G'day and welcome back for another Space
Engineers tutorial. Today we're going to be building our first mining ship. In the previous
tutorial we built this platform here, where we've got our wind turbines providing power, we've got a
basic assembler, a basic Refinery, a cargo container and we moved our survival kit from the respawn
pod onto our base. The next thing we're going to be adding to our base, before we build our mining ship,
is a battery. The reason we're going to build this first is that a battery is going to accumulate
charge from these wind turbines and it'll be able to dump that charge more quickly into our
mining ship so it can be recharged more rapidly than these wind turbines can do and because it's
going to take a bit of time for it to charge up we want to start that process now, before we start
our build. To build a battery we're going to press control+2 to get to our second hot bar, press G
to open our blocks menu, then right click on the battery to add it to our toolbar and we'll head
over to our cargo container, go to our production menu and I'm going to build 20 steel plate. Then we
can take that steel plate, pop it in our inventory, walk down the end here and stick our battery down.
Then go back to our production menu and build all of the remaining components and finish up our
battery. With our battery complete we're going to be able to start accumulating charg in this
from our wind turbines, ready for us to use in our ship. During the last tutorial I collected
a fair amount of resources, so hopefully we'll have enough on this station to be able to build
all the things we need for our ship. I'm going to order up a few components so that we've got some
manufacturing while we're waiting, I know I'm going to need at least 100 steel plates, so I'm going to
shift+click on that, I know I'm going to need at least 100 construction components so I'm going to
shift click on that, and I'm going to probably need at least 100 Motors so I'm going to shift click on
that too. This way these can be built and they'll be sitting there ready for us to use later. To make
building our ship a little bit easier I'm going to build a little bit of a platform. Let's grab
these steel plate out, double click on them. The reason I'm building this little platform is that
it's going to make it easier for us to see what we're doing and to move around the ship while it's
under construction. To get started building a small grid ship is a little bit different to
when we're building large grid because small grid can't intersect with the voxel around here. We
need another way to lock it down so it's secure and won't roll over while we're building pieces
onto it. The easiest way to do that is to begin with a landing gear. You can see a landing gear on
our number nine on our hot bar. As I bring it up it comes up as a large grid version, we can either
press R to change to the smaller version or press the number again to cycle between. Both options
work. We can then click and drop one down. Landing gear (when you drop it down) will automatically
lock to the surface, if they're aligned. If you drop it from too high it may topple over like so,
or if you drop it sideways it's not going to lock that way either. If you find that it's rotated the
wrong way, the easiest way to deal with that is to press the number twice and it'll switch back to
perfectly aligned with your camera view and then drop it from nice and close to the surface. Let's
clean up this mess with the mess cleaned up let's add a couple of blocks to our landing gear here
I'm going to stick two on Top This is mainly to give myself clearance underneath so I can add
blocks underneath as well as all around because underneath is often quite difficult if you start
really close to the ground the first block we're going to add to this is going to be our cockpit
we press control 2 go to our G menu and add our cockpit to this list we can also look at our
progression menu and see why we want to start with the cockpit if I type Thruster up here we
can see that all the thrusters are currently locked behind us having built a cockpit similarly
gyroscopes which are required to make a ship turn are also locked behind it so if we build our
cockpit we've then unlocked everything that we need place the cockpit on top and then we can use
a new method to get all of the different parts we need for this so what we're going to do is we're
going to with our welder in hand right click on the cockpit and it will say components added
to build planner if we then press G you can see in our blocks menu there's this section down in
the bottom right here called build planner this is where you can add blocks to a list that can
then be utilized for ordering components from our production systems so if we then walk over to
this cargo container and not open it up but while highlighted press shift middle Mouse it will
say all components were successfully put into production if we look at our production window we
can then see that all those parts for the cockpit are there we can then press on our inventory
access port with middle Mouse and it will say all components were successfully withdrawn sometimes
you might have to Middle Mouse more than once to get all of the parts out collecting all those
components will also clear the item from our build planner list and weld it up and we'll see
by building cockpit you have unlocked new blocks so now I have access to the thrusters and we can
add them to our hot bar to be able to place them around the next thing to add to our mining ship
is going to be the drill to get the drill press G type drill and we can right click and add that
