This is a short story about a survival scenario I played in the game Space Engineers by Keen Software House. I got inspiration to play this through after someone said the “Space Suit” respawn option for survival shouldn’t be there since it’s only useful for creative mode. How wrong this opinion was!

I woke up. There was sound of wind rushing by. Opening my eyes and I realize a planet trying to hit me 110 m/s. There was some time to think, I think. I took a quick look into the status display of the space suit and realized I’m having full tanks of oxygen and hydrogen as well as a full battery charge. I turn off the inertia dampeners of my space suit to save hydrogen. There’s no fighting back when planet is trying to ram into you.

Because the roundness of this planet is still easily visible there was a small possibility to pick a place to land using the jetpack from my space suit. Somewhere low with hopefully air to breath and maybe a lake nearby. If this big rock is anything like earth.

After few directional jetpack thrusts towards what appeared to be a lake and free falling for a while, a well-timed jetpack landing with inertia dampeners took me down safely to what appeared to be an icy lake as I expected leaving me with 95% of suit energy and 80% hydrogen left. Nice! I checked my backpack. A welder, grinder, drill and rifle with ammo. The basic tools of Space Engineers. Double nice!

Remembering the good old advice of “Don’t Panic” from Space Engineer’s Guidebook H2G2 I sat down to think. Need to prioritize my doings to be efficient and not run out of life necessities.

Drafted a quick plan in my head which went as follows: 1) Suit energy, 2) manufacturing capability, and 3) refining ores to support the first two priorities.

Need to charge my space suit

While pondering my priorities and options the radio of my space suit picked up an Unknown Signal. Something is falling down from the sky? It appeared to drop about 4 klicks away. I decided to investigate.

A quick hike later what I found was a metal shell with some gadgets built into it. There appeared to be a nuclear reactor, a parachute hatch, a small cargo container containing some components and the outer shell had plenty of steel plates.

A contraption: Nuclear powered space suit recharger.

Night turned into a day while I was busy building a contraption. I disassembled what I could from the Yellow Box from Space. My contraption begun with building a landing gear to stick into the ground and combined it with a seat to maybe be able to charge my suit batteries. Really carefully I turned off the reactor, removed the uranium fueling it and transferred the reactor into my contraption. Add the fuel and test the connections. No blue smoke! And my suite charged while I enjoyed the sunshine.

First priority done. At least as long as I have fuel I could go on.

Need to build more

While enjoying my nice recharging seat, I picked up more Unknown Signals. Since the loot from them was so good, I made it first priority to go investigate any new one appearing. I kept disassembling them and collected component after component. It begun to feel like I could maybe build an assembler to be able to build and disassemble components.

How to get the required electricity for running the assembler? Since the Unknown Signals kept falling down from the sky I had enough parts to build a small reactor and fuel to run it. But it had to be a small and the assembler is quite large.

Advanced Space Engineering courses taught me something, but it has possibility to summon the Wraith of Clang. However, I didn’t have any other choice. I had to survive.

Finally I have an assembler!

I kept running around catching Unknown Signals, hauling components, building my assembler and its power source bit by bit. Nights turned into days, days into nights. And then, one morning it was done. Last bzzz of my welder. And done! Finally.

Hauling is tedious

Building the assembler was huge undertaking. And most of it came from the 400 liters of storage I could haul in my backpack. I had to change my priorities. Building some kind of powered and wheeled vehicle could have capacity to haul more. And the landscape around was flat so driving around shouldn’t be that demanding.

Now since I had the assembler, I could turn some components into raw materials to turn them again into different components. I also caught some Unknown Signals to get more parts. I had a small container on my “base” working as a central collection point for all the parts. And what a beauty it is!