15 ESSENTIAL mods for Space Engineers you NEED TO USE! (2024) 

What are your most essential Space Engineers mods? Let me know!

One mod that is way too underrated in my opinion is Easy Block Renaming. Basically what it does is give you the ability to rename multiple blocks at once or only giving them a certain prefix or suffix. It's not a lot, but I always appreciate not having to spend half an hour on renaming all the blocks on a new ship

One of my new favs is Autofill Bottles by Echthros - whenever you are in a piped cockpit or refill at a medical station, your bottles will top off as well as your suit. It may be another 'lazy' one, but it's been really helpful. If I remember right, being in an oxygenated environment with your helmet open also (slowly) refills your O2 bottles, since it fills your suit too.

Ok, here is my top list: 1. Plugin Loader 2. SEWorldgen (easy solar system maker) 3. Multigrid Projector (one click to assemble projection & keybind mode for projector) replaces Production Quota. I don't like this mod since I use Isy's Inventory Manager anyway. 4. Mechanical Keybinds (for other keybinds) 5. BuildInfo (I don't see a need for build vision. I rarely edit single blocks.) 6. Air Leak Finder (is now seperate from BuildInfo) 7. Ore Detector+ (400m+) because I don't want to mess around with config files every time I make a new world, welders and drills are good enough and 7a. JumpDrive 10x 8. Real Orbits Note: Platinum/Uranium on Modded Moons and Planets and in Asteroid Belts 9. Atmospheric Physics + Re-entry 10. Smooth Voxels breaks Modded Planets, which usually are more rover friendly already, so every Planet Mod here 11. Colorful Icons 12. Thruster VFX Framework + Hydrogen Visuals 12a. Ion/Hydro Mix Thrusters Note: You can make Ships without thruster banks, It is quite fun to hide them. Skill issue for you, if you build Box ships. Also, for larger ships we get Prototech thrusters so... don't use Thrust multiply mods. It's too creative-mode for me... 13. Hydrogen Rebalance. 1MW for 1 O2/H2 generator running slightly slower. 14. NPC Takeover Mod 15. Exploration Mod(s), at least MES without any module. 16. Sneaky Sounds. *GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRinder* Note: If I see one "but console" comment: The PC masterrace wants to talk to you. Consoles are dead. Nintendo only makes handhelds, and Microsoft actively moves to the cloud and to Game Pass, to kill the console even faster. what did I forget?... see in comments

I've added AI enabled to every server I've ran and to this day only one of the players figured out it can be used for autobuild despite several constantly requesting build and repair lol

People after downloading AI enabled: “I am the leader of the most powerful droid army the galaxy has ever seen!”

Dude build vision is so good for when u have like 50 lights on ur base and want to change the specific color of one light but dont know its name, so u just walk up too it and change it, hands down best mod ever

Build vision and Info is so good the Devs should incorporate it into the base game!

zer0: you probably want to set it to something balanced me: no

I really REALLY enjoy the Real Stars mod. Being able to set up multiple 'solar systems' of planets for my server to explore without the need for complicated 'transfer grids between worlds' things was so cool.

Aaaand I added 2 mods from this list, thank you :3 But the mods are most essential to me nowdays are ISY solar alignment recolorable thrusters Lord Wiaders Tiered Systems Speed mod Exploration Enhancement mod for an easier start Gravel shifter

I blame the planet for all my problems

Instead of vanilla+ , get the one called "Expanded Settings" it does the same but let you change more options, like you suit fuel capacity or the suit thrusters output, how much ore you find and even edit if those ore spawn on planets, moons and asteroids

I'm sorry, you can COPY settings with Build Vision?!?!? Incredible. Absolutely incredible! Excellent list :)

gravel sifter is definetly a must have mod. it uses extra gravel to make a smidgen bit more of resources for you

Dangerous decompression is a great mod for a little more realism and another shipbuilding mod which is good if your to lazy to build is shipyard revival

For me nothing is more essential than Rotary Airlocks. Totally forgot The "Auto Fill Bottles".

The thing with the kind of absent colours in Space Engineers has to do with Marek Rosa (the chief boss of Keen) being colorblind. For him this blue tinge everywhere is optimal. I mean it is hard to do some kind of colour design stuff for color blind people!

Some quality of life mods I like are: Autofill Bottles, Cooperative NPC Takeover and Automatic Ore Pickup. I forget the name of the mod, but I replaced the standard drop pod with a little rover, which I think is another great quality of life addition. It doesn't come with power generation to start, but it lets you relocate from your original landing location right away which is a huge help.