to the hot bar we we want to make sure that this drill is conveyed to our cockpit cuz we're going
to use our cockpit as a Midway through to our cargo that's at the rear the drill has three
cargo access ports one on each side and one on the back we want to line up the one on the back
with this cargo access port on the front of the cockpit so we bring it across make sure it's lined
up directly in front of the cockpit and place it there we want to add some cargo so we're going
to grab our cargo containers we're also going to grab our conveyor Junction block here the larger
one not the smaller one and add that to our hot bar if we have a look at our cargo containers in
small grid we have three options these tiny little ones this medium one and this large one for our
first mining ship we're going to stick with the medium cargo container the reason we're starting
relatively small is because it's going to cost a lot of materials to build something that's bigger
so you may as well start with something that can at least get you mining with this ship early
so you can stop hand mining sooner if we have a look at our medium cargo container you can see
that there are four four cargo access ports two large and two small the small ones cannot connect
to these large ports you must match type for type so if we want to conveyor this in such a way that
large ports are facing forward and backwards which we do because that's going to help us build our
connector we're going to need a way to convert from these small ports on the back of the cockpit
to the large port on our cargo container and that is going to be done with a conveyor converter
the conveyor converter block has this large port on one side and these small ports on the other
if we make sure that the conveyor converter is lined up this way not this way this way it will
line up properly with those ports on the cockpit to do that we can use this line on the large
Port because it aligns with those three ports if we make sure that that line is horizontal
when we place this it will definitely line up to our cockpit and that's going to connect our
drill to our cockpit to this conveyor converter which is then going to to allow our medium cargo
container to sit on the back here some of you may have found these blocks a bit difficult to place
in the correct position and there's a good reason for that and it's called autor rotate this can
be toggled by pressing T and when it's on if I walk up to a grid Space Engineers is going to
try and predict the orientation of the block that I want to place that means that if I pick
a particular orientation walk away and come back it's going to change if we toggle this off and I
set a particular orientation for this block walk away come back it's going to hold that orientation
there are a few specific exceptions to this rule like conveyors but for the vast majority of blocks
this will hold true and it is quite handy to be able to turn this off and leave it off most of the
time at least for me I find that to be easier then we're going to add our connector the connector is
going to be how we attach to our base here and how we transfer the ores from our ship to our base so
to get a connector let's type connect and we want this big one this small one cannot connect to a
large grid connector so it doesn't work here we must use the standard connector so we'll right
click on that and then we're going to build this using that large Port aligned to our container
and that's why we did the conversion so now ores should be able to pass from our drill into the
cockpits inventory which does have a moderate amount of storage then into our medium cargo
storage then into to our connector storage and then when we're hooked up to the base all of that
can be moved across to the base so let's weld this part up now so then we can add more blocks to this
as before to order up the parts we can right click on each block of our ship and you can do this
with up to eight blocks at a time then we can walk over to our conveyor Port here press shift
middle Mouse and put it into production we have a look at our production window it'll have all the
parts we need for those four blocks the next thing I want to place onto our ship is our batteries
I want to build two of these one on each side we're going to place one just down here lined
up with the bottom of the cargo container and the conveyor converter and another one on this
opposite side in the same position weld those up too in small grid you have two battery size
options you've got these little ones and you've got the larger ones that we've used here the
reason we've used the large ones is because they can output enough power for our thrusters
and they can also store more power so we'll be able to fly longer and I've checked ahead based on
how many thrust as I'm planning on adding to this build and two batteries is about what we need
for this build over time you'll get a feel for this or you'll be one of these people that uses
a spreadsheet to do it I'm definitely a goby Feld kind of person we've got power we've got cargo
we've got the drill let's add some thrust to do that we're going to add this thing here the large
atmospheric Thruster with the plus symbol on it right click on that and we'll see that there are
multiple types available to us in small grid we've got these large ones we've got these smaller ones
we've got these flat ones that come in a couple of different shapes and these little flat ones that
also come in a couple of different shapes the main difference between these thrusters that's relevant
to us today is how much force they can generate these small flat ones produce the least next up
is these ones then the flat ones and then finally the big ones the bigger thrusters also produce
