Space Engineers got a huge update today, along with an epic 6-minute trailer to showcase it. The most requested feature by the Space Engineers community, according to Marek Rosa (founder of Keen Software House), has been the addition of full-size planets. They’ve been working toward this for quite a while now, and not surprisingly. Implementing full-size voxel planets is no easy feat! The planets look great from space, but also really good from the surface, too. Be careful though, as there is a nasty new foe you might have the misfortune of encountering when you venture onto new worlds…
Yes, that is probably not something you want to see chasing you! Unfortunately, they are something you will have to contend with sometimes when you descend onto the many unexplored worlds that are waiting for you amongst the stars. Waiting to be colonized, and for you to build the most epic bases and colonies on them. The image above also shows some plant life that looks quite nice, along with grass that appears in different color tones.
The Planets Update is a huge update for the game because creating these huge voxel planets is a very challenging thing for a developer to do (due to a number of technical challenges that must be overcome to make it all work), but also because prior to today you could only build ships and stations out in space or on asteroids. This update gives us full-size worlds to explore and build on. Marek Rosa had a lot to say about it on his blog today, too.
Of course, the fact that Space Engineers now has these full-size worlds also opens up some new possibilities for future updates. For example, you could have new gather-able ores and materials that can only be obtained from certain types of worlds. There are a lot of ways the developers could go with that. From wood, to new metals, to new fuels. Either way, if you haven’t seen it, you should check out the epic 6-minute trailer they released today showcasing this incredibly awesome new update:
