Making a Mining Ship - Space Engineers Tutorial

This is the part 2 of a tutorial series to guide new and old players alike through Space Engineers survival from the very beginning and through to the point where ridiculous builds seem plausible.

If you haven't yet bought Space Engineers and decide you want to here's an affiliate link to use :)

This video covers the construction of a mining ship for use in atmosphere, as well as all the info you need to understand for the building of any ship in space engineers.

If you have any tutorial topics you'd like me to cover in the coming videos please let me know in the comments. If you've got burning questions about how to do something, ask here and I'll do my best to answer.

00:00 Previously in this guide series
00:21 Building a battery on the base
01:24 Ordering some extra components
02:00 Starting to build a small grid ship with a landing gear
03:14 Building the cockpit and the basics of Build Planner
04:49 Drills, Cargo and conveyors
07:02 Turn auto-rotate off
07:50 Connectors
08:55 Batteries
09:40 Atmospheric thrusters
13:08 Gravity as down thrust
13:38 Why can't my ship turn? Gyroscopes
14:44 Base mounted connector
15:22 First flight tests
17:05 Docking to the base, making connectors safe with magnets
18:49 Charging our batteries
20:07 Doing a Capac
22:10 Flight test 2
23:47 Ore detector
25:21 Getting the drill on our toolbar
26:08 Mining without flipping over
27:35 Why mine horizontally? Pancakes.
28:16 Setting up sorters and ejectors for stone
32:25 Lazy way to add drills to the toolbar
33:08 Offloading ore to the base
34:54 How to paint things, and when you can use P
37:18 Adding lights
39:27 What to do if you crash
40:23 Adding more drills
42:15 Weight watchers
43:15 Advanced techniques for starting your next small ship build
44:50 Outro

The blueprint of the ship can be found on Steam

Music and Sound Effects by:
Space Engineers

[jonnoble]

Who here has played plenty of Space Engineers and still watches all of Splitsie's tutorials? This wasn't the first SE content I ever subscribed to but it's always been the best.

[davidwarburton-burley]

My biggest tip to newbies is to remember that braking distance increases considerably when youve got a full load. Ive crashed quite a few times because I was going too fast 🙂

[echomande]

Splitsie's Space Engineers tutorials. The standard against which other Space Engineers tutorials should be judged.

[VoidCrafterYT]

Honestly, Keen should hire Splitsie to make all their future tutorials. Always nice to watch these tutorials even though I'm an old player.

Edit: Honestly, I've suffered under auto-rotate for so long. I literally forgot it was a thing and it was so annoying until I realized it existed again. Glad to see this tutorial warns new players (and old players that forgot it was a thing) about the suppressor that is auto-rotate.

[renn_frenn]

Not knowing how to use the build planner was causing me so much wasted engineering time. This is a tutorial on top of a tutorial. Gorgeous gorgeous man

[TheMarneh]

Even as a somewhat experienced player, I really like to watch well structured tutorials like this because you can ALWAYS learn something you didn't know before

[RvKsword]

ive been playing for bout 2 years but still like watching tutorials to see building techniques and i often learn new tricks. for example I HAD NO IDEA YOU COULD DOUBLE CLICK TO LEAVE HAND TOOLS ON DO YOU KNOW HOW USEFUL THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN TO KNOW

[greyic]

"It's not save-scumming in Space Engineers. It's just having a better day." Amen <3

[UndisputedNoobs]

As a guide creator for new players myself it’s always nice to stumble across great people like yourself.

No waffle, nice pace for noobs to learn without constantly rewinding. Efficient and clear covering everything needed from a new players perspective. That takes not only skill but a great awareness of others and puts you in the top 10% of creators on YouTube IMO

Not sure why I never played this before but just got it today. Wanted to say thanks for the effort on the videos, appreciate the content as much as the delivery.

No need to reply, just letting you know that you are appreciated and worth the sub.

[bobmay]

For docking and undocking, I like to use an Event Controller and two Timer blocks. Name one timer block "Undock" and one timer block "Dock". Set the event controller to monitor your connector, and on connect, trigger the "Dock" timer block, and on disconnect trigger the "Undock" timer block. Then on the timer blocks, set batteries to recharge/auto, turn thrusters on/off, turn ore detectors on/off, antennas, beacons, set H2 tanks to stockpile or auto, etc. On small grid, this takes up only 4 blocks, and means that I can free up my hotbar so that I really only need my connector and maybe my lights. And when docked, my small grid ship consumes a minimum of power from the parent grid. The Event Controller is definitely the best block added to SE in recent years.

[fcytv]

That's one nice looking starter miner!
As for things you probably should mention in this one:
1. Point to the fact that spotlights work just as suit flashlight and can be controlled by pressing "L" when you're in the cockpit.
2. Starting small grid builds became easier than ever when they added a "add small head" button to rotors. It's way easier to do and way less chance to do it wrong since the rotor and the rotor head will be locked in place... well you'll have to explain how to lock the rotor too but still worth mentioning this method too along with connectors.