more thrust per unit of power so they're more power efficient which is important to us a little
bit with this mining ship to optimize things a little bit we're going to use our flat atmospheric
thrusters for our lift but which way do we need to place these thrusters must be placed somewhat
carefully with the standard thrusters it's pretty clear which end is going to be the exhaust and
in this case it's to the left of screen with the flat ones it's a little less obvious but we
can tell by using this bounding box that green box that's around the block right now the green
box extends in the direction of the exhaust so the exhaust in this case would be pointing right
or if I flip it around pointing left or pointing towards our character that's important because
the exhaust will damage blocks that it's next to so if I were to place this block like this it is
going to progressively damage that battery because the battery is too close so we have to be mindful
of where the exhaust is pointing so that we don't damage things to begin with I'm going to place a
few of these flat atmospheric thrusters underneath our ship we're going to start with a square one
here sitting just behind the cockpit and then I'm going to choose a d-shaped one here just cuz
I think the rounded Edge looks nice underneath the connector that's going to be two of our three
lifting thrusters there's a third lifting Thruster that I want to place but it's going to be placed
directly under this cockpit and we will place it down later next up we're going to add some reverse
thrust because we're going to be probably pointing our drill downward a fair bit we're going to want
more of this than we want of the other directions in order to make room for that and potentially
make some room for some future expansions on our build I'm not going to place a Thruster here
because I'd like to potentially Leave Myself the option of adding a drill on either side of
the existing one to make it so that I can place this block up here because it can't attach to
the cockpit there we're going to add an armor block here and here and then add a Thruster on the
top and bottom of that armor block one up there and one down here another one here and here as
well as a fifth and sixth Thruster here and here lining up the middle of the Thruster with that
conveyor converter that's going to give us six thrusters for when we're tilting forward next up
let's add some sideways thrust We'll add a pair of thrusters under here like this and then we can
add some forward thrust here and here do the same on the other side forward thrust lining up just
in ins side our battery here and then two going sideways here and here that's going to give us
forward back left right up and gravity gives us down the reason I'm going to use gravity to give
us the down thrust here is because it's going to make us more power and weight efficient because
we don't have to carry the weight of thrusters to push us back down this adds some risk to
Flying but I think on balance it's worth it for making something that's more capable in all
the other directions because by by getting rid of anything that pushes us down we can then have more
things that push us sideways forward and back all right this is all welded up once I've got this
Thruster done and you might be thinking at this point great we've got thrust we've got a drill
we've got batteries we've got a connector we've got a mining ship no because thrusters in Space
Engineers always push their Force through the center of mass of the grid this ship currently has
no ability to turn it won't be able to rotate at all all so what we're going to do is we're going
to add that ability by using a gyroscope press G find our gyroscopes we're going to add them on
each side on this block right here one there and one there I'm just going to rotate them to match
cuz symmetry for direct control methods gyroscopes will function exactly the same no matter which
way you place them you don't have to worry about their orientation but if you want to know about
the specific situations where does matter where you place them I've got a dedicated tutorial to
gyroscopes that I'll link above in this case it doesn't matter and now we have a flyable ship
which is great because now we can make a way to connect it to our base I'm going to walk over here
and I'm going to build a connector on our base I'm just going to attach it to this survival kit
so we'll go back to our connector on our second page and this time we're going to place the large
grid version align it up to our conveyor port and pop it there then we got to right click grab the
components we've already made of it which aren't many with middle Mouse then shift middle Mouse
to produce the rest of them and get this thing welded up the reason I built that connector now
is that I can move my ship over to that connector and start charging my batteries while we build
the last bits but I also wanted to demonstrate some things about this ship before we improve it
I'm going to remove this landing gear here and hopefully the ship will hover good I can then hop
in the cockpit and I can lift with space and I can fly around just as I do with my character need to
be careful though that I don't run into these wind turbines cuz that would be bad for both my ship
and the wind turbines before we fly away just in case we have trouble finding our way back here
we're going to create a quick GPS for where our base is so I'm going to open up chat with enter
type slash Allin lowercase GPS and then call it home that's going to create a GPS location right
where I'm sitting in my cockpit and that means I shouldn't ever get lost there are a few things
