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.

February 28, 2019 is the day for all Space Engineers. Today, we are moving Space Engineers out of Early Access. Getting Space Engineers out of Early Access has been planned for a long time. We have worked on it basically since 2016/2017, when the game entered beta. It was our goal to release the game in the state we consider to fulfill our original vision, including all planned features and core game components. Moreover, the game includes a lot of things that were not planned at the beginning of development (solar panels, planets, rotors, pistons, wheels, and many more features).

Survival

The Survival overhaul has been one of our top priorities, so it was specifically planned to be released after we had other key things finished. Over the last 6 years, we have carefully executed our original vision, which hasn’t changed since. Moving step-by-step towards our vision, the Survival overhaul is one of those steps. In addition to survival, many new features have been designed to help new players to be introduced to the game and are not specifically focused on existing players.

Survival overhaul is one of the biggest overhauls because until now our main priority was making sure the sandbox elements work properly. We needed to make sure that the physics are stable, multiplayer is reliable, the destruction is working, and so on. With this update, we are evolving from a sandbox experience, towards a game with many unique single and multiplayer features.

We have touched almost every survival element. There are new blocks such as the Hydrogen Engine, Wind Turbine, Survival Kit, and Small Battery being introduced into the game, ragdoll mechanics are coming back, loading times of even very large wolds are now extremely reduced, and a new Progression system has been integrated into Space Engineers.

Out of Early Access

Space Engineers has been in Early Access for 5+ years, and during this period we developed the game from a proof-of-concept to a feature complete space engineering sandbox. We sold more than 3 million copies and we have more than 200,000 monthly active players.

We went through more than 200 updates, which include major game changes such as:

• planets
• new HUD and game UI
• skins, parachutes, wheels
• more than 200 blocks
• reworked and updated the character animations several times
• improved the multithreaded physics, but also physics itself
• implemented super-large worlds
• a lot of game optimizations during this entire period
• went through the massive updates of the game’s visuals and audio
• we spent a significant amount of time on improving the multiplayer, air tightness, and oxygen
• survival mode
• programmable blocks, modding support, antennas, landing gears, solar panels, cargo ships, meteorites, encounters, asteroid clusters, visual scripting, realistic mode audio, in-game help, and more.

Because Space Engineers development was open, you were able to see what’s happening under the hood. Contrary to other products, where you see the final product, but don’t see how the project has been developed and changed over time, and what challenges the development team had to overcome.

New Price

With this update, we are also setting a new price for Space Engineers to $19.99 (USD). According to our analysis and tests, this price better suits the majority of Space Engineers fans. This change also brings all regional prices on Steam to match countries specifications and regional differences.

This step will enable the Space Engineers community to grow even bigger, which is great news for everyone because Space Engineers always benefited from the huge pool of player creations, and this can only work if we have a large player-base.

It is quite an unusual move to decrease the price when the game leaves Early Access, but we believe it’s a good gift to the community and will better support the future of Space Engineers.

Ladders

Ladders are a special thing for all Space Engineers. We had them in the early builds of the game, but then removed them due to the complexity involved in having them work properly (omni-directional gravity, colliding ships, animations, you name it). However, we always knew we wanted to bring them back and the best moment to do this would be today - when the game leaves Early Access.

The ladders are back, with new visuals, new animations, and new features - you can jump off the ladder, you can jump from ladder to ladder, ladders work in multiplayer, multiple players can climb on the same ladder, and much more.

What’s Next?

Space Engineers is not finished. We already have a lot of plans to expand the Space Engineers franchise with new features, blocks, and scenarios. We’re going to take Space Engineers to exciting places when it comes to gameplay, immersion, and challenges! 

In the short term, these expansions will bring more decorative blocks, new in-game economy (trading, currency, but no MMO scale yet), new weapons, and we also plan to look at combat specific scenarios. 

We will continue to monitor our support site for bug reports, questions, concerns and suggested features. We are also working on an Xbox One port for Space Engineers.

We are moving into the new era of Space Engineers and I’m sure that we all have many reasons to look forward to it.