Agreed...having a projector set up on every ship is a must. One time I even built welders behind a large front shield of heavy armor that were always on. That way, blocks could get repaired as soon as they start taking damage (provided the welders don't get damaged, and you have the parts to repair on the ship).
I used to put Projectors as standard for ships thematically designed for repairability in mind in exchange for reduced modularity. Because the trick here is Recursive Design. So long as the projector is intact and contains the EXACT same blueprint and block configs as the ship itself, it can consistently come out the same. Fighters and drones only need a welding fabricator line. Huge ships need weldships, but individual crew for internal repairs.
I actually did this with a patrol boat I'm experimenting with. I'm trying to test its combat capabilities and limitations, and figured that might be a good idea.
That glass is not just to stop you crashing into it, it's vital to stop blocks greater than 1x1 being created behind the spinning welder, that are inside the path of swinging arm.
I never though to use glass. I made a shroud around my welders so that only the barest tip was poking out. 0=armor block 1=welder x=thing to be welded 000 xxx 111 xxx 000 xxx
2 года назад+259
As a matter of fact, you can use build planner with block tools. Simply press RMB with selected welder tool (eg: if you have a grinder and a welder in a builder ship) and it will be placed to build planner queue. Just with the hand welder. And you can even build from cockpit with CTRL-G so you can build and design ships in no jetpack worlds. Once you docked to a connector simple use the dedicated pull all components button to fill the ship cargo based on the build planner queue. Otherwise nice tutorial :)
The real downside to Welding Ships is not that "there is no build planner". Its just too small with 8 blocks. That might be enough for a handwelder but not for a ship, with which you can build 50 blocks per trip. Keen, just make it loooong (preferably infinte).
You know what I'd _love?_ a Space Engineers 2, with a far more user friendly everything, with many lessons learned from the greatness and horribleness of this first game.
Because it went so well with Kerbal Space Program 2... Don't get me wrong... I'd love it if they started over from scratch and did it right and better the second time around.
@@jasonpayne4952 The company is making an updated version of the game engine that runs Space Engineers. We are either gonna get a complete overhaul soon, or a 2nd game will be in the works... I'd prefer an overhaul though, as I think it would give them more time in the long run to work on a 2nd title
So you don't have to have your ship being moved on a piston array causing Klang. You can instead have your WELDERS being withdrawn via piston. And also nope for the rotor welders, I get the PCU thing but a weld wall is so much better and quicker. Another thing you can do is build a rail and use wheels to pull your build back, making in effect a 3d printer. Just some ideas for you.
I was thinking about it on a planet. Make a huge flat platform with a "troley" that hold the projector. Then either pistons or simply wheels moves the projector away from the welder wall at slow pace. of course welder wall is connected to storages to build/get items
Building in creative first was the one of the first lessons I learned in SE. You can spend forever building a design only for it to not work, then you'll need to disassemble and reassemble a ton. Build the ship in creative, troubleshoot it, then go back to survival and either load the blueprint into a projector or build from memory
When it comes to placing your projection: You can turn down your menu opacity in the options. You can enter the terminal from third person. If you can orient your camera somewhere you can see your vessel through the UI, while also accessing a terminal, you can very quickly put down a projection.
I have UI opacity turned up for the sake of recording but honestly, it's still a massive pain in the ass to do if from a cockpit. Being unable to free move you camera is a pain.
@@Zer0sLegion I have Build Vision and it never occurred to me I could adjust Projector Blueprints with it. If any tips in this video stick with me it will be that one.
A tip I once watched with Luca was to make two versions of your ship as a BP. One with and without armour blocks. Print and build the one without first, which means no conveyors get missed. Then print the armour blocks on top. There are various mods or tools (SE Toolbox) that can allow you to remove armour blocks.
It can do, but I find it better for bigger ships as I hate missing conveyors and wondering why a turret or thruster isn't working. Personally, I use this in combination with a 4-welder array on a large ship to drag backwards as I print (full large cargo container filled with materials. SE Toolbox can also tell you the exact amount of materials for any given ship).
This is a creative idea. The biggest issue I foresee is in my case at least, building the functional blocks first, then armor means in more cases than not, I am building separate grids intended to be one. Example - a space only ship without H2 thrusters would use Ion thrusters... either "wing" would be held together with armor blocks for structure, thus the only way to make that work is to have a category of modules that can be connected with a merge block or a mod like the one I use adds a "weld pad" and allows detaching without decon'ing fully. That said, I really like the idea of making a personal catalog of modules for ships, stations, etc in maybe creative mode, work out designs, alignment, etc make sure it all works as intended... blueprint each module, hop over to your survival map, and build it all with projectors then attach everything... or maybe a factory assembly line dedicated to certain class of builds. The issue with even that idea is if you play in multiplayer and not a dedicated server, you are shutting down the other player's map each time you want to switch to creative and back and you have to consider load times too. As the host, yes you can Alt + F10 and enable creative tools but you don't have symmetry building and so on so it's not perfect either and in that example, you already went through the trouble of placing everything in "creative" mode as a admin in survival just to blueprint it, delete it, turn off creative tools, just to tediously build legit in survival again just to say you did. There are no easy answers other than using building mods like the "Nanite Control Factory" as one of many mod examples that would do that for you... or like "AI enabled" type mods that allow you to create AI bots to help you weld and so on. Whenever the next SE update hits and the devs add "grid AI" officially, we might be able to make dedicated construction fleets, transport fleets, and so on that automates the shittier parts of building in SE and what not and replace some mods with vanilla features ( which is always nice when done right ). Those are my two cents as a long time player with 2,638 hrs of gameplay as of writing this. Corrections and add on ideas are welcome. I don't claim to know all things SE. Just my own experience.
It should also be noted that you should design your ships with construction in mind. Ships built from the center out work a lot better when welding them together and ships built from one side to the other.
You could probably solve that imbalance problem by trading the rotor in for a bar, then have a piston sweep that print head bar up and down as a second piston incrementally pulls the unfinished ship away from the welders. A skeleton of support scaffolds should be plenty to keep things aligned.
*Wait until this guy finds out about Nanites and Build and Repair smh* EDIT: If one more person tells me that "you can use the build planner on ships", I know you can, what I meant is that it's not the same and no where near as easy to use as it is with a hand welder.
The best easy welding setup I have even seen used the projector on a piston that moves away from the welders making the ship as it passes thru the front of them, this way you don't have to do any movements at all and the ship gets made. Just recently made a small rover/ship so I have something cheap and easy to print this way. This method works best with smaller ships tho , but could be scaled up for larger ones if limits allow or you could get creative with the pistons movements to make it work.
Here's another one: Building those welders on a diagonal line with conveyor tubes connecting at the corners will maximise the range of each individual welder, and allow for less of them over the same length.
My method involved creating a series of conveyors with hinges made of advanced rotors set to have a weak but constant braking force attached to a small ship via a docking port and that small ship was basically a welder + cockpit + hydrogen thrusters that were attached to my main base for power/hydrogen. This allowed the tube to follow me around like a giant umbilical so I never ran out of materials while mining because I never had localized storage.
The most common method I used in multiplayer (with 3 to 4 players), was a mix of hand weld and weld ships, working on a blueprint. They tend to complement each other well. I would have a number of colour coded weld ships, and each would be assigned to automatically pull only a specific category of components from the base. No need to manually manage their inventory, just dock and undock, and they're ready to go again. One player would act as the construction foreman for the build, and move around in person inspecting blocks and informing the team of what was needed where, making sure that areas were done in the correct order to avoid blocking anything off. He would also monitor component supply and reassign assemblers as needed. He would assist in hand welding slow components whilst inspecting. Most of the weld ships wouldn't waste time fully welding most blocks. Their main job was to deliver the components. The one performing bulk work like hull plating was the exception, and would be a variant with a 2x3 array of welders, that could rapidly weld up large sheets of armour due to it's overlapping weld area, much faster than by hand. The other weld ships had their welders on extended prongs, to ensure they could deliver to narrow areas of the ship. Once bulk work was done, most players would dismount and use high tier hand welders to quickly finish up blocks. Any additional components needed could be grabbed from the weld ships parked near the work site. For the larger builds that I designed, I also made multi stage blueprints. Basically I would complete the ship in creative mode and blueprint it in it's final form, but would then strip out sections that block easy access, and remove most of the exterior hull, leaving just a skeletal frame of the ship. It was quick and easy to simply delete segments, and I would blueprint the ship in increasingly cutdown variations. This meant that when it came to construction in survival mode, we could start with a frame work and minimal internals, and gradually add layers as each was completed. This considerably improved the effectiveness of the weld ships, being able to get right inside the ship and work on areas that would otherwise become a nightmare of half welded blocks and confusing hologram. This design process was also used when we did our "Mothership" play through. Using both staged and modular blueprints of the same ship, we were able to quickly build a very large but bare minimum mothership, and travel through the game gradually adding and upgrading systems as needed and when possible. Eg, systems such as thrusters, refinery, or cargo holds, were blueprinted separately in approximately five "levels", from the minimal required to survive, up to a fully completed ship.
"I want to build a welding array for making ships so I don't have to waste time hand welding everything, but I need to make the welding array. To do that quickly I'm going to make a welding array, but to do that I need to make a welding array." (Continues forever)
You use a hand welder instead of a big one because you like the experience. I use a hand welder instead of a big one because I don't know how to use a big one. We are not the same. 💀
Something I like to include in many of my builds, especially fighters with guided missiles, are projectors onboard for easy repairs and rearming. Need destroyed armor and thrusters added? Turn on the projector and fly up to welders. Same with replenishing spent guided missiles. If you aren't using the multigrid projector mod, you can just add a second projector that casts a BP of the missiles linked as one BP, the linking blocks being concealed inside the ship, so it only welds the missiles.
If you connect missiles with merge blocks a normal projector will project the missiles and ship. I typically have dedicated welders for rearming my fighters, with a connector to align the ship. I've also found it is easier to just print a new fighter when it is damaged, and toss the old one in a grinding pit
Add a conveyor system and some welders that cover the entire are of the ship and you have a self-building ship. You also get repairs mid-flight without having to dock. If you position them correctly where your first three blocks are a connector, conveyor, and welder; that's the mot efficient way. Go off and do other things. One other thing about having the projector on board the ship is; when it's on it gives a shield like aura.
tip for welder arm: place em diagonal as in welder, curve conveyor, repeat. or like a staircase if that makes more sense. that way they reach further with same amount of welders. tbh. the pistons for me at least dont klang, share inertia and make multiple move slowly, for easement, make a timer block turn them on/off every time welders have rotated and build blocks, lets say it does it in 2 rpm, so to make sure make timer turn on/off every 3 rpm. easy :)
What I always strive for is effectively a large drydock. A projector that starts at roughly the rear center of the ship, then have a welding rotor that starts in the core, then moves to the frontal length, moves up one layer, moves back, etc, the classical automatic ship factory. It's amazing once set up and I did build a gargantuan one on a multiplayer server and made it public as in: come here, put your stuff there and then we build your ship. It was very nice
I've always been a fan of the self building ships on servers that don't have limits. Once you get a good design, the hardest part about actually building them is just supplying the ores and waiting. And since self building ships are also self repairing, as long as the inventory is stocked it is damn near unbreakable. My favorite so far was essentially a giant mining ship at a glance, but contained everything you need for a base and was heavily armed on all sides. As long as the "core" remained in tact, it could recover from anything pretty quickly.
Projectors will also show if you're missing any blocks from a blueprint in the control panel. Good for letting you know if you got everything after a repair, or if you missed anything while building.
Zer0 you can use the build planner with ship welders. You can change the inventory on the left to be the whole grid and withdraw build planner components.