to look at when you're testing your ship one is its power consumption you want to make sure that
you can lift move sideways and move forward or backwards at the same time without maxing your
power consumption you can see that I'm at 60% so that's okay I don't have too many thrusters in
this case I probably should move backwards rather than forwards and moving sideways and that goes
up to 70% because I do have more reverse thrusters than forward I also want to make sure that I
can tilt my ship a fair way before it starts losing altitude definitely do this at a higher
altitude rather than close to the ground so that you got more buffer in case things go sideways
and speaking of going sideways how far can I tilt it looks like while I'm empty I can tilt to if we
look at our Artificial Horizon on our just next to our hot bar I'm probably at something around 60
70° there which is pretty good but that's while I'm empty this is going to get a lot heavier with
some or more so I think I'm going to want to have some more lateral thrust and that extra lifting
Thruster that I can place in now that I've removed that landing gear in order to land our ship there
are a few things we're going to do to make it as safe as possible first off we're going to press
G we're going to find our connector and this is just pure force of habit for me I'm going to put
it on number nine and I'm going to select switch lock you can either drag it down to that slot to
pick the option or you can right click on it and it will fill from the left so if I right click
on it and select switch lock it'll move it over here or I can drag it down here and select switch
lock over here I'm then going to fly down and try and line myself up with that connector this is
definitely easier with third person carefully bring myself closer make sure I don't move too
fast back into that connector cuz you can break it when we finally get close a magnet will pull us
into position if you find that you're destroying a lot of connectors one thing you can do to improve
the safety of moving into that position is get rid of that magnet we can do that by pressing
K finding our connector scrolling down here and in this strength bar dragging it all the way to
disabled that way when we move near this connector we're not going to get moved around unexpectedly
which means any crashing is 100% the Pilot's fault cuz they've moved too quickly and now you can see
as I move away the connector goes from White to Yellow as I get closer when it's yellow that means
it's ready to lock as you can see on my hot bar it says ready to if I press number nine now it'll
switch to Green cuz I'm now locked to that base your connector also disables its magnetism
automatically for a brief grace period when you disconnect it will show up blue when it's in
that state let's relock while lock to the base if I press K and go to my batteries we can see that
we have an orange battery and two white ones the white ones are on the grid that I'm in right now
or I'm accessing the control panel through that means they're the batteries on my ship which say
fully recharged in 3 hours this battery is the one on my base which says fully recharged in 2
hours with stored power of 1.85 megawatt hours I would like the batteries on my ship to be charged
before the one on the base so I'm going to press control and I'm going to select both of those
and I'm going to change the charm charge mode I'm going to change it over to recharge it is now
going to steal the charge from this battery which is now going to be fully depleted in 17 minutes
and put it into my batteries here there is some efficiency loss in terms of the absolute amount
of energy in the system transferring power from One battery to another however all of the Power
that's stored in that battery on the base would have been lost if we didn't have that battery
anyway because those wind turbines had nowhere to store it so overall for our uses this is
giving us more energy be careful having done what I've just done because and I'm going to
save before I do this cuz I might break some things if I disconnect while those batteries are
on recharge I'm going to fall on the ground and I could break something especially my lifting
thrusters because my batteries won't give out any power on my ship they may as well be off I
need to press K I need to turn these batteries back on but I'm going to make this a little bit
easier and I'm going to create a group for them over on the right here you can see block group I'm
going to say minor batteries save now I have this asterisk group at the top of my blocks list which
is both of these batteries now we can add that group to our hot bar press g go to the groups list
over here and we're going to put this next to our connector with recharge on/ off and now instead of
having to go into the menu to change the recharge status of these batteries we can simply press
eight on our hot PA and we can have power back which means we can pick this back up and bring it
back onto the connector lock it to our connector switch it back to recharge mode and that way every
time I jump into my ship I need to remember before I disconnect from the base I switch that recharge
mode onto Auto and now we can get back to adding some more thrust to this so that it can carry
all of the weight of the ores that we're going to drill first thing we're going to do is add that
flat large atmospheric Thruster here underneath the cockpit we're going to add a few more side
thrusters three of them like this one two three another three on this side one two 3 so we now
have four forward thrust six reverse thrust five left and five right get those welded up and then
