space engineers bootstrap (modded)

gistfile1.txt

Splitsie is an Aussie youtuber responsible for much of the decent quality Space
Engineers content on YouTube. As part of this, he's done a lot of tutorials.
The most relevant to new players are available at:
  * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL8XQ1Avz-0&list=PLfMGCUepUcNzLePdu3dZfMTLfWq1bclUK

Unfortunately, these videos only consider a vanilla game start, so assume things
like the base game planets and drop pods.

Because the modding community is so strong for this game, we play modded - and
this can complicate the process of bootstrapping and learning the game.

### Planets

On our server (and many others), there is a completely different solar system.
This doesn't change as much as you might think, it just means that you have to
either look up data about the planets or talk to other players before choosing
a spawn location.

We are using planets from the SMU set by MLTMods:
  * https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=732708497

NB: We're not using all of the planets/moons in this set, just some of them.
Specifically, only 3 planets are reasonable to start on for any but the most
experienced playes:
  * Adelle - Adelle is pink and blue, with a thin atmosphere that is not
    directly breathable, but which can be scrubbed fairly early on to provide
	useful oxygen without having to break down Ice to get it. Adelle has 30%
	stronger gravity than Earth, which makes flight more expensive - and means
	that your suit's jetpack will run out of hydrogen significantly faster than
	it might otherwise. Adelle has all of the resources you need - except
	Silver, which is used for medical bays and advanced modded components.
  * HaleE2 (Haley) - Haley is magenta and pink, and does not have any oxygen
    in the air. This means that you will need to break down Ice and/or set up
	O2 farms if you want to breathe ;) Haley has slightly less gravity than
	Adelle - at only 21% more than Earth's, and should also have access to all
	minerals in the game.
  * TER-4 (Tera) - Earthlike, with a breathable atmosphere. Tera only has 90%
    of Earth's gravity, and is home to all of the mineral resources in the
	game - with the notable caveat that Silver and Platinum are hard to find.
	The biggest downside of Tera is the scale of the landforms. Mountains are
	BIG. And big mountains are rough to navigate, especially in a rover.

### EEM

Apart from the planets, the first mod of interest is EEM - the Exploration
Enhancement Mod. It is by one of the game's developers and many of its
features have been rolled into the most recent official patch, but we still
use it.

The main way EEM affects your start is by swapping out the vanilla drop pods
for most planets. Instead of getting a large grid lander that falls and then
clamps itself onto the ground, you will spawn in a small multipurpose rover.

### The Rover

The EEM rover is capable of traveling at speeds of more than 40m/s over flat
terrain, and can navigate hills if you are careful - but it is very easy to
wreck, or at least flip the thing.

The rover is armoured and rounded, which mitigates the damage you can cause
yourself by rolling, and it also comes equipped with two additional safety
features:
1. Extra parachutes. If you find yourself suddenly airborn and expect you
   will not have an elegant landing, tap the parachute button on the actionbar
   and if you have any chutes left, one will deploy - significantly reducing
   any impact damage you might take.
2. Anti-flip gyroscopes. Since this is a small grid vehicle, sufficient gyros
   can apply some impressive torque. There is a button on the rover's
   starting actionbar that will set gyros to crazy mode - causing the vehicle
   to twist and bounce into the air. If you find yourself upside down but
   mostly intact, tapping the button - and then pressing it again to turn off
   the insanity once you are upright can remedy the situation without causing
   too much additional damage.

Apart from those features aimed at improving your exploration process, it's
just a very flexible starting vehicle and has:
  * A small bit of storage
  * Ice -> O2/H2 processing
  * A survival kit
  * An ore finder

### Driving

The game does not make controls 100% obvious, in fact, they're pretty bad at
teaching you about the buttons. So here is a quick rundown on what you can
do with the vehicle:
  * WASD to drive normally. These controls have no affect if you are in the
    air.
  * Hold space to apply the brakes. This may be the same as holding reverse,
    but generally just tries to arrest your motion in all directions.
	Unfortunately, the brake will depress the moment you let go of the
	spacebar - so this is only useful for stopping, and not for parking.
  * Moving the mouse will engage the vehicle's gyroscopes to attempt to tilt
    you. It won't be much, but it's the only control you have while airborn.
  * Number keys to perform actions on the actionbar.
  * G to configure what is ON the actionbar.
  * F to exit the vehicle and wander around on foot.
  * K to open up the control panel - get used to this screen, you'll be seeing
    it a lot.
  * X to try to jump with the wheels' hydraulics (ymmv).