@@sethgilcrist8088 There are buttons for buildplanner in the inventory screen in the middle between the inventory lists. The cogwheel + cube is equivalent to Shift + MMB (add buildplanner components to build queue) and the arrow + cube is equivalent to MMB (transfer buildplanner items). On top of both inventory lists there are buttons (helmet / cube symbols) to switch between personal and connected inventories. Using that you can pick a different inventory than you personal one as target for the buildplanner. Keep in mind that it might transfer items to other inventories in the left list if it cannot put all items into the one you have selected for whatever reason. The best way to make sure all transferred items end up in your welding vehicle is to access the inventory screen from the vehicle (either from a cockpit, control panel or cargo access of the vehicle, does not matter) and filter the left list to show only inventories of the 'current ship' via the button on top of the inventory list (ship with two arrows).
I haven't played Space Engineers since about 2020, but I remember finding all sorts of cool ways to help with the assembly process of, well, pretty much anything. One of the coolest things I think I ever built was a "welding arm" that uses pistons and rotors which are hooked into your actual base. This provided it with more storage than you would ever possibly need to worry about, no need to ever dock and get more materials or anything like that. Using clever scripting, you could control this welding arm from the cockpit with simple WASD controls. I built this "welding arm" in such a way that it sort of acted like a gimbal. Wherever your mouse was pointing is the point in space that it would rotate around when moving. This made it very easy to reposition around a projected blueprint and make absolutely certain you were getting those tricky interior blocks. VERY cool stuff! The coolest thing about this is how easy it was to rapidly build *LARGE* grids, and it had quite a very long range. The one and only drawback to this was occlusion. This was a welding device attached to an arm. You had to kind of plan what you would weld up first. If you welded the wrong stuff first, you could easily end up in a situation where the welder could not navigate to the other side of the projected blueprint, because there was stuff in the way and the arm obviously can't phase through physical objects. However, if you treated it like any kind of printer-like design (slowly pulling back from one point) it worked extremely well. My biggest issue with Space Engineers was dealing with ship damage. I always tried to design my ships to be pretty, yet entirely functional. This meant everything was fully conveyored, and these parts of the ship were covered. If any of this internal stuff got damaged, there was simply no fricking way to know _what_ was damaged and what wasn't. It is especially frustrating when one of your 300 large grid gyroscopes scattered throughout various parts of the internal structure is damaged. Good luck finding it. I like the gameplay and quality of life improvements stuff like the Nanites mod adds, but I don't like the implementation. I personally LOVE the idea of assembling a ship in some kind of drydock, using cool design ideas with how welding works to make it buildable. I think there should just be an easier way to identify and repair damaged components. Perhaps instead of nanites, a literal laser passes through the ship and instantly repairs anything in the beam that is damaged. So you could have a welding setup for drydock assembly, and a _repair_ setup specifically for bringing in damaged ships and repairing them. Imagine being able to fly your barely functioning ship through a grid of lasers, and just fly it back out and it's all patched up in its entirety. This would make the game a lot better in this respect. At some point the game definitely changes from "space engineers" to "repair engineers" and it just gets tedious. I think for this repair system, projectors should be done away with. Projectors are perfect for building something initially, but I don't like the idea of having a "repair projector" which just overlays the missing blocks on the grid. This just seems like a lot of added work on the player's part because sometimes setting these up can be tricky. And what do you do if the projector with the preset blueprint and necessary offsets gets damaged? You have to fiddle with all of that again. I honestly found it very frustrating trying to configure projectors for this purpose, because dialing in just the right offsets was always frustrating, and if I was unlucky and that vital repair projector was damaged, I just had to screw with the settings again. It was annoying. Instead, it would be nice if the game just "knew" what was supposed to be there in the first place. Like, when you convert something to a ship, the game just goes "ah yes okay, these are all the blocks needed for this grid, I'll remember that." So if a block straight up gets destroyed, using a _repair_ laser on it would just instantly rebuild that block, provided the materials are present. I feel like this would already be pretty easy to implement directly as a core part of the game. The game *already knows* what blocks compose a grid, you can literally see every grid in a game. It knows this stuff already. It would be cool if you could just tell the game "THIS configuration is what it is SUPPOSED to be", and when you tried to repair it and replace missing blocks, it just went "oh alright." No need to fiddle with projectors for this purpose would be really, really nice.
On a note very related to this, one of my biggest "one day" goals for SE is to build a production line which assembles a multi-grid vehicle (say a shuttle with VTOL thrusters) in entirely separate sections then combines them. All automatically at the press of a single button. An ambitious and clang offending dream, but I've seen some amazing builds which do similar things and I want to try it. Lol.
I just put a small welder wall in my hanger and have a repair projector for small grids, for large I just scrap it and re print it if it's royally buggered
I built a ship once that grinded down ships/stations quickly and easily. It had two giant walls on the back of the ship with grinders on them facing inward with a large gap between them, and each wall had pistons behind it to push the walls together. I would then position the ship or station to be broken down between the grinder walls and activate the pistons. All materials the grinders collected were sent through tubes to several large cargo containers on the ship. It was amazing watching it chew up whole stations one layer on either side at a time.
My last welding ship was the smallest large grid ship I could build, basically a big cargo box with some engines and a cockpit. But that let me do all my welding in one run since even at default inventory sizes, you can fit a tremendous amount of stuff in a large box.
My friend and I always enjoy building a 3D printer building of sorts, where the welders are static, and a line of pistons with a projector pulls the projection back. It works especially well for small grids, and I ended up designing an elevator that takes the finished build down, where it is able to fly out of a tunnel. It's impractical in some ways but looks and feels awesome. We even built an observation room so we can watch as the ship is built. We installed flashing lights so that we know when welders are on.
One more idea is to use modular construction methods like engine and cargo pods with a central ship module that can each be built using a smaller weld wall and then assembled using merge blocks and a little tug ship with mag plates to move the modules around. It does take more planning and may limit your product but still another fun way to get around the building limits.
I wish SE would explain stuff like this better. I had no clue that: 1. Hold shift + Ctrl to make a plane. I thought you had to go into settings, change it from line or whatever, and do that every time you wanted to make a big plane. Or meticulously build line after line. 2. That you're better off making blueprints from behind so that ships align correctly when placing them down. 3. That you could control projector movements in a seat to better see where it's going 4. Build info has an option to show only currently attached and weldable 5. that you can build a small ship to "pull" the projection through the welding thing to build it up effortlessly. I've spent so many hours in SE trying to find a good way to weld large ships that I've created, but they are so incredibly time consuming that I generally just gather all the materials I would need, spawn the ship in, and delete the materials.
That's what my channel is for, covering everything that no one tells you about Space Engineers. I make the kind of videos I wish existed when I started the game.
@@Protect_all_ljf3forms No real excuse for that now, at least Xbox Series has very high level of support for KB/M in many games, if you choose to play on a controller, that is your issue to contend with in complex input scenarios. Now if the game doesn't support KB/M that's bad developers.
Been a while since I played this, but I was playing a vanilla survival game once where I started with nothing except basic tools and used realistic inventory/physics settings once where I made a tiny, bare-bones "ship" with no cargo blocks and just a single welder as it's own grid, then attached it via connectors (plus necessary stabilizing blocks-- landing gear, etc.) to a conveyor "arm" made up of free-floating rotors/pistons that would allow it to move with the "ship" while pulling directly from the station's inventory/power...
Weld ships can have multiple welders. This helps with speed. You can also queue up things in the build planner, get in your weld ship, select weld ship inventory in the left panel, and transfer in build planner components to the weld ship via the button in the middle. Then just load up with common components like plates and construction components and worry about the rest on a 2nd pass. I'm not sure if you can pick blocks for the build planner in cockpit build mode, which is something else a lot of people don't know you can do by pressing shift+G in a cockpit, but that should be easy enough to figure out with a little science.
Sure, ship welders have the additional steps of having to dock an open the inventory, but I do still recommend learning how to use the ship's build planner effectively. It's saved me so much time, especially when handing large numbers of blocks as you can withdraw x10 what your build planner has, which is handy given the build planner itself cannot hold more than 8 blocks. Once trick I've learned when building landing pads is to simply add one block to planner, eyeball the pad's width, and then x10 a few times to stock the ship and get back to welding.
so does rmb with ship tool add that block/its missing components to the build planner? how do you get the inventory into the ship, by transferring manually? what's the purpose of adding it to planner if you can't also quickly transfer components to the ship?
@@TeleClassy2 Sorry for necro, no sadly you can't pick blocks from the world while in the ship. However, if you're in a closed cockpit (doesn't work with control seat) you can Ctrl+G to open build mode, then open the G menu and add blocks to the planner there. As for moving items quickly it's as simple as docking and then setting your left inventory to the ship's inventory, then click withdraw from build planner. Like I mentioned you can even hold Ctrl to take 10x the amount for many of that same block. Hope this helps! EDIT: Apparantly you can add blocks with ship tools, so that's useful!
Building a good print tug can be a pain, especially in gravity. So one of the things I've been doing with larger builds is chopping the ship into slices in creative first. Print out one relatively light piece and then go merge block it to the base. Print out the next one and merge it down etc. Basically allows you to print any size of ship pretty easily.
For a welder ship I like to attach a large hinge piece to a medium hinge head, converting to small ship so you can run large grid welders on a small grid ship. A few 5x5 cargos and it's much faster than hand welding.
2:50 Many solutions to the problems mentioned. Sortie and gates on the conveyor system allows fast refill. Multiple branching welders, and a better welder ship design makes welding a lot faster. My welder ships are agile, and so docking is easy. But also, lastly, rooms can be made for welding. Build a small ship, place the blocks, than use welders on the wall, on pistons to weld.
The other benefit of building ships in creative mode is Spectator (F7/F8, F6 to disable). If you're building a very large ship, missing something like a conveyor is such a pain to find, or realizing you forgot something like a jump drive after you finished the build can make adding it a daunting task. Well, with spectator, you can phase through a grid and see what the problem is, and still place or remove blocks at the same time! So long as you still have space for yourself to exist (you can't put blocks on top of yourself, for instance). Almost 1,500 hours in the game and I only recently figured out this little trick for editing ships when they are already mostly or fully completed. Keep in mind that SE, for whatever reason, sometimes takes multiple button presses to register, so try it a couple times if it doesn't do anything.
Personally i use the build planner just to load up the welding ship in the early game for huge parts like large grid large thrusters. MMB on loaded container, Alt + MMB on welding ship, repeat until done. Still do conveyor systems and stuff by hand. Also bear in mind you can MMB click any cargo hatch with a block blueprint in your hand and it will add to build planner and attempt to auto-pull right on the spot. Useful for when you want to load the welding ship for like 30 thrusters but only have 8 slots in the build planner, but know you have the capacity for a single trip.
I have a bad habit of wanting to design a new ship from scratch every time I do a survival (or have to restart on a server). It’s the designer in me, it’s like I must keep ideating.
My default has always been welder wall, pistons, wheels on rails, mass blocks and gravity generators when building ships in space. I've successfully printed some very large ships with ease. The setup is always quite time consuming however - but fun. Though the welders have to be strategically placed to get the maximum wall with fewest used (and it does lead to some smaller blocks needing hand welding).
Self welding large grid ships ate the way I go, build a spine of convers and welders, start the first two blocks connected to your part box and away it goes. It also then self repairs during fights.
To the rotor arm welder: You even do not need so many welders. In fact one can arange them in a kind of an repeating L-form on the arm and it will still hit every block. It will take more time. But then even larger ships are possible with only 3 welders. Comparable to the drill head, which is a rotor, a sideways drill and an off center forward drill, all on a piston slower then 0.02m/s².
What I did was that I made an arm like contraption with pistons and hinges, 3 of each, and had a welder on the tip. Then, with the turret controller, I can move it pretty much anywhere in 3 dimensions, and reach nooks and crannies easily. I had so much fun making those that I made 2 more arms, one with a large parking pad to pick up stuff and one with a connector, just for funsies.
you could also use a welding array with a projector on a piston, so you can move the hologram (also the ship in construction) away from the welders so you can build the next layer.
Honestly, i‘ve printed up huge ships with 0g printers and even if a bit tideous it‘s always been fun. The most fun part though is adding dubgrids by printing them seperately and attaching them with a small contruction tug. It always feels like one of those fan art pictures of a star wars space station assembling an ISD.
Welders sphere of welding forms a cross, and so even on the limited Keen servers, one can still build big welder systems by taking advantage of this. For small grid welders, arrange them in adjacent 45 degree diagonals to each other. For large grids, you can space them out a bit, place a conveyor block directly above the central rotor, place another conveyor at 90 degrees...and repeat, so the Welders proceed at about 30 degrees angle from the starting Conveyor block; this will allow a welder with a 23 Large Grid block width using only 5 welders. BE SURE TO ANCHOR THE WELDER SYSTEM! ....or expect to chase after a rogue grid you spent an hour building. I have no ideas on the following: but... learning to create ships in sections and weld/merge them together later is useful for PCU limited servers. A video on how to do this wold be good. edit: when designing a ship make sure to keep in mind the starting weld block which I usually mark in an off color. And that all blocks extend from it even these are removed like flashing on old plastic models; otherwise some bits can be missed by the limited reach of the welders.
This! Using merge blocks to piece together a ship. I do something I like this to an extent in creative, make modular hull pieces then start gluing stuff. I had thought about using it in survival but got burnt for a while.
Docking isn't a huge problem as long as you design your ships properly. Word of advice: hangars suck, for two main reasons. One, it takes a log more time and care to enter a hangar than it does to hook onto a well-placed external connector. Two, if the ship breaks loose while the bigger ship is moving, it will clang around and tear up the inside of your large ship as well as destroy your small ship, and you won't have any way of knowing it disconnected until you hear the clanging. Carrying the ships externally is simply superior from an efficiency and safety standpoint. This is why the industrial capital ship I built carries its utility ships on its back, with piston-mounted connectors to dock to. It dramatically improves the speed and reduces the precision needed to dock. Hangars _look_ cool, and I recognize they're nice for many uses, but anything you're going to be making lots of trips for you want external docking.
The best thing if you play on survival is building an auto builder on tour base. It makes building ships way easier and quicker. Even large ships you can create using the segmenting technique. You do however need the welder+ mod from the workshop
tip if you add a antenna to the grid you have a projector on you can set up another powered grid to adjust the projector offset remotely. this is handy when setting your ship up for self repair
When in a cockpit you can transfer material to your ship from the build planner using a button in the UI of the inventory screen. Not sure why so many people do not know about it.
I worded it poorly, what I meant is that isn't way more difficult than using a hand welder. And trust me, a lot of people know about it, I speak from experience.
It's easy to say that "hand welding is better' when you're not playing on 1x cargo volume. Multiple ship welders in tandem with ample storage capacity for heavy components dramatically improve the value of ship welders when you don't have minecraft pockets. Even then, ship-based welders/grinders are best used in pairs (with a gap in the middle thanks to the overlap aoe) to weld/grind single parts as well as bulk structure jobs faster. One of the first ships I build is a Drone I call the 'stencil'. it's a 5x5xX small ship single welder drone that more or less takes over larger construction jobs, mostly small ships using a projector. I keep several around, and at least one has a grinder swapped out on it. I can sit comfortably in a space-hab and get work done without needing oxy/fuel reloads constantly. Why multiple? so they can repair each other. The work does require manual checks to make sure there aren't any gaps in the jobs, but they've proven incredibly servicable.
Have not played this before, but saw it was coming to PS4/5 and went to RUclips to check out what it was about. In regards to your 3D printer, you have the "printer" stationary in space and on land. In space it should be free to move one block backward after each rotation. I'm sure there is an AI cube that could be set up for that. As far the ground "printer," you could have it push one block back on a rail system. Have the ship be built on a stand and the "printer" moves back as it prints. Have the rotation setup to activate the wheels to move the needed amount. Again, I've never played the game, but this looks really fun. Can't wait for it to come out on PS4!
On the terminal inventory screen you can use the centerline buttons located between the two sides to move the items in build planner between cargo containers to speed up loading a weld ship
Here's another tip, u can pull up the build planner in any ship by pressing Cntrl+G i believe, that'll change the layout for construction, as long as u have raw materials in your inv, u can build it and weld it straight away in a ship
One tip from me: Try building ship *starting from* the projector block before make it a blueprint, so when you project it to build in survival you don't have to mess with Pitch, Yaw and Roll settings. The blueprint's orientation is the orientation of the first placed block on that blueprint, so if you can keep track of that block and that orientation you can start with any block. The same applies to Horizontal, Vertical and Forward offset, if you don't want your projector to project a blueprint 20Km away you should keep track of the first block and build your ship around that block.
The glass doesn't protect you, it protects your welders. It also stops the welders from placing blocks anywhere but in front of themselves, which is important when they're swinging about.
Build a ship in creative. Save blueprint. Now cut all the components out leaving just armor. Save as shipname-armor. Do the same in reverse, saving a version that's minimum armor and all the components required for minimum functions. This allows you to build more deliberately in survival when you have limited resources.
You can use build planner for loading up ships by right clicking as usual but instead of middle mousing to dump the items in your inventory you go into the inventory of the control menu and bring up the name of the cargo you want to draw from (i.e your station) on the left side and the name of the cargo of the weld ship on the right, then click the add to inventory icon in the middle between the two menu and build planner will dump the mats into the weld ships cargo.
@@Zer0sLegion I think collectively we've all probably figured out about half of what build planner can do. Personally i had no idea you could Shift+middle mouse to order up mats without having to go into the production tab for the assembler. For whatever reason Keens keeping the list of useful key shortcuts hidden like it's the recipe for Coca Cola or something.
I've taken to sticking cameras set back slightly from my connectors to ease docking, knocked out a few connectors before I realized. I've gotten eerily good at handling my ship mirrored because I didn't place the camera facing the same direction as my cockpit
With the new turret controller I like building my small ships in a specified area with a welder on a robotic arm. All resources are coming from the base. Since I like designing and building small grid ships in survival mode, it doesn’t feel like a shortcut to design them in creative.
i do the same thing. although on keen servers because of the limited welders i put them every other block with conveyors. still works just as good. maybe a little slower. I've also done a line of welders in a static position on the base and just set a gyro to override on the projecting ship and get the same effect or if it is a small grid fighter just make passes over the welder table. still the rotating head is a great method for large ships.
In my opinion is this method works well for servers with low welder limits. But when you are allowed to build a decent amount of welders, say 30 or something, I use 24 in a vanilla without limits server. The following method is more efficient. It's also a relevant guide to end game players. Moving the projection out of a welderwall is the heaviest method of printing. (Projection set to ship making grid calculations heavier, and materials are pulled from a full base, with tons of unrelated inventories to check for components, and connected ships are checked as well. If you set the projection to station, and weld with a reasonably large weldership that has f.e. 4 large cargos, you keep the conveyor system simple and small. Not too big a welderwall mind you I'd say at MOST 10x10 blocks in total size whilst spacing the welders 1 block in evey direction. This way you print much faster and in a much healthier manner for the server. For bigger prints in I reccomend going to creative and cutting the ship into sections to keep the block count per print low (I cut them into around 2k block sections), then merging the sections together after building them in survival. This is because as the blockcount gets higher the grid calculations get heavier. I think it adds up all the blocks, for physics simulations, every time you add one to the grid. We actually had someone lag the server quite heavily by manually placing blocks on a huge hand built station. A lag spike every time he placed a block due to the enormous block count. That's why I recommend splitting grids up when printing bigger stuff on a multiplayer server.
There are ways to stabilize pistons. One method is to inline a few pistons. IE make several rows of pistons that are attached to one grid. Use merger blocks to merge them together.
Two points: 1) Use Viktor's Multigrid Projector mod! Projects subgrids, letting you print PMW turrets, mechs, wacky creative mode piston/rotor/hinge mechanisms -- in survival. It's one of the top complaints I see people commenting about on workshop designs -- "can't do this in survival". Except that you can. Also, use Viktor's Projector Extra mod. It adds a new single function you can put on a control seat hotbar: Toggle manual alignment. This is possibly just as valuable or more valuable than multigrid projection. When in the control seat, you can intuitively use the normal block rotation and player movement keys to rotate and shift a projection. Say goodbye to that moronic slider interface or having 12 clunky hotbar actions, or even using the very convenient Build Vision. (just make sure the welders or build and repair nanobots are turned off or out of range whilst adjusting the projection. :P) Load repair projection is another function of Projector Extra that adds a button to the projector in control terminal, to load the current grid as-is, without having to blueprint it (essentially it's an unsaved one-time blueprint). This one's a bit fussy since sometimes I can get it to almost immediately line up the projection perfectly, and sometimes it's out of whack. Make sure the projector top (cross mark) and front (dash mark) are aligned with the ship and control seat, as well as aligned as close as possible to the center axis of the ship, to make the manual alignment easier (though it's not at all a chore with the aforementioned mods). Both of these are available as plugins for the SE Plugin Manager. Yes, plugins have their own issues, but for reliable mods these are a great way to use the mod preloaded with the game so that anything client side will function even on servers, as I understand it (whereas mods have to be permitted by the server). Such as these projector mods. Projections to Assembler is also available on the plugin list. 2) I had this video playing in the background, so I may have missed it. Did you cover using the inventory screen from within a ship control seat when docked and connected to your main base inventory cargo? The second button in the middle column is to withdraw components from build planner. With CTRL or ALT+CTRL you can also adjust how you withdraw (x10 blocks, or leave block in build planner). As you probably have experienced, withdrawing for build planner can be a bit fussy, depending on which inventory conveyor port you MMB click. Same applies to using this button from the inventory screen. MAKE SURE you have a properly large target cargo (left hand side of inventory screen) selected (highlighted). And MAKE SURE you have your main component cargo inventory selected as the source inventory (right hand side of inventory screen). Otherwise, you'll often get the idiotic "Could not withdraw all components" message when you know full well you have 50k damn steel plates etc. This allows you to stack up the entire build planner's 8 slots, even with huge blocks like refineries, large reactors, and jump drives. Then from the welder ship control seat, dock and withdraw enough items to fill entire ship cargo inventories. Furthermore, it's been a while, but IIRC you can have the ship welder tool active from the control seat, and add blocks to build planner by looking at them while piloting the ship. I play with the above mods by default, so I cannot recall if this function is vanilla or a bonus of the mods I use. This hybrid hand building / ship welder approach makes it a bit more streamlined to use the ship welder. I personally like to lay down 1 required steel plate, interior component, etc. for each block in the ship being built (if not using a projector), then whether hand-building or using a projection, add only 1 of each common block type with RMB to the build planner CTRL+MMB in inventory to withdraw x10 the blocks. 2-4 large grid welders and even just an equal number of large grid small cargo containers will make short work of hauling 10k steel plates and construction components for the hull armor, cargo containers, conveyors, etc. (compared to hauling components by hand, especially metal grids or steel plates for heavy armor). Sorry for the text wall, but these mods are worth the read. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
i use creative mode to create most my designs then have a BP projector system (battery connector block projector block) then locking it to a connector that's attached to a grid to charge the battery and power the projector. each design has incorporated a docking connector so i can keep them all uniform. (helpful for drone management)
I'd love to see a conveyor tube in SE that connects to things like a rope. One end is the winch and cargo input and the other end is the output, it would make ship welding a lot easier.