we'll check the power consumption of those while placing these sideways thrusters do make sure
that the exhausts are pointed the correct way the gray end points away from your ship okay let's
test this thing out see what our power consumption looks like after that make sure I remember to turn
my batteries onto Auto and then disconnect with my connector lock now that we're unlocked we're going
to test our three directions of thrust we're going to go up we're going to go to the side and we're
going to go for forward which takes us to 92 or 91 90 89 as we gain altitude our thrusters use
less power because they can generate less thrust if we go in reverse we're at 94% but we've already
gained quite a bit of altitude if we go back down if I now go backwards right and up we're over
100% which isn't ideal as soon as we get over 100% power usage all of our thrusters create less
thrust this means that we'll have inconsistent amounts of thrust generated I know because I
calculated it manually for this ship that we're only just a bit over 100% so the reduction in
thrust output isn't enough for it to be too much of a problem but it also means that we probably
don't want to be adding any more thrusters to this because they're not going to increase what we can
do with it any extra Thruster we put on here is going to reduce the efficiency of all the other is
while also making the ship heavier which further reduces the efficiency so this is about as many
thrusters as we can get away with which is fine cuz while this is empty we can tilt almost all
the way sideways we can tilt all the way forward and we can tilt almost all the way backwards so
we have one more block to add to make this into a mining ship let's lock turn on recharge we're
going to add ourselves an or detector press G find the or detector and I'm going to place this just
behind the battery right here I want it sticking out in line with the battery which will make sense
in a little while it's just for Aesthetics right click add the components get this welded up
and now we have a functional mining ship that could still use a few improvements but let's
go use it HP in the cockpit turn off recharge disconnect from our connector and let's go mine
something while I'm hovering I have 44 minutes of power while I'm flying more aggressively
substantially less so I'm going to have to be a little bit careful about that all right I'm
at my iron deposit and all I can currently see is ice that's because if we go into our menu and
find our or detector it defaults to 25 M range we can increase this all the way up to 50 and then I
still can't see anything cuz I'm still not close enough oh nope now I can see the Cobalt and there
we go now we can see our iron or detectors do not have an orientation that they require they detect
within a sphere around the center of their block so you can place them any way you like I chose
to point it outwards because we're going to add some other blocks that that looks neat next to
in order to get down to our iron deposit we're going to need to be able to use our drill so if
we press G there are two ways we can use our drill you can either use it by selecting a toggle onoff
option on the Block here from the all blocks list or and this is my preferred way to use it or we
can select block tools and find the drill here and then add that to our hot bar when we add this
mode to our hot bar it acts just like if we were using our hand drill if we right click it's going
to destroy a large area around the drill but not produce any resources if we left click we're going
to get some resources unlike the hand drill though if you double click this drill will not stay on
hand tools will if you double click so I'm going to dig down to this iron using right click to
clear a nice wide path so my whole ship can fit through being very careful to keep an eye on my
Artificial Horizon to the right of my toolbars it is very important that we keep ourselves as
close as we can manage to Upright as we go making sure we're using q and E to correct things when
we get a little bit sideways but because of the way we designed this ship we do have a fair bit
of leeway with that so we're less likely to tip over than if we hadn't done so but it can still
happen Okay we're down here at the iron I'm now going to left click I'm going to start at the edge
of the iron deposit here so that I can demonstrate something important we can see that our weight
marker on the right hand side is going up as I drill if I press I for my inventory now we can see
that we've got 2,000 kilos of ore in my cockpit 1,600 in the connector and we've got 3,700 in
our medium cargo container but we've also got a whole lot of stone like a lot of stone we don't
really want the stone anymore because we can more efficiently work with the iron ore so we're going
to head back to base and we're going to fix that to get back art I would recommend holding down
right click as you turn around create yourself plenty of room making sure as we turn around
that we keep ourselves leveled right now I'm quite crooked on my Artificial Horizon so I'm
going to level that back off and then I'm going to move forward and push up some of you might be
wondering why have I made this so much harder by making this a horizontal mining ship why are
we mining something horizontally when we've got a mine down to it why didn't I just put the
drills underneath the ship well the drills aren't underneath the ship because the or deposits aren't
vertical the the or deposits are kind of Pancakes they are very flat and because they're very flat
I want to be able to mine forward back left and right not just plunging straight down into a hole
