What's Hiding in Hostile Encounters

Space Engineers 2's 4.0 update, Hostile Encounters, landed on October 19 with combat NPCs, an interior turret, a pile of new props and a lot of quality-of-life fixes. That's the part you can play. We also went through the game files, because that's what we do on update day, and there's a lot more in there that isn't switched on yet.

Two finds got us genuinely excited, so we'll start there. Everything below comes with the usual warning: something being in the files doesn't mean it works, and it definitely doesn't mean it's coming next week. Keen changes plans, and so do we. One more warning: the pictures in this post are our own quick concept mockups, and they're ugly. We know. The real blocks will look better, promise.

Money is coming (probably)

There's a coin in the game. It's called the Space Credit, and it has a model, a glowing material and everything it needs to sit on the ground as a physical object. What it doesn't have yet is an item behind it, so you can't pick one up, carry it or spend it.

It isn't alone. 4.0 also added two new kinds of item, each with its own inventory slot and its own tab in the terminal:

• Block blueprints that unlock blocks when you use them. Right now there's exactly one, a test blueprint that unlocks an atmospheric thruster and a gyroscope, and nothing in the game hands it out.
• Quest items, with a subject, some text and a picture. Also just a single placeholder for now.

Put that next to the trade and contract terminals that are already in the game, and it starts to look like an economy taking shape: things worth finding, things worth trading, and something to pay with.

For us this one's personal. In our server-rack post we joked about crypto mining servers that make you money and drain your reactors doing it. A real currency would turn that from a joke into a design problem, and we like design problems. Blueprints are interesting too: a mod could, in theory, make you find or earn the plans for its fanciest blocks instead of having everything unlocked on day one. We haven't tested whether mod blueprints work yet, so treat that as a "maybe", not a promise.

The programmable block is nearly here

The programmable block's model is in the files, finished. Screen, buttons, damaged and broken versions, the lot. There are still no block definition and no recipe, so you can't build one, but the art is clearly done and waiting.

If you've played the first game, you know why that matters. The programmable block is where people write their own code to run their ships, and over the years the community turned it into a second game. A few classics:

• Isy's Inventory Manager, which sorts every item on your ship into the right cargo container so you don't have to.
• MMaster's Automatic LCDs 2, which turns your screens into live status displays for cargo, power, damage and just about anything else.
• Whiplash141's turret and missile scripts (Keen even did a modder spotlight on him), which gave players guided weapons long before the game had them.
• SAM (Sam's Autopilot Manager) and PAM (Path Auto Miner), which fly your ships and mine for you while you do something else.

Not one of those exists in Space Engineers 2 yet, because Space Engineers 2 doesn't run player scripts yet.

And automation in the first game isn't done growing. Keen's next Space Engineers update, Warfare 3, adds an event controller event that can detect a missile lock, so your ship can pop flares or sound an alarm on its own. Keen's lead designer also said players who just want more tools to build with aren't being overlooked. If that's the direction for the first game, we have high hopes for the second one. Data Center's Programmable server can run code today, but only if you start the game with -loadScripts, which most people never will. An official programmable block would mean scripting for everyone, and a lot more room for mods like ours to do interesting things.

Keen, we've said it twice now. We'll keep saying it. Politely. We're not complaining, we're just excited. Please let us build!

A quick round of everything else

• A 12.5 m gate with two door leaves. Base or hangar entrance sized. Art only for now.
• Flat atmospheric thrusters, in a regular and a half-round version. The art is there, and this update added their names and descriptions to the language files, which usually means something is getting close.
• Magnetic plates and a neon tube set. The art has been around since an earlier update; 4.0 gave them names and descriptions too.
• Acid rain. A complete weather effect, tinted rain, camera effects and all, that isn't on any planet yet. As far as we can tell it's only visual so far. It doesn't hurt anything.
• Snow on Verdure isn't hidden at all; it's live, and some biomes get a lot of it. It's just easy to miss in the patch notes.
• A "Space Engineers Veteran" DLC entry and a matching character model with no skin hooked up to it. Our guess is some kind of reward for long-time players, but that's a guess.
• Curved windows are still in the game and still hidden from the build menu, exactly as they've been since 2.0.