For using welding ships, I usually use the build planner and just dump everything into the welding ship, so build planner the blocks you need to weld, then go withdraw and dump into the welding ships. At my base in space, I built a welding floor, and then few pistons over it with projector, was great for welding up small grid things. The welding floor would also build itself, build just build one, then have several around it not fully welded but just their, and the fully built one would weld the others up, and so on till your done. I don't usually build on creative then import to survival, as I feel like its cheating, but on a mp server, I see using prebuilts being the best option.
You can use the buildplanner to fill a container’s inventory with the build planner. Downside is that you have to add to the build planner by getting out of the ship
The easiest way to build in SE- Build in creative get a blueprint the go to survival put said blueprint in projector, turn on the build and repair mod. lol
i was doing, a long time ago, a "escape from mars" run, i even had a 3d printer inside a cave on a mountain with something like a rocket silo to take the ships outside. Let me tell u something, i remember that time, that week, like one of the bests weeks of my life. I remember i was on mars and i had to find ice, and, just to find some i builded a plane like a harrier full with batteries and exploration on mind, so, once i builded it i travelled like 40 minutes straight at max speed just to find ice, imagine that, 40 minutes doing nothing inside a cockpit, but, it was so meaningfull. I remember i wanted to build a robot inside or a couple of them, just to build without having to care about oxygen, or inventory, so, if i runned out of materials i just used another one, of course they were controlled remotly, but, the problem with them was the tires, to unstable. On the possitive side, being terrestrial meaned those robots only needed one or 2, i dont remember, little batteries to run and doing everything. To me, it was increible the creativity, having an idea and puting in to practice just the way u need it, i always wanted to build a terrestrial giant truck base with a retractable mining drill and i did quite a job for a few days trying to build one, it was a gigantic thing, i dont remember right now but it was hyper heavy, like hundreds of tons, it was to massive, it was imposible to use it for mining because just going down a hill accelerated it so much that the tires or even the truck got damaged, going up a hill or a mountain was imposible with any tires or engine, so i found a solution to climb hills, i putted some giant thrusters on the back that i turned on when climbing was necesary, the use of energy was minimal because i turned on those only the seconds or minute they were needed, besides that, the problem of being to massive was there and that was the last time i played that game. I remember another time i wanted to build a modular ship with some universal spheres, every sphere was an individual empty ship with the capability of flying, i merged them together, that way u could build a gigantic ship with a little 3d printer, i experimented with that on creative and i did a increible heavy ship, it is not such a good idea to build a ship like that because there are expensive and every part of the ship its capable enough to lift its own weight, the problem with that its that the final result was to expensive to build, to many engines and i needed to build some of those spheres without engines, there was enough power to lift some load. At the end the ship was powerfull enough to go to space but it was like maybe 100 or 200 meters long and with that weight going down a planet was imposible, even if u tried to brake the entire time all because of the weight and let me tell u, this is an incredible game, the funniest part its the ones that are not programmed. Like if u try to make artificial gravity the physics simulations allow u to do it, the different kind of gravity thrusters, i really want a way to personalize the ships more, using another resources, imagine building a ship with an artificial dome inside filled with plants, or an atmosphere, i really need that and i cannot wait to the time they implement water, imagine building ships, i can imagine myself building some kind of warship merged by little pieces so its safer to use in a war scenario, because, if im not wrong, they want to make water a fluid, and if they do that i can imagine water generators on rivers or the middle of the ocean, if water acts like a fluid i can imagine they will release a generator that works by the movement of something atached on it, well, lets wait.
I used to use weld walls or weld wall ships with the materials and a static projection to weld too. Or make the projection on the weld ship like you have and pull the projection through the weld wall. Welders can weld on default settings in front of them and one block to the side both up/down/left/right. So with that you can reduce the amount of welders you sued in this video greatly spacing the welders as such. Also helps to reducing welding lag as each welder welds it's own space and doesn't compete with an overlapping welding area of another welder. Welder, block space, block space, welder, block space block space, welder, etc. I prefer mobile projection ship pulling a projection through a base welding wall. As the base can produce more as needed to supply the welders. But I advanced from there to a found blueprint on the Workshop that is a mobile ship welding wall that can also be made as a mobile parts production. Now I favor servers with Nanite Factories or Nanite Builder mods.
Ship welders, grinders, and drills need a significant boost to their radius at default. I think 2-3x would be appropriate. A dedicated welding ship should beat hand welding in almost every case.
2:15 You can use the build planner with ships, if you add a block to your queue from the build menu, there is a "transfer blocks from build planner" button in the inventory screen by opening the inventory from the ship then selecting on one side the "the ship cargo" to only see the cargo of the ship and the other side you filter to only see your base cargo, you can then press the button and all the mats will be transferred.
I worded that poorly, what I meant is that isn't no where near as easy as using it with a hand welder. It just takes two clicks with a hand welder, the ship version is just a massive faff
Hmm I do believe that there is in fact a build planned for ships. Open your inventory, the right inventory should be your cargo storage and the left inventory is your welder ship, be sure to select ship inventory on the left then just use the withdraw build inventory button in the middle...
I think I've got a setup that's a bit better than the spinning welders blocks. I haven't played the game in years though. One array of welders the width of the ships, on a piston that goes up and down the height of the ships, then attach that to a piston that goes back and forth the length of the ships.
I usually just used Build Planner to gather the materials I need by hand and than mass deposit them in the welder ship. I also just used multiple spread out welders on the ship. At least I'm pretty sure I did, it's been months since I went back on SE. Also still very new to the game
I try and build ships to be modular, then using merge blocks to connect them. So if a part of my ship is destroyed I can build small sections, move it into place, then make the swap.
I use a very similar setup when I'm printing ships but I have two arrays of welders facing each other that slowly pull away from the projector building the blueprint as they do. The only limitation I find is that there's a size limit on the blueprint but I have yet to want to build something that wouldn't fit between two fully extended pistons.
Neat. Maybe using the merge block tactic, mentioned by Louis Brown above, to glue smaller sections that fit inside your contraption might let someone assemble a larger grid.
the spinning printer is okayish when you need to safe PCU but when you have no need to safe them just build welder walls and pull them back, its much more reliable
Oh my god the mod projector assembler is the mod I’ve been looking for so long. Thanks for the video, I learned new things, such as the rotating welding stuff ! I usually used a piston on the main base expanding from the welders but that heavenly limited the size of the ship i could weld, and caused many kelang issues
A method that i think is better than ship printers (welders that build projectors) is to use the conveyer line of the new ship and connect it to the base. Then use welders on the new ships conveyer line to weld nearby components. It is much better for when the ship you are building is much larger than any printer should be or if you are free handing the ship without a blueprint.
I am imagining a scanner, built in a multiblock array, so that you can make a series of antennae that allows one to increase maximum power consumption and range over a logarithmic scale.
Some ships have welder inside them to repair them to 100%. With the right design and projector. You can welder the blueprint to get the ship connected to a station and the first welder and projector on the ship operational. From there the ship will build itself with the resources from the station. You can also use the build and repair mod which will welder the blueprint inside and out without any complex designs to build the ship. Anyway ships that can repair themselves too 100% tend to have a reduced size because the number of welders and conveyors can bug out the ship. The size can still be big but huge ships it can be an issue.
on me and my friends' survival world I made a 3d printer with a projector, welder and pistons, all attached to my base, so whenever one of the boys runs out of fuel and makes a new crater, we can just plug in the blueprint and we have a new ship in about about a minute.
I like building ships in creative so much that I now spend more time on my ship building world than on the survival world haha. It's really satisfying to see your creation get printed in survival though
I think this is more for muliplayer servers than someone like me but this was very helpful.. I enjoy the building aspect of SE more than the survival. So taking a long time to build is fine with me
I only really prefer welding ships for welding large homogenous structures up because you can also have the ship have multiple welding heads to cover more area and do those giant slabs which are always so tedious to weld by hand done in no time.
I personally like using printer tugs myself, but I dont use spinning welders. I just make a laege rake with the welders spaced 5m apart. In my opinion, its better than 3d printers as there is no real size limit to how big you can print. Also, keep in mind which way the welders will be welding from as you design the ship. Some blocks have fun hit box shapes that the welders cant reach if they are facing a certain way and some blocks have only 1 snap point and can be missed because of that. Making sure each block you place is facing the right way to be welded properly can save you the trouble of having to grind through your ship to find that missing gyro or finding that 1 light that didnt get welded up all the way
Also, Build planner dpes wprk on ships. Tp use it, simply set the left inventory to the container you wish to move the items to and click the button in the middle to transfer all otems on your build planner
And if you need to mass produce smaller modules in large quantities (eg modular base segments) you can make a kind of 3D printer that has a line of welders that shift back and forth and after a number of repeats of that movement it shifts up one block and continues
2:50 i know you probally arent including scripts, but i use ISY's inventory, and have my Welding ship set up to have a Minimum amount of materials in its cargo. Using "special" tags.
i use something similar for massive resource bores, plant it above a resource node and have a slowly advancing rotating drill head, generally space the drills out and use gyros to stabilize and you're good to go.
another tip is incorporate a projector on your ship and then line the BP up with the ship so when parts go missing you can weld them back with ease.
All BPs should have a projector built-in. That should be a rule.
Agreed...having a projector set up on every ship is a must. One time I even built welders behind a large front shield of heavy armor that were always on. That way, blocks could get repaired as soon as they start taking damage (provided the welders don't get damaged, and you have the parts to repair on the ship).
I used to put Projectors as standard for ships thematically designed for repairability in mind in exchange for reduced modularity.
Because the trick here is Recursive Design. So long as the projector is intact and contains the EXACT same blueprint and block configs as the ship itself, it can consistently come out the same.
Fighters and drones only need a welding fabricator line.
Huge ships need weldships, but individual crew for internal repairs.
I actually did this with a patrol boat I'm experimenting with. I'm trying to test its combat capabilities and limitations, and figured that might be a good idea.
Just remember to turn projectors off. Really big BPs or multiple BPs can cause servers to become very sad.
That glass is not just to stop you crashing into it, it's vital to stop blocks greater than 1x1 being created behind the spinning welder, that are inside the path of swinging arm.
I never though to use glass. I made a shroud around my welders so that only the barest tip was poking out.
0=armor block
1=welder
x=thing to be welded
000 xxx
111 xxx
000 xxx
As a matter of fact, you can use build planner with block tools. Simply press RMB with selected welder tool (eg: if you have a grinder and a welder in a builder ship) and it will be placed to build planner queue. Just with the hand welder. And you can even build from cockpit with CTRL-G so you can build and design ships in no jetpack worlds. Once you docked to a connector simple use the dedicated pull all components button to fill the ship cargo based on the build planner queue. Otherwise nice tutorial :)
You're only the 50th person to tell me 😓
@@Zer0sLegion It is quite useful. (51)
The real downside to Welding Ships is not that "there is no build planner". Its just too small with 8 blocks. That might be enough for a handwelder but not for a ship, with which you can build 50 blocks per trip. Keen, just make it loooong (preferably infinte).
@@Zer0sLegion The fastest way to find the correct answer on the Internet is to give the wrong answer.
how am I just seeing this?
You know what I'd _love?_
a Space Engineers 2, with a far more user friendly everything, with many lessons learned from the greatness and horribleness of this first game.
