Keen Software founder Marek Rosa has announced the new update that brings entire planets and moons is now available for the space exploration and exploitation game Space Engineers.
The planets are not procedurally generated - rather, they’re hand-crafted by the development team. According to Rosa, ”planets and moons are persistent & fully destructible - anything you build or destroy will stay there forever. You can even dig through the planet if you want!”
The task was difficult in that planets had to be completely volumetric and destructible. ”Since day one planets occupied the top spot among the most requested features by community, but we didn’t have them in our initial roadmap,” explained Rosa. ”The decision to add planets came almost a year ago and back then, I knew it was going to be a very complex and difficult task that would test the limits of how far we could go and how hard we could push.”
The planets and moons come in several flavors. Planets include Earth-like (atmosphere with oxygen), Mars-like (no oxygen, thinner atmosphere), and Alien (low oxygen, denser atmosphere), while moons include Earth-like Moon (no atmosphere), Europa (thin atmosphere, no oxygen), and Titan (thin atmosphere, no oxygen). Planets are 120km and roughly 1G while moons are 19km in diameter by default.with ,25G.
The other major addition brought by the update includes new AI enemies, such as sabiroids, space spiders that can be found on Alien planets and Titan moons. They’re able to destroy metal blocks, and can burrow into the ground to ambush hapless prey. Other enemies include pirates and their bases as well as enemy drones which spawn automatically from pirate bases.
Space Engineers is still in Steam Early Access.
