general:playertips

Collection of player tips

Note: BuildAndRepair will henceforth be shortened to “BAR”

General best practices

This section describes general best practices to allow seamless BARing!

  • Do not include limited blocks in the blueprint! Before you take the final version, remove any limited blocks (especially refineries, assemblers and H2/O2 Generators) from the grid. If structurally necessary, add a brightly colored light armor scaffolding to be ground off afterwards.
  • Start your build as a separate grid! Best practice for this is to start from an existing connector, building a light armor block onto its side, adding a projector and placing another connector facing the existing one. Weld the projector and connector, connect the two connectors, grind down the light armor block and rename the grid to what you want it to be. Afterwards, load the projection in such a way, that the connector you already built aligns with one from the blueprint! This will allow you to refuel, power and arm the grid while it is being built while also completely avoiding any grid limit issues.
  • Subgrids are best separated, connected to main grid via brightly colored sprues and then attached with a tug. The “Multigrid projector” plugin will not work on the server.

How to get your BAR stuck, and how to fix common issues

Any of the following will prevent the BAR from working fully or will get it stuck. A good way to tell a BAR is stuck is when the main block plays the welding animation and sound, yet no blocks get added to the grid/welded up.

  • Projector on different grid than welded object: This will never work, even if the alignment is perfect. The projector needs to be ON the grid that is being built!
  • Hitting a limit: Run “!blocklimit mylimit” to make sure that…
    • You have enough space in your player limit on varying blocks needed for the build
    • The grid you are welding on can support more of the blocktype (E.G. a base with a drill arm with 10 drills on it will prevent any more being placed on a mining ship being welded while connected to said base)
    • You are not maxing out your personal block count (see INFO tab in inventory, max 50 000 block per player)
  • Trying to be smarter than the BAR: Blocking off blocks (e.g. limited production blocks) because you have hit your limit on them will often cause the BARs to hang - especially if “Welding Only” mode is used!
  • Building a separate grid without fly mode: There is little reason to use walk mode, which is the default. This will make sure the BAR will not work on grids other than the grid it is on!
  • Not owning the BAR: Not only will this not allow you to station / rename the grid via the INFO tab, this will also…
    • Mess up DLC Paintjobs like carbon, gold etc
    • Get stuck immediately upon reaching a DLC block
      • Note: These last two bullet points will not be an issue if the owner is online at the time of welding.
  • Not supplying enough materials: Make sure the BAR or its connected inventories are well stocked! It greatly helps to use a plugin called “Projection to Assembler” or running a programmable block using the BARQueue script.
  • Running “Multigrid Projector”: While it looks like it will save you time, this is actually another great way to get a BAR stuck. This script will almost never work on the server!

General fixing steps should none of the above work

Credit: @jonasfors on GURP Discord
  • Turn BARs off and on
  • Repainting BARs
  • Turning bars on and off
  • Repainting bars
  • Fix ship with bars and projection on
  • Fix ship with bars and projection off
  • Fix ship with bars on and projection off
  • Fix ship with bars off and projection on
  • Fly away 6-7 km so the grid unloads with everything on
  • Fly away 6-7 km so the grid unloads with everything off
  • Reloading the blueprint
  • Logging out and logging in again
  • Changed welding priority order
  • Changed from flymode to walk mode
  • Changed to welding only
  • Fool around with priority order
  • Make sure you own the block
  • Sometimes the owner of the BaR needs to be the same owner as the projector for them to weld the projections.

Setup

Inject into steam launch

Credit: @mommyraven on GURP Discord

Find Space Engineers in your steam library, and right click > properties. In the “Launch Options” section, insert the following text:

"D:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\SpaceEngineers\Bin64\SpaceEngineersLauncher.exe" %COMMAND%

Replace the listed path above with your own launcher location. Do not forget the %COMMAND%.

With this done, you can now launch Space Engineers through steam as you would any other game. Please note that shortcuts that directly connect to GURP will not work with this.

Credit: @toluenefennec on GURP Discord
  • Conveyor loops (even really long ones, which are worse) cause lag by the pathing algorithm used for conveyor systems getting confused and will drastically increase lag as more is added to the system.

  • Cargo and Tank blobs cause the same issues as loops and lag from the pathing check looking into each connected cargo causing more calculations and lag.

  • Refinery and assembler blobs are notably much worse, Due to their constant pulling and pushing of components it does hundreds of calculations a second and since it checks all things in the path to it, it will create exponentially more lag per machine in the path of the check. This applies to h2 gens as well.

  • Dry pulling when you run out of materials is in a similar vein as this, due to it checking every frame to check if it has more materials it causes a large amount of lag, try to turn off your assemblers when you run out of materials.
  • Extremely long conveyor lines just increase the base calculations the check has to do, It's generally a bad idea to have a conveyor length of more than 75 or so blocks on a station due to how much it will be used. This isn't quite a problem on a lesser used ship like a fighting craft.

  • A good setup would have nothing having to link through another machine nor any loops in the conveyor system (If you can go in a circle without going to the same place twice, you have a loop).

To Recap:

  • Do not leave large ships connected for extended periods of time, it increases the size of your conveyor network and causes more checks and lag.
  • Do not have large spread out docking lines
  • Try to keep your Build and Repairs as close to your cargos as you can (do not place them directly on the side of cargo containers)
  • You can use Industrial cargo containers side by side if you rotate it so the side ports don't link
  • Try to avoid large pressurized environments, the code for airtightness is obnoxiously bad
  • Do not leave welders on unless being used (they have the same issue as assemblers)
  • Have a main conveyor line with your cargo near the central point of it
  • Mobile bases, while fun are a bad idea, moving heavy grids that are 5m kg+ cause permanent physics lag which is only fixed by a restart
  • If you have to path through a machine to get to a machine, you did something wrong

→ Open Windows Run (Win+R)

→ Enter:

%appdata%/SpaceEngineers

→ Search for the file called “SpaceEngineers_YYYYMMDD_xxxxxxxxx.log (Replace YYYYMMDD with the date of when the event you get the log for happened, xxxxxxxxx will be a random string of numbers)

  • general/playertips.txt
  • Last modified: 2024/09/03 17:21
  • by gurpadmin