full, and our drill is very nearly full.
This
ship can just barely lift itself, kind of, sort of, get itself up out of this hole.
Be mindful of how heavy your drill ships get when you are mining with
them. Be careful that you don't overload them and make it impossible for yourself
to get out of your mining hole. If you do get stuck down there though there's a
way you can help yourself out, so if you have overloaded your ship, you can simply
hop out, grab some stone and chuck it on the ground or in this case throw it in
our refinery. Even though what I'm doing right now is quicker than hand mining
it's still a bit of a hassle having to move stuff between the ship and the base
manually. That's why the ship has a connector on it but the base currently
does not, and one of the reasons I collected these materials first is that
connectors on bases are quite expensive So let's get all this stone out and then
we'll add a connector to the base.
So if I want to add a connector to the base,
what I will want is something pointing upwards so that we can connect on to
this ship in its current orientation. I think the easiest way to do that given
how we've got the base set up currently is to have a small cargo container in
between our survival kit and our basic refinery and then to pop a connector on
top. We then have a look at what the connector requires, in fact let's do it
this way because it's clearer if I do. You can see that it requires a hundred and
thirty steel plate, that like the o2 generator is quite expensive so one of
the reasons why I wanted to get the mining done first. Hopefully we'll have enough iron to be able to produce that and the
other components that we need for the connector. Now we've got a connector on
the base we can attach our ship to it so let's do that. For the connector there
are colors that indicate its state it will be white if it's powered and not
ready to lock on to anything, yellow if it's powered and it's ready to lock
green if it's locked and red if it's unpowered or switched off.
Right now this
one's yellow so we can press lock and it will turn green.
Now that the ship is locked to the base it is sharing power with the base, that
means that if the base needs extra power it will steal battery power from the
ship but if the base has extra power it will recharge the battery. That is with
the battery set to auto mode. You can force this to recharge by setting
recharge or you can force it to discharge and not accept new charge by
setting it to discharge.
For now we're going to leave it at auto. While our
battery can charge through this connection because power will travel
through this incomplete cargo container we still can't move cargo
between the two and we can't finish this cargo container right now either because
it needs four metal grids, so I think it's time that we take this little ship
over to that cobalt and grab some Something to note with a ship like this
is that every time I push forwards, I'll accelerate with our forward thruster and
then every time I release, our backwards thruster will slow us down. That's quite an
expensive way to fly, instead what we're going to do is press K find our
backwards thruster and name it backward The reason we have to name it backward,
is if we go into our G menu and we look at our thrusters, those directions don't
show up but because we've named it it will, so then we can select this one and
go toggle block on and off.
If we then turn it off and move forward, we will
coast happily without any problems at all and it will save us a fair bit of
energy going on long distance trips like this one to the Cobalt.
Just make sure you remember to turn it back on because slowing down will be
interesting without it, you'll have to flare like a helicopter to be able to do
so. Now that we're approaching this spot let's turn that thruster back on and
slow ourselves down.
One thing you may note as we approach this deposit is that
you'll start to see markers of where the ores are, we can currently see one for
nickel and one for iron, so let's see if we can find one for cobalt. There we go
cobalt so let's drill our way down to that and collect a little bit with the
ship. Get nice and right overhead and then spiral our way down with right-click. Something to note about lighting here as
it's starting to get a bit dark, the light you can see coming out the front
is actually my suit lights, if I hop out and turn off my suit lights and then hop
back in you can see that it's gone away So your suit lights will work from
inside the cockpit the other thing is, by default these little Landers have a
couple of interior lights on them.
The trouble is they're set to blink so let's
turn that blink off and let's increase our radius and out to its maximum and
now we can see quite a lot more. Since we're not wanting to collect stone we're
just wanted to collect cobalt let's just drill straight through all this stone
with right click. What you can see right in front of us now is that we've
actually come through one of the iron veins, so that's going to be convenient
when we want to come back and collect some in that we've already got a whole
reaching down to the iron.
Rather than having to deal drill two holes like this
we can use the same one for the iron and the cobalt hopefully. And there we go
there's the blue that's what we were looking for. So let's switch over to
left-click or turn the drill on and collect a bit of that, just being mindful
of not leaning too far forward and you can tell how far forward you're leaning
by looking for the artificial horizon. If you keep that artificial horizon in view
even in third-person you should have a decent idea of how far forward you're
leaning and I was leaning way too far forward because I had let that go out of
my line of sight. Now let's have a look at our inventory right now we've got a
pretty good supply of cobalt, I'm very happy with that, that's plenty but we're
also carrying a lot of stone and for the moment I want to get rid of that stone
so the way I'm going to do that, is drag it into my personal inventory and just dump
it on the ground.