all right we're back with our load of iron and stone which could have just been iron and we're
going to make it just iron for the next load lock down set to recharge hop out what we're going to
do is we're going to get the ship to throw out every bit of stone that it mines we stone is quite
heavy and doesn't produce as much material as the ores we want to just have the ores so what we're
going to do is we're going to head to our second hot bar now we're going to add this small conveyor
and we're going to add our small connector so at the back here where this connector has a conveyor
Port we're going to add a block called a sorter so we're going to scroll through our small conveyor
block list until we find the sorter small conveyor sorter this thing has an arrow on it on the side
that is important because that is the direction of flow that it allows things to move through it
we want to place a sorter here with the arrow pointing outward attached to that conveyor port on
the side of our connector so we'll Place one there we'll fly around the other side and we'll do the
same there too making sure the arrow is pointing outward so if I move around here we can see a bit
more clearly I'm going to rotate and make it point that way next thing we're going to do is add a
conveyor Junction so we'll keep scrolling find the junction add one there and another one here
and then on this side we've only got room for one because of the a detector so we'll just place the
one and now we're going to weld those blocks up because we're not going to be able to reach them
when we put the next bits on with those welded up we can now place our small connectors make
sure that the small ones place one on this port here pointing backwards one on this port here
pointing outwards and then on this side we'll realize I haven't welded this up and I'll fix that
whoops and now we'll place the small connectors on here and on this side we'll get three 1 2 and
three and now hopefully the or detector makes a little more sense because it sits neatly next
to this small connector here get these welded up and then we can set them up to get rid of all
of our Stone the reason we've added more than one of these connectors is that the more of them
we have the more quickly we can throw that stone at out I'm going to now hop in my cockpit press K
and find my sorters small conveyor sorters I have to select these one at a time and we have to make
sure we set up both of them cuz unfortunately we can't set them up together so our small conveyor
sorted number two we're going to go filter mode and we're going to change this to whitelist we're
going to scroll down further and then in this list we're going to find Stone Select Stone and click
add that means that the sorter is going to allow Stone to pass through it because stone is on
the white list and then we select the second sorter do the same thing filter mode Whit list
scroll down Select Stone click add make sure it's in our active filter list now we can find
our small connectors for the sake of making this easier later I'm going to rame these to ejectors
because these are going to be throwing out Stone they're not going to be used for connections and
that's going to make my life easier later when I'm trying to figure out whether I'm looking
at something that's meant to throw out stone or something that's meant to connect another ship
we can then select all of our small now renamed ejectors grab them select collect all and throw
out they will now try and pull any Stone from the connected inventories into the connector and then
dump it out into the world so since there is no stone currently inside any of the inventories that
it's connected to let's go mine some as before make sure we turn off recharge and then disconnect
with our connector we can just go and mine some Stone let's just mine this Boulder so that we can
get a little bit of iron and a little bit of Stone from nice and close by left click mining to make
sure we collect and there we go we can see some Stone getting ejected if I press I you'll see that
the stone amount in our medium cargo container is now going down same in our cockpit and now we're
out of stone if you're feeling lazy and you don't want to have to hold down left click while you
mine you can press G and we can go to this all blocks list select our drill and click toggle
block on off we can then turn it on and that acts the same as left click drilling so we're
collecting resources and as you can see we're throwing out this Stone so that's weight we don't
have to carry while we're mining or carry all the way back to base it looks like we're probably
about full at this stage let's turn our drill off check our inventory and look it's all just
iron which is perfect no more wasted Mass from all of that stone let's lock ourselves down and
put our back on recharge something important to note when we return to base with our load of ores
is that if we go to our inventory screen the ores do not automatically move to the base we're going
to have to do that manually at least with the way things are set up here the refinery will pull
some amount of ores into it so that it can start processing them but it will not fill itself up
so what we need to do is set up a way to quickly move all of those materials from our ship into our
base this can be done simply by finding our cargo container on our base which is our small cargo
container and then dragging all of that ore into it from our ship but there's a better way to do
this so let's hop out of the cockpit walk over to this cargo container and we're going to name this
cargo container something related to our base and for the base cargo contain containers I'm going