There are other buttons you can press that will break things. Never ever use
the P key to engage the parking brake or Y to power the vehicle off completely.
These are broken features that lead to bad habits in the future and can cause
a lot of property damage and loss ;)

Because the vehicle HAS a parking brake, but cannot use it directly, you will
need to add a button to your actionbar for this.
  1. Press G to open up the actionbar configuration screen.
  2. Find the icon for the cockpit and drag it down to where you want the new
     button to go.
  3. Select the option to toggle the handbrake on/off.
  4. Close the actionbar config and test your new button with the number key.

### Walking and Hand Tools

When on foot, your primary controls are similar:
  * WASD to walk, QE to rotate while flying.
  * Space to jump.
  * Mouse to look.
  * F to generically interact with things (push a button, sit in a chair,
    pick up a rock, etc...).
  * K to open a control panel.
  * I to open your inventory.
  * Number keys to select something from your actionbar:
    - tools select the tool for use
	- blocks select the block for building
    - 0 puts away whatever you were holding
  * G to configure options on the actionbar.
  * Z to toggle your jetpack.
  * X to toggle your jetpack's innertial dampener setting.
  * C to toggle crouching.
  * J to take off your suit's helmet.
  * O to toggle your suit's short-range (200m?) radio beacon.
  * H to cycle through waypoint display modes.
  * Tab to cycle through HUD overlay options.
  * Backspace to die.

There are 3 primary tools in the game (plus guns).
  * The welder - used to repair and finish building things.
  * The grinder - used to dissassemble things.
  * The drill - used to dig holes.

If you hold down the left mouse button with a tool, you will activate its
normal mode (and slowly drain suit power in the process). You can double-click
to toggle it and save yourself from having to hold the button down for an
overly long period.

The welder and grinder will show you details about the block you have
targetted - including its repair level and the components used to build it.
If you grind something down, most components will be returned, so you can
safely move most buildings around. The notable exception is with batteries,
their power cells will be destroyed (and turned into "scrap") when ground down.

The mining drill will tell you about nearby ore deposits (50m) when held, and
when you dig with the left button, little chunks of mineral will be dropped
into the world. It is usually helpful to hold down the F key to try to
automatically pick up as many things as possible while mining, but you will
need to pause every few moments to collect everything that you've dropped.

Mining with the right button will dig a bigger radius hole, but will destroy
whatever you are mining in the process. This is good for tunneling.

Crouching is frequently the only way to actually reach down low while mining,
and right-click drilling while crouched will tend to make a downward sloping
tunnel if you are not careful.

### Life Support

The rover contains an electrolysis machine for breaking ice down into its
constituent components (the game has no liquid water, only ice). This costs
only energy and ice to run and will work automatically. The rover will spawn
with enough ice onboard to keep you going for several days of gameplay, as
long as you don't actively waste it.

Sitting in the cockpit will charge your suit's battery from the vehicle's. It
will also fill your O2 and H2 tanks. You can also do this by holding down F
while targetting the little computer panel on the survival kit.

The rover comes equipped with two (prefilled) auxiliary gas tanks - one each
for oxygen and hydrogen. If you are carrying one of these tanks and your suit's
internal supply drops to a dangerous point, a bit will automatically be drained
from the tank to top you off again.

To recharge the tanks, place them in the O2/H2 Generator on the vehicle.

Please note that because the rover does not contain its own gas tanks, it has
to process ice whenever it needs to generate either O2 or H2.

Flying around with your jetpack engaged 100% of the time is the fastest way to
burn yourself out of ice, and subsequently oxygen. Turn off your jetpack when
walking to conserve hydrogen (and to prevent yourself from accidentally flying
into a tree or something), and dig up some ice when you get a chance, and you
will be fine.

### The Survival Kit

The survival kit installed at the very tail end of your rover is the game's
zeroth level crafting option. It is a multipurpose machine that serves as:
  1. medical bay (and respawn point)
  2. refinery
  3. assembler

But it's awful at all of those things, and you want to set up a semi-permanent
base as quickly as possible if you want to progress.

NB: If you die and have a powered survival kit, you will respawn right next
    to it. If you want to respawn somewhere else, either grind down the
	survival kit or power it down, and then press backspace to spawn
	elsewhere in a new rover.

As a refinery, the survival kit can only process "stone" (and not scrap or
any of the specific metal ores). And as an assembler, it can only manufacture
the most basic of recipes.

Stone is plentiful on most planets, it's what you probably spawned on top of,
even if it looks like dirt or grass or sand or something. Granted, you get less
"stone" per m^2 of terrain mined when digging through dirt than you do when
digging through what clearly looks like solid rock, but dig deep enough or for
long enough and you will get what you need.

