When it comes to space exploration games, there isn’t much that gives the freedom that Space Engineers does.
The game even provides a creative mode where you can basically enable unlimited resources and instant crafting, essentially letting you do anything you can imagine. It’s The Sims, but for outer space.
Between the creative and survival modes, there’s a whole galaxy to explore. And even more than that, developers actually released the source code for the game, and with code comes a prolific modding community.
With the the right kinds of mods, you’re sure to squeeze hours upon hours of fun out of this game.
And here are some of the best mods you can get to take your space exploration experience to the next level.
Colorful Icons is a great pairing for the HUD Colors mod, taking things a step further in giving more “life” to the game.
I’m not sure why they decided to keep everything in that washed out blue color scheme, but thanks to these mods you can change things up.
Colorful Icons gives you complete freedom, letting you choose which icons will be changed, and includes colored icons for ores, ingots, components, and more!
Another questionable visual choice by Keen (in my opinion) is how they colored the atmosphere here.
I mean really, the typical galaxy milky-way coloring?
It oftentimes feels like you’re starting out into a child’s space painting instead of outer space itself.
Space Just Got Real is a quick and easy way to make the game much more immersive, making the unexplored depths of space look more realistic.
Based on actual NASA photos, modder Dr. Novikov plays around with shaders, shadows, lighting effects, and other visual properties of the game to make everything appear as real as possible.
As building and crafting is a huge part of Space Engineers, you’re definitely not going to regret installing Easy Inventory.
The mod is so good that Keen themselves took from it, with the modder’s permission of course.
All you have to do is select the block you want to build, and with a quick click, all required materials will be transferred to your engineer for easy building.
I need a “that was easy” button, stat.
Not only will this save you the trouble of having to select each piece needed for each build, but it will save a lot of real-world time as well.
While there are mods that add functionality and data displays to aid your space exploration, there are lots of useful scripts that let you automate certain commands as well.
Taleden’s Inventory Manager is a great example, automating inventory actions so you don’t have to do things manually all the time.
With the mod installed, you’ll be able to sort your inventory items into different containers, depending on how you want them organized.
Plus the mod gives you options to prioritize certain materials, so everything is arranged exactly how you want it.
Another useful text display script, this time giving oxygen and pressure information for each room of your ship.
You can set up displays for each room of your ship. But what’s really cool about this mod is it allows you to create a sort-of “master hub” which displays the values for every room.
With the master set up, you’ll have a quick overview of oxygen levels for each room of the ship, displayed in bars and percentage values.
Yes, there’s even a neat script for your very own space buddy.
Now don’t expect too much here. You’re not getting an actual human being as a companion.
The My Buddy mod lets you create a companion out of a drone, having him automatically follow you around wherever you go.
The mod gives you options that you can set, like how far you should be for the drone to start following you, how far a drone will stay away from its target, and a quick toggle switch to make the drone stop following you when you don’t need him anymore.
Rdav has created some of the most original scripts out there.
And I highly recommend giving these next two mods a try.
He actually takes inspiration from real-time strategy games to give you easier control of units in Space Engineers, with Fleet Command MKII targeted specifically at controlling ship fleets.
From an LCD within your own ship, you’ll be able to control movement and actions of a separate fleet as you would in an RTS game.
Point and click to tell them where to go, and what to do, simple as that.
While combat is barely the primary focus of Space Engineers, fans of Star Wars or Star Trek might like the idea of building large battleships.
With that, there are some mods that make combat more interesting.
Like the OKI Grand Weapons Bundle.
The pack includes a number of turrets and cannons to play around with, along with mounts and casemates, depending on what you need for each of your ships.
Adding a little trace of life around the galaxy can go a long way to making the world feel alive.
The Air Traffic mod makes randomly generated cargo ships appear around the atmosphere, giving you some opportunity to interact with other characters in the game.
You could treat them as friendlies and let them fly by.
Or you could put your XX-9 to good use and shoot them out of the sky.
If the social aspect of the game is really valuable to you, then you’re probably going to want to install More NPC Encounters from modder superhappyalien.
While the game does provide a few chance encounters, there really isn’t much to look forward to.
This mod simply adds a bunch of new random encounters for you to enjoy, as you’ll be seeing a lot more NPCs from cargo ships to pirates.
Other than the Death Star gun and Star Trek cockpit, the modding community has come up with loads of new parts for you to use to make your Space Engineers ships even better.
This mod lets you place a completely functional cloaking device on your ship.
Now that’s something to wrap your brain around.
If you’re looking to sneak up on enemy ships, or stealthily make an escape from battle, all you have to do is fire up your cloaking device and you’ll be completely invisible.
The cloaking device block comes in small and large variants, and they’re paintable as well.
So you won’t have to worry about it making your ship look bad.
If you want even more ship parts to play around with, the Small Ship Mega Mod Pack is a fantastic place to start.
As the name suggests, it gives you over 50 new custom parts to use when building small ships.
The pack includes everything from walls, doors, antennas, and even weapons.
The mod is actually the result of a collaborative effort between 11 different modders, and according to them it should offer pretty much everything you could possibly need.
Taking modding beyond automation scripts and ship parts, you can even change the entire universe within Space Engineers.
Whether you feel like you’ve explored enough of the vanilla universe, or just want to check out some of the custom content available, there are loads of universe alterations out there.
Let’s start with this custom universe mod by Posivi.
One of the largest ones out there, offering a huge universe with five whole solar systems to explore.
The universe houses 35 planets, which are all randomly placed – so they won’t be appearing on your GPS.
Dead Sun is another interesting universe. It’s built around the special planet of the same name.
The universe contains four planets, each with their own moons surrounding them.
Other than Earth, Mars, and one alien planet, in the top left corner of the universe is Dead Sun.
It poses a real challenge to get however, as the planet’s gravity is extremely high, and the heat makes it difficult to stay for extended periods of time.
It will be worth it to explore though, as Dead Sun contains some of the rarest ores in the universe.
These last two aren’t as big compared to other entries, but are more like bonus mods that showcase the endless possibilities offered in Space Engineers.
This particular mod adds a custom part that allows you to build your very own Iron Man reactor in Space Engineers.
Building one will cost you 1.67 Iron and 3.33 Uranium ingots, but will prove invaluable once completed.
Having your very own Iron Man reactor grants you infinite suit power in the game. Quite a valuable treat!
Come on, the idea of having a Terminator T600 in any game is just cool as hell.
There’s really not much more to say here!
This just goes to show that anything is possible with modding, and I’m sure there’s still loads of interesting content to come for this game down the line.