The reason I don't want this stone is because it's going to be
extra weight that I have to carry all the way back to base which is extra
power consumption and I don't want that just yet.
Something I will collect since we're here and we've got access to it though
is some iron since that is a more efficient use of our power and will
allow us to build a fair few more steel plates like the ones we need for the
oxygen generator. It is looking like we are too heavy because we up to thirty
seven thousand kilograms and you can see the problem because I am sinking to the
bottom of this hole.
So I'm gonna hop out and I'm gonna offload some of our ores
so that we can make it safely home. You can see the challenge of mining even
with those extra lateral thrusters given how hard it is even with those who could
imagine just how hard it would be without them. What we're gonna do as soon as we get back is add a few extra thrusters so that we can fly this thing
a lot more easily. Here we run into something that was why I've made a GPS
last time, that respawn pod marker that we were using for where the base is, is
with us right now, so we can't see exactly where the base is, I know where it
is it's roughly in front of us, but if we want to know exactly where it is we can
go back to our GPS and turn that marker on. With how heavy the ship is you can
see that we've only got a few minutes of power left and that was with our fully
charged battery, so you can imagine how difficult it would have been to collect
any resources if we'd stuck with building a new battery.
When you're
coming into land with a ship like this it pays to do so slowly you don't want
to rush it, if you rush it you'll end up with a situation where you overcook how
quickly you're coming down and you won't have the thrust to stop yourself before
you hit into whatever's on the ground the other thing to note is when you've
got a base like this and it's nighttime it's probably useful to have some lights
on the base itself, now our connector is not hooked up so I'm gonna have to
manually transfer a couple of things so that we can get it hooked up. There we go
everything we need for the small cargo container Finally I can drop off that ice that
I've been carrying around all of this time, with our cargo container complete
and the link between the ship and the refinery complete we can drag this stuff
straight from the ship into the refinery. The refinery will also automatically
grab things from the ship if it's got space in its inventory, it won't fill
itself up completely but it will do it for now we're just gonna manually move
the remainder of the ore into the small cargo container so that the ship is
empty and ready for its next trip.
Because we collected this iron, we have
plenty being produced and will easily be able to build the steel plate we need
for that o2 h2 generator with our assembler, a refinery, cargo, survival kit
and Oh 2 generator on the base and our mining ship functional, we're in a pretty
good spot, so let's improve the mining ship a bit and get ready for next time.
First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to add an extra battery to our mining
ship, we go to our G menu and add our battery, this spot on the side here
is perfect for it. So let's try and orient that the same way as the other
side, there we go extra battery on board and then I want to add a few extra
thrusters.
Let's get four more metal grids made since we're going to add two
forward and two reverse thrusters. That's because you'll tend to tilt downward to
allow your drill to work, so you'll want to be able to remain stable with that
orientation. I'm gonna add an extra thrust of right here and one right here,
then the same on this side, one there and one there. I tend to balance directions
like forward and backwards, left and right against each other just so that I
don't end up accelerating very hard and not being up and stop or reversing very
hard and not being able to stop. And the last thing I'm going to add is an extra
light on this side, let's grab our interior light, pop that on there
and I will feel like this is pretty good for now.
Something we should quickly do
though is grab our three backwards thrusters, because now we've got three of
them we'll need to have them in a group to be able to switch them on and off
together, so we can select the three of them by control clicking on each one and
then typing up here 'reverse thrust' or whatever name you want to give it, in
fact let's even give it a name that fits with this particular ship, so it's the
'miner reverse thrust' then click Save and you'll see the group the group appears
at the top of your list.
We can then go to our G menu we can remove our old
control for this, select groups and then do the same thing again and have toggle
block on and off and that will work for that group. If we then disconnect from
our connector, we can fly up and this will show you why I added the reverse
thrust Now, while empty, we can stand on our face. Which is kind of handy and there we go now we've got a functional atmospheric
miner the next thing you'd probably want to do
is generate more power so we can recharge it and use it more often. So
next time we're going to look at power generation and we're going to have a
look at where to find ice, so there's all that and plenty more to come and I will
see you then 🙂