To process stone in the survival kit, simply mine a couple hundred (thousand)
and put it into the machine (pressing F while targetting one of the yellow
squares on the rear of your vehicle). Drag the stone into the top section of
the kit.

And nothing happens, because the survival kit actually "crafts" the stone. Go
into the Production tab on the control panel and observe that there is a little
recipe for processing stone on the left. Ctrl-shift-click it to queue up a
whole bunch of stone processing. This recipe requires hundreds (500?) of stone
at a time and outputs an amount of:
  * Iron
  * Nickel
  * Silicon
  * Gravel

Gravel is mostly a waste product at this point, so if you are running out of
space because you're processing so much stone, don't hesitate to just dump it.

The iron, nickel, and silicon will be everything you need to bootstrap your
very first base. You can queue up items to craft by selecting from different
categories on the left side of the production screen.

If the survival kit is annoying you by spending too much time processing rock
instead of making that last computer you need, you can re-order the queue by
dragging the stone processing job to the far-right of the queue; and you can
also cancel build orders by right-clicking them in the queue.

### Finding Ore

In a normal game, a small grid ore finder isn't any better than your handheld
drill's - but we're running a mod that increases its effective range into the
realm of usefulness.

So open the ship's control panel, scroll down to your ore finder, make sure it
is turned on, and then scroll down the middle frame to crank up the scan range.

Anything in the 250-500m range is a good place to start. Additionally, you will
probably want to make sure the ore finder is broadcasting its findings over the
vehicle's antenna (otherwise you will lose its markers when you get out to mine).

Please note that the ore finder does draw power, and that by cranking its scan
radius up, you are increasing the rate of draw. It isn't sufficient power drain
to fret over very strongly - but it's also enough that you don't want to keep
scanning at high range when you're not looking for ore.

### Your First Base

So... putting all of that together.

You want to:
  1. Create a handbrake option on your rover's actionbar so it doesn't roll
     downhill on you.
  2. Crank the ore detector range up to 5-10x what it started at.
  3. Familiarize yourself with the terrain and drive around until you find a
     suitable place to build your first base.

A good first base has ready access to:
  * Ice - for breathing and flying.
  * Iron - the most basic raw material.
  * Nickel/Silicon - at least one of these so you don't have to process rocks
    forever when getting started up.
  * Cobalt - the first material you'll need as you ramp up to more advanced
    blocks.

Any other metals are optional, but good to know about - especially if you plan
on turning your first base into something bigger.

Once you've found a location, you need to build some stuff:
  1. A small light armor platform
     - embedded into the terrain, this makes it a station and not a vehicle,
       and also means it won't roll away from you.
	 - placed but not welded, light armour costs 25 steel plates, but the base
	   scaffolding block only costs one - and you need to conserve materials.
  2. A tower 7-10 blocks high from there (just build straight up with more
     light armor blocks)
  3. A wind turbine, which should provide enough power to bootstrap your first
     machine or two.
  4. A basic refinery, so you can start processing stone faster - and any other
     basic ores you may have come across so far
  5. A basic assembler, so you can stop using the survival kit for any crafting
     at all.

NB: When placing the refinery and assembler, make sure you line yellow boxes
    up together, this way the assembler can take metal directly from the
	refinery on demand instead of requiring you to manually shuttle things
	around.

Once this works, your rover is just a vehicle and your life-support station
slash respawn point. If you lose the rover, you won't respawn near the base
and your work will be lost - so be careful with it.

Now, a single turbine won't provide enough power to run both machines at once.

You can improve this by either adding a second (and likely third) turbine,
which should be spaced 8 blocks away from the previous one for maximum
clearance and efficiency... or by building a battery. You will eventually want
both, but the battery is the more expensive option.

Once your power is stable, it's time to completely cut your dependence on the 
rover and build:
  * An O2/H2 generator
  * A small cargo container (ideally connected to everything else)
  * A survival kit

You will probably need to break down the survival kit on the back of your rover
to get the medical components required to build the kit on the base. But once
you do, the rover is 100% just a vehicle now, and not required for your
continued survival.

### Logging Out

One last thing - when you log out of a multiplayer game, your body stays in the
game world... for 15 minutes. After this time, the server will kill you and
destroy anything you are holding.

Unless you log out in an approved logout container thing.

These are Cryopods and Beds.

Beds don't provide any life support, so they need to be in an oxygenated
environment. They also require the decorative block DLC if you want to build
them yourself.

Cryopods need to be connected up to electricity and an oxygen supply, otherwise
you will still die when logging out.