TRUE! I'd love a sequel.
@@Zer0sLegion I mean... what if you want to make a building like in a Roleplay server of the game?
I've heard one is in works... No idea how true that is though
Because it went so well with Kerbal Space Program 2...
Don't get me wrong... I'd love it if they started over from scratch and did it right and better the second time around.
@@jasonpayne4952 The company is making an updated version of the game engine that runs Space Engineers. We are either gonna get a complete overhaul soon, or a 2nd game will be in the works... I'd prefer an overhaul though, as I think it would give them more time in the long run to work on a 2nd title
So you don't have to have your ship being moved on a piston array causing Klang. You can instead have your WELDERS being withdrawn via piston. And also nope for the rotor welders, I get the PCU thing but a weld wall is so much better and quicker.
Another thing you can do is build a rail and use wheels to pull your build back, making in effect a 3d printer. Just some ideas for you.
Welder wall is better but alot of servers limit welders so I was covering the most niche circumstances whilst mentioning other methods.
rotor allows largest surface area, vertical piston allows faster welding. Pick and choose depends on needs.
Do hinges suffer from klang? Especially if they're connected and unfold.
I was thinking about it on a planet. Make a huge flat platform with a "troley" that hold the projector.
Then either pistons or simply wheels moves the projector away from the welder wall at slow pace.
of course welder wall is connected to storages to build/get items
ditto to robin
Building in creative first was the one of the first lessons I learned in SE. You can spend forever building a design only for it to not work, then you'll need to disassemble and reassemble a ton. Build the ship in creative, troubleshoot it, then go back to survival and either load the blueprint into a projector or build from memory
When it comes to placing your projection: You can turn down your menu opacity in the options. You can enter the terminal from third person. If you can orient your camera somewhere you can see your vessel through the UI, while also accessing a terminal, you can very quickly put down a projection.
I have UI opacity turned up for the sake of recording but honestly, it's still a massive pain in the ass to do if from a cockpit. Being unable to free move you camera is a pain.
@@Zer0sLegion I have Build Vision and it never occurred to me I could adjust Projector Blueprints with it. If any tips in this video stick with me it will be that one.
Amazing tip, I was wondering why my holograms were opaque! Really difficult to work with :-)
A tip I once watched with Luca was to make two versions of your ship as a BP. One with and without armour blocks.
Print and build the one without first, which means no conveyors get missed. Then print the armour blocks on top.
There are various mods or tools (SE Toolbox) that can allow you to remove armour blocks.
That sounds cool but it would also take a long time to weld up
It can do, but I find it better for bigger ships as I hate missing conveyors and wondering why a turret or thruster isn't working.
Personally, I use this in combination with a 4-welder array on a large ship to drag backwards as I print (full large cargo container filled with materials. SE Toolbox can also tell you the exact amount of materials for any given ship).
Thats actually a great tip for reliable printing.
Nice one! Thanks. I sometimes build the innards first then build the outer shell on some ships. Though more often than not I do both things at once.
This is a creative idea. The biggest issue I foresee is in my case at least, building the functional blocks first, then armor means in more cases than not, I am building separate grids intended to be one. Example - a space only ship without H2 thrusters would use Ion thrusters... either "wing" would be held together with armor blocks for structure, thus the only way to make that work is to have a category of modules that can be connected with a merge block or a mod like the one I use adds a "weld pad" and allows detaching without decon'ing fully.
That said, I really like the idea of making a personal catalog of modules for ships, stations, etc in maybe creative mode, work out designs, alignment, etc make sure it all works as intended... blueprint each module, hop over to your survival map, and build it all with projectors then attach everything... or maybe a factory assembly line dedicated to certain class of builds.
The issue with even that idea is if you play in multiplayer and not a dedicated server, you are shutting down the other player's map each time you want to switch to creative and back and you have to consider load times too. As the host, yes you can Alt + F10 and enable creative tools but you don't have symmetry building and so on so it's not perfect either and in that example, you already went through the trouble of placing everything in "creative" mode as a admin in survival just to blueprint it, delete it, turn off creative tools, just to tediously build legit in survival again just to say you did.
There are no easy answers other than using building mods like the "Nanite Control Factory" as one of many mod examples that would do that for you... or like "AI enabled" type mods that allow you to create AI bots to help you weld and so on.
Whenever the next SE update hits and the devs add "grid AI" officially, we might be able to make dedicated construction fleets, transport fleets, and so on that automates the shittier parts of building in SE and what not and replace some mods with vanilla features ( which is always nice when done right ). Those are my two cents as a long time player with 2,638 hrs of gameplay as of writing this.
Corrections and add on ideas are welcome. I don't claim to know all things SE. Just my own experience.
It should also be noted that you should design your ships with construction in mind. Ships built from the center out work a lot better when welding them together and ships built from one side to the other.
You could probably solve that imbalance problem by trading the rotor in for a bar, then have a piston sweep that print head bar up and down as a second piston incrementally pulls the unfinished ship away from the welders. A skeleton of support scaffolds should be plenty to keep things aligned.
*Wait until this guy finds out about Nanites and Build and Repair smh*
EDIT: If one more person tells me that "you can use the build planner on ships", I know you can, what I meant is that it's not the same and no where near as easy to use as it is with a hand welder.
The only way I build anymore and it incorporates a nanite build and repair every 4-6 blocks and a projector because why would we not?
I mostly use build and repair but i admit i've gotten very lazy lmao
Nanites are cheating, fight me =)
@@TheYrrinotherapy I never cheat, I just sometimes forget the rules.
@@TheYrrinotherapy I almost never have opponents aside from the computer - when I do I furnish all the ships and let them choose.
The best easy welding setup I have even seen used the projector on a piston that moves away from the welders making the ship as it passes thru the front of them, this way you don't have to do any movements at all and the ship gets made. Just recently made a small rover/ship so I have something cheap and easy to print this way. This method works best with smaller ships tho , but could be scaled up for larger ones if limits allow or you could get creative with the pistons movements to make it work.
Here's another one: Building those welders on a diagonal line with conveyor tubes connecting at the corners will maximise the range of each individual welder, and allow for less of them over the same length.
My method involved creating a series of conveyors with hinges made of advanced rotors set to have a weak but constant braking force attached to a small ship via a docking port and that small ship was basically a welder + cockpit + hydrogen thrusters that were attached to my main base for power/hydrogen. This allowed the tube to follow me around like a giant umbilical so I never ran out of materials while mining because I never had localized storage.
Wow, I should try it, that is actually pretty smart
The most common method I used in multiplayer (with 3 to 4 players), was a mix of hand weld and weld ships, working on a blueprint. They tend to complement each other well. I would have a number of colour coded weld ships, and each would be assigned to automatically pull only a specific category of components from the base. No need to manually manage their inventory, just dock and undock, and they're ready to go again.
One player would act as the construction foreman for the build, and move around in person inspecting blocks and informing the team of what was needed where, making sure that areas were done in the correct order to avoid blocking anything off. He would also monitor component supply and reassign assemblers as needed. He would assist in hand welding slow components whilst inspecting.
Most of the weld ships wouldn't waste time fully welding most blocks. Their main job was to deliver the components. The one performing bulk work like hull plating was the exception, and would be a variant with a 2x3 array of welders, that could rapidly weld up large sheets of armour due to it's overlapping weld area, much faster than by hand. The other weld ships had their welders on extended prongs, to ensure they could deliver to narrow areas of the ship. Once bulk work was done, most players would dismount and use high tier hand welders to quickly finish up blocks. Any additional components needed could be grabbed from the weld ships parked near the work site.
For the larger builds that I designed, I also made multi stage blueprints. Basically I would complete the ship in creative mode and blueprint it in it's final form, but would then strip out sections that block easy access, and remove most of the exterior hull, leaving just a skeletal frame of the ship. It was quick and easy to simply delete segments, and I would blueprint the ship in increasingly cutdown variations. This meant that when it came to construction in survival mode, we could start with a frame work and minimal internals, and gradually add layers as each was completed. This considerably improved the effectiveness of the weld ships, being able to get right inside the ship and work on areas that would otherwise become a nightmare of half welded blocks and confusing hologram.
This design process was also used when we did our "Mothership" play through. Using both staged and modular blueprints of the same ship, we were able to quickly build a very large but bare minimum mothership, and travel through the game gradually adding and upgrading systems as needed and when possible. Eg, systems such as thrusters, refinery, or cargo holds, were blueprinted separately in approximately five "levels", from the minimal required to survive, up to a fully completed ship.
"I want to build a welding array for making ships so I don't have to waste time hand welding everything, but I need to make the welding array. To do that quickly I'm going to make a welding array, but to do that I need to make a welding array." (Continues forever)
You use a hand welder instead of a big one because you like the experience. I use a hand welder instead of a big one because I don't know how to use a big one. We are not the same. 💀
Something I like to include in many of my builds, especially fighters with guided missiles, are projectors onboard for easy repairs and rearming.
Need destroyed armor and thrusters added? Turn on the projector and fly up to welders. Same with replenishing spent guided missiles. If you aren't using the multigrid projector mod, you can just add a second projector that casts a BP of the missiles linked as one BP, the linking blocks being concealed inside the ship, so it only welds the missiles.
If you connect missiles with merge blocks a normal projector will project the missiles and ship. I typically have dedicated welders for rearming my fighters, with a connector to align the ship. I've also found it is easier to just print a new fighter when it is damaged, and toss the old one in a grinding pit
Add a conveyor system and some welders that cover the entire are of the ship and you have a self-building ship. You also get repairs mid-flight without having to dock. If you position them correctly where your first three blocks are a connector, conveyor, and welder; that's the mot efficient way. Go off and do other things.
One other thing about having the projector on board the ship is; when it's on it gives a shield like aura.
tip for welder arm: place em diagonal as in welder, curve conveyor, repeat.
or like a staircase if that makes more sense.
that way they reach further with same amount of welders.
tbh. the pistons for me at least dont klang, share inertia and make multiple move slowly, for easement, make a timer block turn them on/off every time welders have rotated and build blocks, lets say it does it in 2 rpm, so to make sure make timer turn on/off every 3 rpm.
easy :)
Yeah, that makes sense, less overlap
What I always strive for is effectively a large drydock. A projector that starts at roughly the rear center of the ship, then have a welding rotor that starts in the core, then moves to the frontal length, moves up one layer, moves back, etc, the classical automatic ship factory. It's amazing once set up and I did build a gargantuan one on a multiplayer server and made it public as in: come here, put your stuff there and then we build your ship. It was very nice
I've always been a fan of the self building ships on servers that don't have limits. Once you get a good design, the hardest part about actually building them is just supplying the ores and waiting.
And since self building ships are also self repairing, as long as the inventory is stocked it is damn near unbreakable.
My favorite so far was essentially a giant mining ship at a glance, but contained everything you need for a base and was heavily armed on all sides. As long as the "core" remained in tact, it could recover from anything pretty quickly.
Projectors will also show if you're missing any blocks from a blueprint in the control panel. Good for letting you know if you got everything after a repair, or if you missed anything while building.
Zer0 you can use the build planner with ship welders. You can change the inventory on the left to be the whole grid and withdraw build planner components.
Yeah, a couple of people have told me now, I didn't know 😅
How do you do this?
Yes, pls explain, thanks!
@@sethgilcrist8088
There are buttons for buildplanner in the inventory screen in the middle between the inventory lists. The cogwheel + cube is equivalent to Shift + MMB (add buildplanner components to build queue) and the arrow + cube is equivalent to MMB (transfer buildplanner items). On top of both inventory lists there are buttons (helmet / cube symbols) to switch between personal and connected inventories. Using that you can pick a different inventory than you personal one as target for the buildplanner.