to put in Cc or cargo container it also happens to be close to my WD key so it's quite easy to
type in quickly when we want to search for it if I hop back in the cockpit of my ship and press
I if I type CC only that small cargo container appears on the right I can then click show only
inventories of the current ship which is why I got back in the cockpit if I click that we see we've
got the cockpit the connector the medium cargo container and only the stuff on the ship if I want
to get all of my ores out in one click or mostly one click sometimes it requires a couple I can use
this deposit all ores ingots and components while I've got only this cargo container on the right
here there we go transferred across all nice and empty that means I can go out and collect another
load of ores in my really boring white ship there are two more things we're going to do today I'm
going to show you how you can make this ship a little more interesting and then I'm going to
show you how you can make this ship even better as a mining ship first off let's make it look more
interesting I'm going to utilize the colors from our drop pod here the blue the White and the gray
to change the color of a block I'm about to place down I can press p and use the Color Picker here
in this case this gray on the right of our default Grays is the same gray as the bottom of this ship
but if I didn't have that on my list make sure I've got a block in hand make sure it's snapping
over the block that I'm looking at you can tell that I'm looking at the correct block with the
red bounding box around that block press shift p and it will pick up that color to then use that
to paint our ship we can use middle Mouse and I'm going to paint all these thrusters to this dark
gray all these ones on the bottom it's going to add a degree of depth by having this extra color
down here middle Mouse and all of those then I'm also going to to paint this stuff at the back here
these three thrusters here and the a detector and the connector ejector system there we go that's a
step in the right direction but I think we still need some more color and I need more fuel
so next up let's add some blue I'm going to paint my battery blue and I'm going to add a
couple of extra armor blocks in around here near my gyroscope I'm going to paint this one blue I'm
going to put that there weld it up then I'm going to put a little slope in here weld that up and
a little slope in here and weld it up and do the same on the other side just to add a little splash
of color then on the back side of the battery I'm going to add a little bit of stuff under here
under these ejectors with one two and three and match that on the other side I'm trying to limit
how many of these blocks I put down because every block of detailing you add like this is more mass
that you have to fly with when you're talking about a mining ship if we get a little carried
away that can actually significantly impact how effective that mining ship is but in this case
this is also providing more connections between all these blocks so if you bump something the
whole ship is less likely to just crumble apart which is probably an advantage now you might have
noticed when I went and mined it was pretty dark so let's add some lighting to this too go to our
third hot bar and find our lights the block group we want want to add is this Spotlight group with
the plus so we're going to add that to our hot bar and I'm going to put Spotlight on either side
of this Thruster here to do that I need a way to attach it and I want to make this in the white
blocks so I'm going to select the white color of this Thruster with shift p place that block there
and then place a spotlight on front like so we'll do the same on the other side and then we've got
spotlights pointing forward I'd also like to be able to see what's to the side of me so I'm going
to add these interior lights one on each of the batteries we'll get those welded up and also by
building that interior light you happen to unlock some new blocks that's not bad either with the
lights built we now want to set them up up back in our cockpit find our lights spotlights they're
pretty much fine to leave at default the interior lights though at default only put their light out
to 3.6 M we want to be able to see behind us a lot further than that so let's push them out to 10
on both of them if you're finding that that's making everything just a little overly bright
we can select both of our lights and drop the intensity down to say 1.5 and if you want to enter
a specific value on any of these sliders control click on it then you get this little popup and you
can type in the value there and now let's go see how it looks mining with this much light turn off
recharge disconnect let's fly oh I just noticed I didn't paint one of my batteries I'm going to
fix that now that I'm back in this mining tunnel you can see how much better it is with all this
extra light around we can see all the rock we can see all the ore it is much much safer with all
this light so that's why you want to make sure you add some lights to your mining ships let's
grab some iron while we're here then we're going to head back and do the last little upgrade on our
mining ship that isn't required but you might like to have anyway if you're struggling to keep your
ship aligned to grab don't feel bad if you have to do a quick reload because you crashed your ship
personally I think that's the best way for you to learn because if you have the opportunity
to do the same thing multiple times in quick succession you're going to learn more than if you
have to go and rebuild a ship and each time you get to check to see if you've learned something
is spread apart by several hours of rebuilding and frustration you're just not going to learn
it as quickly so I think especially when you're starting out just give yourself a break break give
yourself a chance and reload and use that backup sa don't feel bad it's not saves coming in Space
Engineers it's just having a better day all right we're going to lock down switch to recharge press
I type CC switch to our connected inventories on ship make sure we've got show only inventories of
the current ship selected and click our deposit all ores to move all that iron on board and our
ship is nice and empty we're good the last little upgrade I wanted to teach you about for this ship
was the option of adding a drill either side of our Central drill here the reason I haven't
done that by default is that this ship with its current amount of inventory and its current
amount of thrusters was fairly tightly balanced what I mean by that is you can fill up the whole
thing with ore and it will still be able to fly if you add two more drills you're going to be able
to drill quicker but you're also potentially going to be able to drill enough that you won't be
able to fly with the amount of batteries and thrusters this has so you're going to have to
keep an eye on your ship's Mass but because we can probably do that I think it's worth talking
about adding two extra drills we can pop one here and one here these thrusters have been positioned
carefully so they do not damage these drills weld these up and we now have three drills just for
some style points I'm going to get rid of this slope here add in a cube and then a slope like so
just cuz I think it'll look a bit nicer there we go here's the ship with three drills so let's try
this out we will turn off recharge disconnect from our dock let's go over and again just drill our
little test Rock here something to note is that because we've added two extra drills our little
turn on off command is still only going to work on the central drill if we want it to work for
all of them first off press K find our drills select them all and create a block group called
minor drills or whatever you want want to call it then press G we'll remove this from the hot bar
remove from toolbar go to groups find our minor drills and then select toggle block on and off
and now all three will turn on and off or you can continue to just use the block tools command
where we use left click and right click to mine so let's drill this out if you notice on the right
our mass is slowly increasing at some point I'm going to get too heavy and I'm going to sink to
the ground and potentially break my ship 57 now 62 66 is too much so for safety we probably want
to stick to under 60 tons so that we can always make sure that we can still fly with those three
lifting thrusters that we have if we were to try to add more lifting thrusters we're going to end
up having too little battery power for being able to maneuver while lifting which is risky so
we' then add more batteries which adds more weight which means more thrusters and so on
and so forth for over time you'll figure out ways that you like it to be and ways that you'll
like to fly I tried to balance this Min as best I could for new players to optimize flight but also
optimize usability so just keep in mind if you add those drills don't let it get too heavy there we
have it we have a mining ship redock it and let's talk about a couple of Advanced Techniques that
we could have used instead of using the landing gear in order to build our mining ship I've added
two connectors to the base just temporarily so that we can demonstrate these points if we were to
build a new ship and we have a connector pointing upwards and we were happy to have the connector
pointing downwards on our ship what we can do is build that connector on the base first make sure
we switch to our small grid connector and then rotate this so that it's sitting horizontally
then make sure that it's just over the top of the other connector and then drop it on top like
that we can then weld this up and then once it's welded we can lock this to the connector below go
to our control panel and select lock now that it's locked to the base any batteries we build on our
ship as we build them we can turn to recharge so that they can be charging up as we do all of our
decorative bits and add all our thrusters to our ship so that by the time our ship's finished
we've already got charged batteries this is quite easy to pull off for vertically mounted
ones but for horizontal ones it's a bit more tricky because the small grid connector won't
line up with the large grid one if we place it directly on the ground so what we're going to
do first is place a couple of light armor blocks drop our blocks down place two like that then
we place our connector on top of that rotate it so that it lines up build our connector and just
like before select it lock it down and then you can build while attached to power on your base
which is really quite handy for getting those early batteries charged up without having to
wait around for it after you've finished your build if you got any tips on anything that you
know that I haven't mentioned here feel free to share them in the comments equally if you've
got any questions about anything I've said here today let me know and I'll do my best to answer
them next time we'll be using our mining ship to collect enough resources so that we can build a
large Refinery a proper assembler and go through all of the production upgrades that we can utilize
with that as well as probably building a little bit of style onto our base so there's all that
and plenty more to come and I will see you then
