Space Engineers is a sandbox game about engineering, construction and maintenance of space works. Players build space ships and space stations of various sizes and utilization (civil and military), pilot ships and perform asteroid mining. Space Engineers utilizes a realistic volumetric-based physics engine: all objects can be assembled, disassembled, damaged and destroyed.

Space Engineers offers a robust platform for creative gamers to build and maintain space stations and ships in a single or multi-player environment. Offering both Survival and Creative modes, as well as resource management, multiplayer, and even combat, the limits of what can be built and played are only bound by the player’s own creativity. 

The v1.185.0 update is a large overhaul to the physics in Space Engineers and primarily focusing on pistons, rotors, landing gears, and grid deformations.

The original vision of Space Engineers was to build a game where physics behave exactly as in the real world. We wanted players to be able to transfer their intuition from the real world to the game world. Things in Space Engineers should behave exactly as one would expect them to behave in real world. There shouldn’t be things that look like they can do something but actually cannot and are there just for visual effect. We wanted to create a game where there are no limits in what players can create.

Just as an illustration: in Space Engineers we have practically infinite worlds, players can seamlessly travel from planets to moons to asteroids, they can build and destroy everything that’s in the world, they can dig through entire planet which are huge -- up to 120 km, players can build kilometer-long ships while being completely destructible. Ships and stations have their own mechanics - pistons, rotors, thrusters, gravity generator, conveyors, programmable computers and many more. 

On top of that, everything is destructible, deformable, recalculated in real time, different blocks have different strength, gravity and other forces push on objects, ships crashes and collisions feel like in real world. We consider these to be the core elements of Space Engineers.  

This has been a top priority for me and the SE team during last year - to have these things be as robust, stable, and intuitive as possible.  

We have resolved all physics issues that we are aware of in typical use cases. It may still be possible to break builds when using certain settings, however the game will detect unsafe values and warn the user.

SUMMARY:

• Massive physics overhaul
• Pistons, rotors, landing gears and more
• Grid deformations - Improved, optimised, tweaked and balanced
• Optimizations - less lags, more fun
• Improved subgrid behaviour and fragility
• Stronger constraints for mechanical blocks so they don’t break so easily
• Less Clang, more engineering

For more technical details continue to my blog post, that goes into great depth about the changes that were made to Space Engineers for this update.