MineEngineer

MineEngineer drops you into the void with a hand drill and a survival pod that leaks air. There is no quest marker. There is an asteroid, and there is the fact that your oxygen is finite.

What follows is an engineering game in the honest sense: every block you place is a component in a system that either works or doesn't. A solar panel shaded by your own hull produces nothing. A refinery with no conveyor route to your drill sits idle while you haul ore by hand. Add armour plating and your ship's thrusters have to move the extra mass. Cut a hole in a sealed room and the air leaves.

From that first pod you work up through refineries, assemblers, reactors and thrusters to ships large enough to need their own control panels — 240 parts, seven fuel tanks, and a power balance you have to keep out of the red. Rotators and pistons let you build machinery that actually moves. Docking clamps let a shuttle become part of a carrier.

The solar system is procedurally generated, and you fly from open space down to a planet surface and back. Alien drones hunt through open space and chew through hulls on contact, so at some point the base you spent six hours on needs turrets. Play it solo, or host a session and find out whether your friends build or grind.

Key features

• 46 block types, none of them decorative — power, conveyors, life support, propulsion, production, weapons and mechanics
• Systems that physically connect — conveyor routes, power budgets, sealed oxygen rooms, mass-dependent thrust
• Procedural solar system with flight between space and planet surfaces
• Online multiplayer — co-op or PvP, server-authoritative
• Rotators and pistons for genuine multi-grid machinery
• Combat and survival — alien drones, turrets, laser guns, oxygen, hull breaches
• A 37-step guided tutorial that teaches the systems instead of the buttons

Fair use

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