Keep in mind that it might transfer items to other inventories in the left list if it cannot put all items into the one you have selected for whatever reason. The best way to make sure all transferred items end up in your welding vehicle is to access the inventory screen from the vehicle (either from a cockpit, control panel or cargo access of the vehicle, does not matter) and filter the left list to show only inventories of the 'current ship' via the button on top of the inventory list (ship with two arrows).
@@esgeran1654 cool I'm have to remember that. I mainly uses printers to make things.
I haven't played Space Engineers since about 2020, but I remember finding all sorts of cool ways to help with the assembly process of, well, pretty much anything. One of the coolest things I think I ever built was a "welding arm" that uses pistons and rotors which are hooked into your actual base. This provided it with more storage than you would ever possibly need to worry about, no need to ever dock and get more materials or anything like that.
Using clever scripting, you could control this welding arm from the cockpit with simple WASD controls. I built this "welding arm" in such a way that it sort of acted like a gimbal. Wherever your mouse was pointing is the point in space that it would rotate around when moving. This made it very easy to reposition around a projected blueprint and make absolutely certain you were getting those tricky interior blocks. VERY cool stuff!
The coolest thing about this is how easy it was to rapidly build *LARGE* grids, and it had quite a very long range. The one and only drawback to this was occlusion. This was a welding device attached to an arm. You had to kind of plan what you would weld up first.
If you welded the wrong stuff first, you could easily end up in a situation where the welder could not navigate to the other side of the projected blueprint, because there was stuff in the way and the arm obviously can't phase through physical objects. However, if you treated it like any kind of printer-like design (slowly pulling back from one point) it worked extremely well.
My biggest issue with Space Engineers was dealing with ship damage. I always tried to design my ships to be pretty, yet entirely functional. This meant everything was fully conveyored, and these parts of the ship were covered. If any of this internal stuff got damaged, there was simply no fricking way to know _what_ was damaged and what wasn't. It is especially frustrating when one of your 300 large grid gyroscopes scattered throughout various parts of the internal structure is damaged. Good luck finding it.
I like the gameplay and quality of life improvements stuff like the Nanites mod adds, but I don't like the implementation. I personally LOVE the idea of assembling a ship in some kind of drydock, using cool design ideas with how welding works to make it buildable. I think there should just be an easier way to identify and repair damaged components. Perhaps instead of nanites, a literal laser passes through the ship and instantly repairs anything in the beam that is damaged. So you could have a welding setup for drydock assembly, and a _repair_ setup specifically for bringing in damaged ships and repairing them. Imagine being able to fly your barely functioning ship through a grid of lasers, and just fly it back out and it's all patched up in its entirety. This would make the game a lot better in this respect. At some point the game definitely changes from "space engineers" to "repair engineers" and it just gets tedious.
I think for this repair system, projectors should be done away with. Projectors are perfect for building something initially, but I don't like the idea of having a "repair projector" which just overlays the missing blocks on the grid. This just seems like a lot of added work on the player's part because sometimes setting these up can be tricky. And what do you do if the projector with the preset blueprint and necessary offsets gets damaged? You have to fiddle with all of that again. I honestly found it very frustrating trying to configure projectors for this purpose, because dialing in just the right offsets was always frustrating, and if I was unlucky and that vital repair projector was damaged, I just had to screw with the settings again. It was annoying.
Instead, it would be nice if the game just "knew" what was supposed to be there in the first place. Like, when you convert something to a ship, the game just goes "ah yes okay, these are all the blocks needed for this grid, I'll remember that." So if a block straight up gets destroyed, using a _repair_ laser on it would just instantly rebuild that block, provided the materials are present.
I feel like this would already be pretty easy to implement directly as a core part of the game. The game *already knows* what blocks compose a grid, you can literally see every grid in a game. It knows this stuff already. It would be cool if you could just tell the game "THIS configuration is what it is SUPPOSED to be", and when you tried to repair it and replace missing blocks, it just went "oh alright." No need to fiddle with projectors for this purpose would be really, really nice.
There is a mod that allows you to visualize where damaged blocks are on a screen.
On a note very related to this, one of my biggest "one day" goals for SE is to build a production line which assembles a multi-grid vehicle (say a shuttle with VTOL thrusters) in entirely separate sections then combines them. All automatically at the press of a single button.
An ambitious and clang offending dream, but I've seen some amazing builds which do similar things and I want to try it. Lol.
Ship welders are a better option when it comes to repairing ships after battles .
I just put a small welder wall in my hanger and have a repair projector for small grids, for large I just scrap it and re print it if it's royally buggered
I built a ship once that grinded down ships/stations quickly and easily. It had two giant walls on the back of the ship with grinders on them facing inward with a large gap between them, and each wall had pistons behind it to push the walls together. I would then position the ship or station to be broken down between the grinder walls and activate the pistons. All materials the grinders collected were sent through tubes to several large cargo containers on the ship. It was amazing watching it chew up whole stations one layer on either side at a time.
My last welding ship was the smallest large grid ship I could build, basically a big cargo box with some engines and a cockpit. But that let me do all my welding in one run since even at default inventory sizes, you can fit a tremendous amount of stuff in a large box.
My friend and I always enjoy building a 3D printer building of sorts, where the welders are static, and a line of pistons with a projector pulls the projection back. It works especially well for small grids, and I ended up designing an elevator that takes the finished build down, where it is able to fly out of a tunnel. It's impractical in some ways but looks and feels awesome. We even built an observation room so we can watch as the ship is built. We installed flashing lights so that we know when welders are on.
One more idea is to use modular construction methods like engine and cargo pods with a central ship module that can each be built using a smaller weld wall and then assembled using merge blocks and a little tug ship with mag plates to move the modules around. It does take more planning and may limit your product but still another fun way to get around the building limits.
I do this too. I build the ship in creative now (tip from zer0 legi0n). Then cut out in smaller segments the Bp it like, shipname 1, 2, 3, ect
I wish SE would explain stuff like this better.
I had no clue that:
1. Hold shift + Ctrl to make a plane. I thought you had to go into settings, change it from line or whatever, and do that every time you wanted to make a big plane. Or meticulously build line after line.
2. That you're better off making blueprints from behind so that ships align correctly when placing them down.
3. That you could control projector movements in a seat to better see where it's going
4. Build info has an option to show only currently attached and weldable
5. that you can build a small ship to "pull" the projection through the welding thing to build it up effortlessly.
I've spent so many hours in SE trying to find a good way to weld large ships that I've created, but they are so incredibly time consuming that I generally just gather all the materials I would need, spawn the ship in, and delete the materials.
That's what my channel is for, covering everything that no one tells you about Space Engineers.
I make the kind of videos I wish existed when I started the game.
Think that’s rough try on console.
What is Shift on a controller?
@@Protect_all_ljf3forms No real excuse for that now, at least Xbox Series has very high level of support for KB/M in many games, if you choose to play on a controller, that is your issue to contend with in complex input scenarios.
Now if the game doesn't support KB/M that's bad developers.
@@Protect_all_ljf3forms left stick down generally, it's just the sprint input by default
Been a while since I played this, but I was playing a vanilla survival game once where I started with nothing except basic tools and used realistic inventory/physics settings once where I made a tiny, bare-bones "ship" with no cargo blocks and just a single welder as it's own grid, then attached it via connectors (plus necessary stabilizing blocks-- landing gear, etc.) to a conveyor "arm" made up of free-floating rotors/pistons that would allow it to move with the "ship" while pulling directly from the station's inventory/power...
That's an interesting idea, very creative
Weld ships can have multiple welders. This helps with speed. You can also queue up things in the build planner, get in your weld ship, select weld ship inventory in the left panel, and transfer in build planner components to the weld ship via the button in the middle. Then just load up with common components like plates and construction components and worry about the rest on a 2nd pass. I'm not sure if you can pick blocks for the build planner in cockpit build mode, which is something else a lot of people don't know you can do by pressing shift+G in a cockpit, but that should be easy enough to figure out with a little science.
Also large grid welders are WAAAY better than small grid ones used in the video.
Sure, ship welders have the additional steps of having to dock an open the inventory, but I do still recommend learning how to use the ship's build planner effectively. It's saved me so much time, especially when handing large numbers of blocks as you can withdraw x10 what your build planner has, which is handy given the build planner itself cannot hold more than 8 blocks.
Once trick I've learned when building landing pads is to simply add one block to planner, eyeball the pad's width, and then x10 a few times to stock the ship and get back to welding.
so does rmb with ship tool add that block/its missing components to the build planner? how do you get the inventory into the ship, by transferring manually? what's the purpose of adding it to planner if you can't also quickly transfer components to the ship?
@@TeleClassy2 Sorry for necro, no sadly you can't pick blocks from the world while in the ship. However, if you're in a closed cockpit (doesn't work with control seat) you can Ctrl+G to open build mode, then open the G menu and add blocks to the planner there.
As for moving items quickly it's as simple as docking and then setting your left inventory to the ship's inventory, then click withdraw from build planner. Like I mentioned you can even hold Ctrl to take 10x the amount for many of that same block.
Hope this helps!
EDIT: Apparantly you can add blocks with ship tools, so that's useful!
Building a good print tug can be a pain, especially in gravity. So one of the things I've been doing with larger builds is chopping the ship into slices in creative first. Print out one relatively light piece and then go merge block it to the base. Print out the next one and merge it down etc. Basically allows you to print any size of ship pretty easily.
The hilarious part about this IMO is that it's what people do for 3D printing as well hahaha :-D
For a welder ship I like to attach a large hinge piece to a medium hinge head, converting to small ship so you can run large grid welders on a small grid ship. A few 5x5 cargos and it's much faster than hand welding.
2:50 Many solutions to the problems mentioned. Sortie and gates on the conveyor system allows fast refill. Multiple branching welders, and a better welder ship design makes welding a lot faster. My welder ships are agile, and so docking is easy.
But also, lastly, rooms can be made for welding. Build a small ship, place the blocks, than use welders on the wall, on pistons to weld.
The other benefit of building ships in creative mode is Spectator (F7/F8, F6 to disable). If you're building a very large ship, missing something like a conveyor is such a pain to find, or realizing you forgot something like a jump drive after you finished the build can make adding it a daunting task. Well, with spectator, you can phase through a grid and see what the problem is, and still place or remove blocks at the same time! So long as you still have space for yourself to exist (you can't put blocks on top of yourself, for instance). Almost 1,500 hours in the game and I only recently figured out this little trick for editing ships when they are already mostly or fully completed. Keep in mind that SE, for whatever reason, sometimes takes multiple button presses to register, so try it a couple times if it doesn't do anything.
Personally i use the build planner just to load up the welding ship in the early game for huge parts like large grid large thrusters. MMB on loaded container, Alt + MMB on welding ship, repeat until done. Still do conveyor systems and stuff by hand. Also bear in mind you can MMB click any cargo hatch with a block blueprint in your hand and it will add to build planner and attempt to auto-pull right on the spot. Useful for when you want to load the welding ship for like 30 thrusters but only have 8 slots in the build planner, but know you have the capacity for a single trip.
I have a bad habit of wanting to design a new ship from scratch every time I do a survival (or have to restart on a server). It’s the designer in me, it’s like I must keep ideating.
My default has always been welder wall, pistons, wheels on rails, mass blocks and gravity generators when building ships in space. I've successfully printed some very large ships with ease.
The setup is always quite time consuming however - but fun. Though the welders have to be strategically placed to get the maximum wall with fewest used (and it does lead to some smaller blocks needing hand welding).
