Star System
The game Space Engineers is set in a star system containing planets and moons and asteroids.
Note: There is also a specific Sandbox Game template called Star System/Home System which contains everything mentioned here. Other templates and scenarios may contain fewer planets.
This article is about properties of the game's star system contrasted with how it is in real life.
Gallery
Moon and Earthlike in the front, Triton left in the back, Mars and Europa top-right, Alien in the bottom right.
How to identify planets from space
How to identify planets seen from the Alien planet
Solar eclipses and planetary transits. Red arrows indicate planets. The dashed yellow line indicates the ecliptic.
A holographic projection of the same solar system map on the captain's bridge.
The Sun
The name of the sun or star system in game is never mentioned.
The sun is a light source painted on the skybox and you can never reach it. As a simplification, the skybox rotates around the Earthlike planet in the center, which is in contrast to real life, where the planets rotate, and also orbit the sun Sol.
The sun moving instead of the planets rotating also means that the length of a day in game is the same on each planet (by default 2 hours, this can be configured in the World Settings).
Star System Size
If you traveled from one side of the game world to the other, and you fly at in-game maximum speed of 115 m/s, it would take you 552 years (2 x 6.6 AU / 115 m/s)! For practical purposes, the game world feels "infinite", but technically, it has of course limits.
The radius of the star system on PC is 1,000,000,000 km[1], which equals to 6.6 AU (astronomical unit; 1 AU = 150,000,000 kilometres). For illustration, 6.6 AU is slightly more than the distance from the Sun to Jupiter in real life.
The game uses double-precision 64-bit floating point numbers, even though Havok, the physics engine, uses only 32-bit floating point numbers. For optimisation, the world in Space Engineers is split into independent clusters, wherein each object has its own coordinates relative to the cluster center, that Havoc can handle in 32-bit.
Common cluster sizes are 50-100km, the minimal cluster size is 20km. A clustering algorithm guarantees that no dynamic object is closer than 2km to a cluster border. Clustering is totally transparent to us players, it happens in the background and we won’t see any borders.
How to Identify Planets in the star system
Looking through a camera, you can distinguish planets in space by their colours and by whether you see a moon or not.
- Pertam (small and reddish) and Triton (small and white) have no moons.
- Alien planet and Mars are both reddish with moons, but Alien has a cyan atmosphere and cyan lakes.
- EarthLike Planet has a grey moon and a thick blue atmosphere and is noticeably green-yellow-white
When you are on a planet's surface, it's good to watch the sun over the course of a day, to align solar panels. The apparent path of the sun against the sky is called the ecliptic.
If you observe a low ecliptic close to the horizon, it means you are in one of the polar regions of the planet. A steep ecliptic with the sun straight above you means you are near the equator of the planet.
You may notice that many other planets lie on the same ecliptic plane, resulting in observable eclipses[2] and planetary transits[3].
You may also be interested in drawing a star system map.
Star System Gravity
There are no planetary orbits in game. Planets, moons, asteroids, and stations are static and are not in any way affected by gravity.
Gravity in game affects only players, items, Artificial Mass blocks, and mobile grids, such as spaceships and rovers.
If an Admin were to spawn in two planets very close to each other, so they are inside each other's gravitational fields, they would remain motionless and not collide with each other. Players and vehicles travelling between them would, however, experience strange gravitational phenomena, comparable to overlapping artifical gravity fields.
Moons in game possess weaker gravitational fields than planets, only 0.25 g. Asteroids in game are smaller than moons and planets and have no perceivable gravity.
Lore
The sandbox game doesn't explicitly state the name of the sun or its star system. Some planets are similar to Earth's solar system, while others are very different. We know from the scenarios that the blue faction is called Sol Cooperative, but that could also mean that they originated from Sol and are here to explore this (as of yet unnamed) star system.
For your own playthroughs, you can customise the game and rename and change the planets to be any star system you want to set your story in.
Related Mods
- Add more planets from the Steam Workshop
- Add more planets from Mod.io
- Patrick's Star System Generator - The fastest way to start a new game with randomly positioned planets.
- For Modders the spawn menu contains a SystemTestMap.
References
- ↑ https://blog.marekrosa.org/2014/12/space-engineers-super-large-worlds_17.html
- ↑ During a solar eclipse on Earth, our moon casts a shadow on a small region of the planet's surface, where it results in twilight during the day for a few minutes. In game, various eclipses are observable.
- ↑ During a planetary transit, you see another planet as a (generally tiny) black dot in front of the sun. In real life, you can only observe that with protective instruments, but in game, you can sometimes see it happen during the day.