Friendlier NPCs, and maybe drones

The NPCs you meet in 4.0 mostly want to shoot you. The files suggest that won't always be the case. There's a "press to talk" interaction, a conversation screen, an engineer NPC with idle chatter and a short conversation about fixing a station's conveyor network, and a set of civilian-looking NPCs that nothing spawns yet. NPC behavior is defined in plain data files, and the Mod SDK has an editor for them, so modders can already poke at how NPCs think.

There's also an AI controller set up in the game's data that no character uses. As far as we can tell it's meant for things that aren't people: drones and ships. That one caught our eye, because drones are very much on our minds. Limpet Swarm is our hull-repair drone mod, and we'd love for it to grow up alongside whatever Keen builds here. Beyond that, we have ideas. That's all we're saying.

And co-op?

Keen has already announced player-hosted co-op for up to four players in early 2027. We'll just say the language files already have the text for it: join codes, a players list with ping, "player joined" messages and a version mismatch warning. Signs are good.

The community, of course, didn't wait. Before 4.0 even dropped, players were already flying together with fan-made multiplayer plugins like SE2 Online and SE2MP, and Captain Jack has a video of it in action, and the_swack teamed up with yellow51, who makes SE2 Online, for another one. It's exactly the kind of stubbornness this community is known for, and we love it. Both are unofficial, so read their pages before you install anything, and expect Keen's own co-op to be the long-term home.

What we're hoping for next

Time for some guessing. None of this is announced for Space Engineers 2, so treat it as a wish list with a few hints behind it.

Old favorites, new grid. A lot of blocks from the first game already have names in Space Engineers 2's files, and some have art too: the jump drive, merge block, projector, laser antenna, hydrogen engine, remote control, air vent, cryopod, parachute and more. Most of them have been sitting there for a few updates, so we're not holding our breath for any one of them. But the list reads a lot like a "coming home" queue, and with the unified grid they could end up better than they were.

Two of those we'd love to see sooner rather than later: the laser antenna and the remote control. In the first game, the laser antenna was how you linked a base to an outpost across a planet, line of sight and all. The remote control was how you flew a drone, or a whole ship, from somewhere safe. Put them together and you get the thing we keep daydreaming about: satellites.

Satellites that look the part. Right now a "satellite" in Space Engineers tends to be a box with an antenna and a solar panel stuck on it. It works, and it's fine. But real satellites are some of the best-looking machines people have ever built, and almost every bit of them is there for a reason. A few parts we've been tossing around, none of them planned:

• Solar wings that unfold when you switch them on, and turn to follow the sun.
• A dish that actually points at its ground station, or a laser terminal for a relay chain around a planet.
• Gold-foil insulation panels, because nothing says "satellite" quite like crinkly gold foil.
• Small thruster quads for station keeping, and reaction wheels instead of a chunky gyroscope.
• Sensor and camera pods for the spy-satellite crowd.

And yes, the ground station could be a rack of servers. We can't help ourselves.

Smarter weapons. I'm really looking forward to the EMP in Warfare 3. Knocking out a ship's systems without turning it into scrap is the kind of fight Space Engineers has always been missing. Warfare 3 also brings guided missiles and heavy torpedoes. If missiles make the jump to Space Engineers 2, smart and dumb fire, that's where modders can really go to town: custom warheads, different seekers, launch bays, point defense, and someday guidance scripts on a programmable block. Picture a data core that has to survive an EMP before the boarding party even gets there. And yes, we may have a project warming up in exactly this direction. It's called Hard Burn, and that's all you get for now. We'll light the fuse when it's ready.

Go look for yourself

You don't need to be a programmer to do this. Before the next update, make a copy of the game's content folder. Afterward, compare the two. The language files are the best place to start, because new block names tend to show up there long before the blocks do. The Mod SDK's editor will let you open the game's own definitions and see how blocks are put together.

If you find something we missed, tell us in the GitHub Discussions. We'll be back after the next big update.