Self welding large grid ships ate the way I go, build a spine of convers and welders, start the first two blocks connected to your part box and away it goes. It also then self repairs during fights.
To the rotor arm welder:
You even do not need so many welders. In fact one can arange them in a kind of an repeating L-form on the arm and it will still hit every block. It will take more time. But then even larger ships are possible with only 3 welders.
Comparable to the drill head, which is a rotor, a sideways drill and an off center forward drill, all on a piston slower then 0.02m/s².
What I did was that I made an arm like contraption with pistons and hinges, 3 of each, and had a welder on the tip. Then, with the turret controller, I can move it pretty much anywhere in 3 dimensions, and reach nooks and crannies easily.
I had so much fun making those that I made 2 more arms, one with a large parking pad to pick up stuff and one with a connector, just for funsies.
you could also use a welding array with a projector on a piston, so you can move the hologram (also the ship in construction) away from the welders so you can build the next layer.
Welding walls on carriers are a must. I would even put a timed piston setup to pull the welded fighter out from.
Honestly, i‘ve printed up huge ships with 0g printers and even if a bit tideous it‘s always been fun.
The most fun part though is adding dubgrids by printing them seperately and attaching them with a small contruction tug. It always feels like one of those fan art pictures of a star wars space station assembling an ISD.
Welders sphere of welding forms a cross, and so even on the limited Keen servers, one can still build big welder systems by taking advantage of this. For small grid welders, arrange them in adjacent 45 degree diagonals to each other. For large grids, you can space them out a bit, place a conveyor block directly above the central rotor, place another conveyor at 90 degrees...and repeat, so the Welders proceed at about 30 degrees angle from the starting Conveyor block; this will allow a welder with a 23 Large Grid block width using only 5 welders. BE SURE TO ANCHOR THE WELDER SYSTEM! ....or expect to chase after a rogue grid you spent an hour building.
I have no ideas on the following: but... learning to create ships in sections and weld/merge them together later is useful for PCU limited servers. A video on how to do this wold be good.
edit:
when designing a ship make sure to keep in mind the starting weld block which I usually mark in an off color. And that all blocks extend from it even these are removed like flashing on old plastic models; otherwise some bits can be missed by the limited reach of the welders.
This! Using merge blocks to piece together a ship.
I do something I like this to an extent in creative, make modular hull pieces then start gluing stuff. I had thought about using it in survival but got burnt for a while.
Docking isn't a huge problem as long as you design your ships properly. Word of advice: hangars suck, for two main reasons. One, it takes a log more time and care to enter a hangar than it does to hook onto a well-placed external connector. Two, if the ship breaks loose while the bigger ship is moving, it will clang around and tear up the inside of your large ship as well as destroy your small ship, and you won't have any way of knowing it disconnected until you hear the clanging. Carrying the ships externally is simply superior from an efficiency and safety standpoint. This is why the industrial capital ship I built carries its utility ships on its back, with piston-mounted connectors to dock to. It dramatically improves the speed and reduces the precision needed to dock. Hangars _look_ cool, and I recognize they're nice for many uses, but anything you're going to be making lots of trips for you want external docking.
The best thing if you play on survival is building an auto builder on tour base. It makes building ships way easier and quicker. Even large ships you can create using the segmenting technique.
You do however need the welder+ mod from the workshop
tip if you add a antenna to the grid you have a projector on you can set up another powered grid to adjust the projector offset remotely.
this is handy when setting your ship up for self repair
When in a cockpit you can transfer material to your ship from the build planner using a button in the UI of the inventory screen. Not sure why so many people do not know about it.
I worded it poorly, what I meant is that isn't way more difficult than using a hand welder. And trust me, a lot of people know about it, I speak from experience.
It's easy to say that "hand welding is better' when you're not playing on 1x cargo volume. Multiple ship welders in tandem with ample storage capacity for heavy components dramatically improve the value of ship welders when you don't have minecraft pockets. Even then, ship-based welders/grinders are best used in pairs (with a gap in the middle thanks to the overlap aoe) to weld/grind single parts as well as bulk structure jobs faster.
One of the first ships I build is a Drone I call the 'stencil'. it's a 5x5xX small ship single welder drone that more or less takes over larger construction jobs, mostly small ships using a projector. I keep several around, and at least one has a grinder swapped out on it. I can sit comfortably in a space-hab and get work done without needing oxy/fuel reloads constantly. Why multiple? so they can repair each other. The work does require manual checks to make sure there aren't any gaps in the jobs, but they've proven incredibly servicable.
Have not played this before, but saw it was coming to PS4/5 and went to RUclips to check out what it was about.
In regards to your 3D printer, you have the "printer" stationary in space and on land. In space it should be free to move one block backward after each rotation. I'm sure there is an AI cube that could be set up for that.
As far the ground "printer," you could have it push one block back on a rail system. Have the ship be built on a stand and the "printer" moves back as it prints. Have the rotation setup to activate the wheels to move the needed amount.
Again, I've never played the game, but this looks really fun. Can't wait for it to come out on PS4!
On the terminal inventory screen you can use the centerline buttons located between the two sides to move the items in build planner between cargo containers to speed up loading a weld ship
Here's another tip, u can pull up the build planner in any ship by pressing Cntrl+G i believe, that'll change the layout for construction, as long as u have raw materials in your inv, u can build it and weld it straight away in a ship
Yeap, it's a little glitch but it works a treat
One tip from me: Try building ship *starting from* the projector block before make it a blueprint, so when you project it to build in survival you don't have to mess with Pitch, Yaw and Roll settings.
The blueprint's orientation is the orientation of the first placed block on that blueprint, so if you can keep track of that block and that orientation you can start with any block.
The same applies to Horizontal, Vertical and Forward offset, if you don't want your projector to project a blueprint 20Km away you should keep track of the first block and build your ship around that block.
I built a welding array once. Didn't think to put a glass wall between me and it, tho. Spawned a lot of tier 1 tools cuz of that array...
The glass doesn't protect you, it protects your welders. It also stops the welders from placing blocks anywhere but in front of themselves, which is important when they're swinging about.
Build a ship in creative. Save blueprint.
Now cut all the components out leaving just armor. Save as shipname-armor. Do the same in reverse, saving a version that's minimum armor and all the components required for minimum functions. This allows you to build more deliberately in survival when you have limited resources.
You can use build planner for loading up ships by right clicking as usual but instead of middle mousing to dump the items in your inventory you go into the inventory of the control menu and bring up the name of the cargo you want to draw from (i.e your station) on the left side and the name of the cargo of the weld ship on the right, then click the add to inventory icon in the middle between the two menu and build planner will dump the mats into the weld ships cargo.
Another person told me this, every day is a school day!
@@Zer0sLegion I think collectively we've all probably figured out about half of what build planner can do. Personally i had no idea you could Shift+middle mouse to order up mats without having to go into the production tab for the assembler.
For whatever reason Keens keeping the list of useful key shortcuts hidden like it's the recipe for Coca Cola or something.
@@GhostOfSnuffles to be fair, most of the information for this game is from 2017 so I'm not surprised alot of people don't know the new stuff
I've taken to sticking cameras set back slightly from my connectors to ease docking, knocked out a few connectors before I realized.
I've gotten eerily good at handling my ship mirrored because I didn't place the camera facing the same direction as my cockpit
Very epic. This is one of those things where it's like, "wow, why didn't I think of that, that's so clever"
With the new turret controller I like building my small ships in a specified area with a welder on a robotic arm. All resources are coming from the base. Since I like designing and building small grid ships in survival mode, it doesn’t feel like a shortcut to design them in creative.
i do the same thing. although on keen servers because of the limited welders i put them every other block with conveyors. still works just as good. maybe a little slower. I've also done a line of welders in a static position on the base and just set a gyro to override on the projecting ship and get the same effect or if it is a small grid fighter just make passes over the welder table. still the rotating head is a great method for large ships.
In my opinion is this method works well for servers with low welder limits.
But when you are allowed to build a decent amount of welders, say 30 or something, I use 24 in a vanilla without limits server. The following method is more efficient. It's also a relevant guide to end game players.
Moving the projection out of a welderwall is the heaviest method of printing. (Projection set to ship making grid calculations heavier, and materials are pulled from a full base, with tons of unrelated inventories to check for components, and connected ships are checked as well.
If you set the projection to station, and weld with a reasonably large weldership that has f.e. 4 large cargos, you keep the conveyor system simple and small. Not too big a welderwall mind you I'd say at MOST 10x10 blocks in total size whilst spacing the welders 1 block in evey direction. This way you print much faster and in a much healthier manner for the server.
For bigger prints in I reccomend going to creative and cutting the ship into sections to keep the block count per print low (I cut them into around 2k block sections), then merging the sections together after building them in survival. This is because as the blockcount gets higher the grid calculations get heavier. I think it adds up all the blocks, for physics simulations, every time you add one to the grid. We actually had someone lag the server quite heavily by manually placing blocks on a huge hand built station. A lag spike every time he placed a block due to the enormous block count. That's why I recommend splitting grids up when printing bigger stuff on a multiplayer server.
There are ways to stabilize pistons. One method is to inline a few pistons. IE make several rows of pistons that are attached to one grid. Use merger blocks to merge them together.
Two points:
1) Use Viktor's Multigrid Projector mod! Projects subgrids, letting you print PMW turrets, mechs, wacky creative mode piston/rotor/hinge mechanisms -- in survival. It's one of the top complaints I see people commenting about on workshop designs -- "can't do this in survival". Except that you can.
Also, use Viktor's Projector Extra mod. It adds a new single function you can put on a control seat hotbar: Toggle manual alignment. This is possibly just as valuable or more valuable than multigrid projection. When in the control seat, you can intuitively use the normal block rotation and player movement keys to rotate and shift a projection. Say goodbye to that moronic slider interface or having 12 clunky hotbar actions, or even using the very convenient Build Vision. (just make sure the welders or build and repair nanobots are turned off or out of range whilst adjusting the projection. :P)
Load repair projection is another function of Projector Extra that adds a button to the projector in control terminal, to load the current grid as-is, without having to blueprint it (essentially it's an unsaved one-time blueprint). This one's a bit fussy since sometimes I can get it to almost immediately line up the projection perfectly, and sometimes it's out of whack. Make sure the projector top (cross mark) and front (dash mark) are aligned with the ship and control seat, as well as aligned as close as possible to the center axis of the ship, to make the manual alignment easier (though it's not at all a chore with the aforementioned mods).
Both of these are available as plugins for the SE Plugin Manager. Yes, plugins have their own issues, but for reliable mods these are a great way to use the mod preloaded with the game so that anything client side will function even on servers, as I understand it (whereas mods have to be permitted by the server). Such as these projector mods. Projections to Assembler is also available on the plugin list.
2) I had this video playing in the background, so I may have missed it. Did you cover using the inventory screen from within a ship control seat when docked and connected to your main base inventory cargo? The second button in the middle column is to withdraw components from build planner. With CTRL or ALT+CTRL you can also adjust how you withdraw (x10 blocks, or leave block in build planner).
As you probably have experienced, withdrawing for build planner can be a bit fussy, depending on which inventory conveyor port you MMB click. Same applies to using this button from the inventory screen. MAKE SURE you have a properly large target cargo (left hand side of inventory screen) selected (highlighted). And MAKE SURE you have your main component cargo inventory selected as the source inventory (right hand side of inventory screen). Otherwise, you'll often get the idiotic "Could not withdraw all components" message when you know full well you have 50k damn steel plates etc.
This allows you to stack up the entire build planner's 8 slots, even with huge blocks like refineries, large reactors, and jump drives. Then from the welder ship control seat, dock and withdraw enough items to fill entire ship cargo inventories.
Furthermore, it's been a while, but IIRC you can have the ship welder tool active from the control seat, and add blocks to build planner by looking at them while piloting the ship. I play with the above mods by default, so I cannot recall if this function is vanilla or a bonus of the mods I use.
This hybrid hand building / ship welder approach makes it a bit more streamlined to use the ship welder. I personally like to lay down 1 required steel plate, interior component, etc. for each block in the ship being built (if not using a projector), then whether hand-building or using a projection, add only 1 of each common block type with RMB to the build planner CTRL+MMB in inventory to withdraw x10 the blocks. 2-4 large grid welders and even just an equal number of large grid small cargo containers will make short work of hauling 10k steel plates and construction components for the hull armor, cargo containers, conveyors, etc. (compared to hauling components by hand, especially metal grids or steel plates for heavy armor).
Sorry for the text wall, but these mods are worth the read. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Those are GREAT mods. The along feature and repair projection are so handy and printing whole turrets is just satisfying
i use creative mode to create most my designs then have a BP projector system (battery connector block projector block) then locking it to a connector that's attached to a grid to charge the battery and power the projector. each design has incorporated a docking connector so i can keep them all uniform. (helpful for drone management)
I'd love to see a conveyor tube in SE that connects to things like a rope. One end is the winch and cargo input and the other end is the output, it would make ship welding a lot easier.
For using welding ships, I usually use the build planner and just dump everything into the welding ship, so build planner the blocks you need to weld, then go withdraw and dump into the welding ships. At my base in space, I built a welding floor, and then few pistons over it with projector, was great for welding up small grid things. The welding floor would also build itself, build just build one, then have several around it not fully welded but just their, and the fully built one would weld the others up, and so on till your done. I don't usually build on creative then import to survival, as I feel like its cheating, but on a mp server, I see using prebuilts being the best option.
You can use the buildplanner to fill a container’s inventory with the build planner. Downside is that you have to add to the build planner by getting out of the ship
Yeah, a couple of people have told me. It's not really what i meant but it's cool that it exists.
The easiest way to build in SE- Build in creative get a blueprint the go to survival put said blueprint in projector, turn on the build and repair mod. lol
cringe repair mod
i was doing, a long time ago, a "escape from mars" run, i even had a 3d printer inside a cave on a mountain with something like a rocket silo to take the ships outside. Let me tell u something, i remember that time, that week, like one of the bests weeks of my life.
I remember i was on mars and i had to find ice, and, just to find some i builded a plane like a harrier full with batteries and exploration on mind, so, once i builded it i travelled like 40 minutes straight at max speed just to find ice, imagine that, 40 minutes doing nothing inside a cockpit, but, it was so meaningfull.
I remember i wanted to build a robot inside or a couple of them, just to build without having to care about oxygen, or inventory, so, if i runned out of materials i just used another one, of course they were controlled remotly, but, the problem with them was the tires, to unstable. On the possitive side, being terrestrial meaned those robots only needed one or 2, i dont remember, little batteries to run and doing everything.
To me, it was increible the creativity, having an idea and puting in to practice just the way u need it, i always wanted to build a terrestrial giant truck base with a retractable mining drill and i did quite a job for a few days trying to build one, it was a gigantic thing, i dont remember right now but it was hyper heavy, like hundreds of tons, it was to massive, it was imposible to use it for mining because just going down a hill accelerated it so much that the tires or even the truck got damaged, going up a hill or a mountain was imposible with any tires or engine, so i found a solution to climb hills, i putted some giant thrusters on the back that i turned on when climbing was necesary, the use of energy was minimal because i turned on those only the seconds or minute they were needed, besides that, the problem of being to massive was there and that was the last time i played that game.
I remember another time i wanted to build a modular ship with some universal spheres, every sphere was an individual empty ship with the capability of flying, i merged them together, that way u could build a gigantic ship with a little 3d printer, i experimented with that on creative and i did a increible heavy ship, it is not such a good idea to build a ship like that because there are expensive and every part of the ship its capable enough to lift its own weight, the problem with that its that the final result was to expensive to build, to many engines and i needed to build some of those spheres without engines, there was enough power to lift some load.
At the end the ship was powerfull enough to go to space but it was like maybe 100 or 200 meters long and with that weight going down a planet was imposible, even if u tried to brake the entire time all because of the weight and let me tell u, this is an incredible game, the funniest part its the ones that are not programmed.
Like if u try to make artificial gravity the physics simulations allow u to do it, the different kind of gravity thrusters, i really want a way to personalize the ships more, using another resources, imagine building a ship with an artificial dome inside filled with plants, or an atmosphere, i really need that and i cannot wait to the time they implement water, imagine building ships, i can imagine myself building some kind of warship merged by little pieces so its safer to use in a war scenario, because, if im not wrong, they want to make water a fluid, and if they do that i can imagine water generators on rivers or the middle of the ocean, if water acts like a fluid i can imagine they will release a generator that works by the movement of something atached on it, well, lets wait.
I used to use weld walls or weld wall ships with the materials and a static projection to weld too. Or make the projection on the weld ship like you have and pull the projection through the weld wall. Welders can weld on default settings in front of them and one block to the side both up/down/left/right. So with that you can reduce the amount of welders you sued in this video greatly spacing the welders as such. Also helps to reducing welding lag as each welder welds it's own space and doesn't compete with an overlapping welding area of another welder. Welder, block space, block space, welder, block space block space, welder, etc.
I prefer mobile projection ship pulling a projection through a base welding wall. As the base can produce more as needed to supply the welders. But I advanced from there to a found blueprint on the Workshop that is a mobile ship welding wall that can also be made as a mobile parts production. Now I favor servers with Nanite Factories or Nanite Builder mods.
Ship welders, grinders, and drills need a significant boost to their radius at default. I think 2-3x would be appropriate. A dedicated welding ship should beat hand welding in almost every case.
2:15 You can use the build planner with ships, if you add a block to your queue from the build menu, there is a "transfer blocks from build planner" button in the inventory screen
by opening the inventory from the ship then selecting on one side the "the ship cargo" to only see the cargo of the ship and the other side you filter to only see your base cargo, you can then press the button and all the mats will be transferred.
I worded that poorly, what I meant is that isn't no where near as easy as using it with a hand welder. It just takes two clicks with a hand welder, the ship version is just a massive faff
@@Zer0sLegion true
you dont need to align the projection perfectly, for the missing distance just build a couple of block to connect it all.
Hmm I do believe that there is in fact a build planned for ships.
Open your inventory, the right inventory should be your cargo storage and the left inventory is your welder ship, be sure to select ship inventory on the left then just use the withdraw build inventory button in the middle...
If this works, you're getting pinned comment
@@Zer0sLegion it does, I always use the welder ship with buildplaner.
Would you still need to get out and look at an un-built piece to get the item on your build planner?
@@Miiidge yes, you can place blocks from cockpit but you need to use the hand welder to make use of the build planner
u can directly add blocks to build planner without using welder, also add more welders to the ship welder
I think I've got a setup that's a bit better than the spinning welders blocks. I haven't played the game in years though.
One array of welders the width of the ships, on a piston that goes up and down the height of the ships, then attach that to a piston that goes back and forth the length of the ships.
I usually just used Build Planner to gather the materials I need by hand and than mass deposit them in the welder ship. I also just used multiple spread out welders on the ship. At least I'm pretty sure I did, it's been months since I went back on SE. Also still very new to the game
I try and build ships to be modular, then using merge blocks to connect them. So if a part of my ship is destroyed I can build small sections, move it into place, then make the swap.
I use a very similar setup when I'm printing ships but I have two arrays of welders facing each other that slowly pull away from the projector building the blueprint as they do. The only limitation I find is that there's a size limit on the blueprint but I have yet to want to build something that wouldn't fit between two fully extended pistons.
Neat. Maybe using the merge block tactic, mentioned by Louis Brown above, to glue smaller sections that fit inside your contraption might let someone assemble a larger grid.
the spinning printer is okayish when you need to safe PCU but when you have no need to safe them just build welder walls and pull them back, its much more reliable
Oh my god the mod projector assembler is the mod I’ve been looking for so long. Thanks for the video, I learned new things, such as the rotating welding stuff ! I usually used a piston on the main base expanding from the welders but that heavenly limited the size of the ship i could weld, and caused many kelang issues
A method that i think is better than ship printers (welders that build projectors) is to use the conveyer line of the new ship and connect it to the base. Then use welders on the new ships conveyer line to weld nearby components. It is much better for when the ship you are building is much larger than any printer should be or if you are free handing the ship without a blueprint.
I am imagining a scanner, built in a multiblock array, so that you can make a series of antennae that allows one to increase maximum power consumption and range over a logarithmic scale.
This is why I always use a spinny welder wall behind a glass wall then have a random ship be the projector
I build ships with extra conveyor junctions everywhere so I can move one station welder along the line of new parts
The most painful part to weld up by hand is the 3x3 glass panels. Aside of course from large atmosphere thrusters.
Some ships have welder inside them to repair them to 100%. With the right design and projector. You can welder the blueprint to get the ship connected to a station and the first welder and projector on the ship operational. From there the ship will build itself with the resources from the station. You can also use the build and repair mod which will welder the blueprint inside and out without any complex designs to build the ship.
Anyway ships that can repair themselves too 100% tend to have a reduced size because the number of welders and conveyors can bug out the ship. The size can still be big but huge ships it can be an issue.
With the example you showed. A upgrade would be to move the pivet to the weld arrays center.
on me and my friends' survival world I made a 3d printer with a projector, welder and pistons, all attached to my base, so whenever one of the boys runs out of fuel and makes a new crater, we can just plug in the blueprint and we have a new ship in about about a minute.
we also have a grinder pit for whatever is left of any wreckage.
I like building ships in creative so much that I now spend more time on my ship building world than on the survival world haha. It's really satisfying to see your creation get printed in survival though
I think this is more for muliplayer servers than someone like me but this was very helpful.. I enjoy the building aspect of SE more than the survival. So taking a long time to build is fine with me
Yeah, it's a mix of multiplayer and single player advice
I only really prefer welding ships for welding large homogenous structures up because you can also have the ship have multiple welding heads to cover more area and do those giant slabs which are always so tedious to weld by hand done in no time.
I personally like using printer tugs myself, but I dont use spinning welders. I just make a laege rake with the welders spaced 5m apart. In my opinion, its better than 3d printers as there is no real size limit to how big you can print. Also, keep in mind which way the welders will be welding from as you design the ship. Some blocks have fun hit box shapes that the welders cant reach if they are facing a certain way and some blocks have only 1 snap point and can be missed because of that. Making sure each block you place is facing the right way to be welded properly can save you the trouble of having to grind through your ship to find that missing gyro or finding that 1 light that didnt get welded up all the way
Also, Build planner dpes wprk on ships. Tp use it, simply set the left inventory to the container you wish to move the items to and click the button in the middle to transfer all otems on your build planner
And if you need to mass produce smaller modules in large quantities (eg modular base segments) you can make a kind of 3D printer that has a line of welders that shift back and forth and after a number of repeats of that movement it shifts up one block and continues
ohh we call this printing a ship, its quite popular with small grid ships, with a piston welderpit combo
2:50 i know you probally arent including scripts, but i use ISY's inventory, and have my Welding ship set up to have a Minimum amount of materials in its cargo. Using "special" tags.
minor advice for anyone who wants to use a piston printer, spin just the head and put a gyro on it, works on servers and keeps it stable.
i use something similar for massive resource bores, plant it above a resource node and have a slowly advancing rotating drill head, generally space the drills out and use gyros to stabilize and you're good to go.