[jimgibson]

Been playing the game for years. Splitsie is still the best resource for learning and watching his videos I always learn something. So many "I didn't know that!" moments! Also, his presentation style is just awesome!

[phoenixfire]

One thing that I've taken to building while in space, and in the process of building a jump capable ship, is what I call a jump sled. Take a jump drive, add two connectors to it, surround it with solar panels and add two batteries. The thing will passively charge up jumps and hold 3 of them at a time, and you can use it to jump a small grid ship anywhere you want, while being dirt cheap compared to a true jump capable ship. You can also run conveyors around the drive to connect the two connectors, so inventory can run through it. Such a simple build, but tremendously useful, I find.

[slab-ddvj]

Nice to see updated tutorials from the master itself. 2 tips that you might add for a flying miner:
1: Breaking thrusters on/off on the hotbar. this is a good habit to have for saving power when you are flying more than 300m.

A more advanced tip:
2: When right-clicking or left-clicking mining for long periods, you can go into your inventory or the control panel while holding the mouse buttons and releasing the button while in the panels then exiting the panels. This will keep the tools working even if you are not holding the buttons anymore. To stop them you can press the buttons again (or get out of the cockpit)

[eddieruhier]

As always, concise, well-planned, and well-illustrated. I've got 3, 500 hours in SE and I still love watching your tutorials - and I'm still learning from them. Thank you :-) - Eddie (leatherboyUK).

[choobakasmooth]

I just started playing this on xbox gamepad yesterday, didnt actually think I'd find an active information outlet as I thought the game was old but your channel is a goldmine for me right now 😂😂

[MykolaSkotynyanskyy]

Great tutorial! Just few tips to improve quality of life:
* Backward facing remote controller + camera on top of connector simplifies docking and flying out from tight mines
* Event controller on "Connector Connected" + 2 timer blocks for dock on/dock off sequences (recharge batteries, turn off/on thrusters/gyros/antenna/ore detector/ejector sorters/stockpile/lights etc.)
* Event controller + Holo LCD for cargo filling control - just turn on/off lcd with preconfigured text (checked AND gate, use level 90%-95% for small miner to avoid flashing when ejcectors pull out stone and drills push new stone)
* Event controller + Holo LCD for drill filling - turn on/off lcd with text (unchecked AND gate, use level 95% - it is hard to fill drill to 100%)
* Hide tanks, ejectors and sorters from inventory screen

[aracron]

I always use one of your other techniques where I build a large grid rotor and give it a small rotor head. Then I build the ship off of that, and it is connected to base power while I do so. But that is definitely more resource intensive early on.

I love these tutorial videos! I hope you keep them going.

[johnrtrucker]

The auto rotate... hundreds of hours in game and I just learned that... 😂 apparently I still have so much to learn! Lol thanks again splitsie 😊

[Ms_Succubus]

There are two things I can recommend new players to mess around with.

One being: If you ever struggle to find Cobalt Ore but really need more cargo capacity on your base, you can use small grid Large Cargo Containers and lock them to your base as Splitsie showed at the end of the video with Connectors to build off of. Small grid Cargo Containers don't require any Cobalt to be built and a large one has the same cargo capacity as a large grid Small Cargo Container.
Another option to attach them to your base is to build an Advanced Rotor that is attached to your conveyor system.
1. You weld the Advanced Rotor up to be functional.
2. You grind off the Rotor Head.
3. You access your bases control menu and set the Advanced Rotor to "Locked". It's a tick box that shows up once you selected the block in the control menu. That prevents it from spinning around uncontrollably.
4. You press the "Add Small Head"-button in the same menu. This will add a small grid Advanced Rotor Head to your rotor. Which allows you to transfer all items between your base and whatever type of cargo you put on the small head side.
5. Place a small grid Large Cargo Container on the rotor head. Make sure the large port of the container connects to the large port on the rotor head.

Number two being (slightly more advanced):
Should you have troubles finding ore spots near you, or have found one that is quite far away, you might want to build a vehicle with wheels. Think of it as a large-ish truck with a few cargo containers and a connector for your miner to connect to. For traversing longer distances you can save a lot of powerr, since wheels use substantially less power than thruster. And you can use it to carry more goodies with you if you add cargo containers to it. Be warned though: Wheeled vehicles sometimes have a very weird way of interacting with ... well everything in this game.
But if you decide to do it:
Make sure you have more than 4 wheels, especially if you want to add additional cargo capacity.
Add more batteries than needed, so you can, if you really need to use them to charge your miner.
DEFINITELY add a Gyroscope. Yes, it is wheeled vehicle, but you'll catch air more often than you'd like to. And it makes getting out of weird ditches you might find yourself in much easier.
Beforer you put your miner on it, give it a test drive, see how it feels, and what wheel settings work for you. Then add your miner on it's back and try again, but more carefully, you don't want to destroy both vehicles at the same time.

This might be something interesting to touch on in this series as well. Like your Goose (I think it was), from Survival maybe. Or just wheeled vehicles in general. Although flying machines tend to be much easier to use and utilize in this game than wheeled ones.

As a side note: I love how you got Capac to help you in your tutorials, besides just causing chaos :D