Industrial overhaul is just my favorite mod for SE, it makes progression so much better and harder than vanilla, but it can be hardh on single player for it massive need for resources, so i balance it out with the resource node (auto miners), pipelines and power tethers, allowing me to enjoy the game without needing to spend the majority of my time grinding minerals

That "AI Enabled" and "Crew Enabled" at 16:37 looks truly incredible, a fantastic replacement for NanoBot Build and Repair. And on top of that, it also adds enemies to fight with weapons, spectacular.

Zero had his motorcycle for a solid 10 seconds 😔

Subgrid thrusters manager and realistic thrusters (aerodynamic) are musthave

You're not the last rover enthusiast - I love my trucks, and Smooth Voxels.

i was waiting for this

space engineers has so many cool mods i think i am gonna learn how to make some

The planets are literally quite rough around the edges 😉. If you use Smooth Voxels, add my Seams Fixed mod for an even smoother experience 😄.

Small Blocks as Static Grid, the one by Skallabjorn.You're able to place small grid blocks into voxels to create a static grid, just like you can with large grid blocks. Well, as long as that block type is allowed (the permissions list is the same for SG and LG). This is _incredibly_ useful for a number of niche applications. You can, for example, plop the tiny battery into the wall of your tunnel and put an interior light on it. That will last for many in-game days if you configure the light sensibly. I also like to use it to create solar powered lighting systems along roads and various other mini-waystations. Lastly, I like to use it alongside the align to gravity feature to create gravity driven drillheads over resource nodes. The design I use relies on an event controller to stop the drill when the cargo is full, and it digs a nice, perfectly straight access shaft down to the resource in question for a front oriented mining ship to use later on. And all of that without using one of the mods that adds more small grid blocks or small grid versions of the large grid only blocks in vanilla.

Oh, I really like that mechanical key bind mod. Didn't know about that. Thanks.

This series is exactly what I need!

Smooth Voxels is my cup of tea, also being a rover fan, terrain is not good and smashes a rover in a few Km and thats if you drive steady, so until I found Smooth Voxels I kept away from rovers, but now are a big part of my game. Nice vid, a coulpe of mods there that I now use, cheers ;)

Some of these mods (Build vision, work quota, mechanical keybinds, etc), and a bunch more are contained in a pair of mods that automatically load these mods into the game, so you don't have to keep wondering if you selected them. These are AQD - Vanilla Extension and AQD - Quality of Life. This also includes quality of life stuff I can't live without, like camera panning and auto-run. If you don't want all the mods, too, the workshop page lists all the mod it includes as dependencies, so you can go grab them individually if you are so inclined. Another mod I like is Relative Top Speed. This mod increases ship top speed to 150m/s, and allows you to set different top speeds for small and large grid. The really unique thing, however, is that a grid's top speed is affected by the ships mass. Make a ship out of nothing but heavy armor blocks, and you're looking at a ship that may reach 90m/s. while light craft will enjoy the full range of the odometer. All of these settings can be adjusted in a config file, including how much weight affects speed, overall top speed, etc.

the thruster one seems especially useful for making compact but fast ships, I'm glad I learned about it and the keybind mod

I haven’t played SE in a long while. These would definitely make the game more fun for me. (Solo Player)

Thank you so much I built way too many ships without knowing where the air leak was and it is such a pain

I would say the paint gun and improvised engineering are the most useful mods i have, especially since i changed the strength and can now yeet a small ship into space

Color Replacer. its a block you place on a grid and you can edit the color values of all blocks on the grid, so if you picked the wrong shade of yellow for half your ship, you can edit all blocks of that color to be the shade of yellow you want.

I prefer the relative speed mod so size of grid effects speed meaning bigger ship more thrust needed Colourful icons has an add-on for ingots With advanced welding I use improvised engineering (grid manipulation mod) I'd recommend cross section projector so you never miss a block building

A simple but cool mod is hydrogen thrusters visuals by Mexpex, just makes hydrogen thrusters look WAY cooler than just an pale orange shape

My favorite mods that you didn't mention in the video are the Deflector Shields mod and Camera Panning mod that allows you to look around with your cameras

AQD (A Quantum of Depth) Is an amazing collection of mods that you can pick and choose from, i usually go for ore distribution as it gives you a reason to travel to other planets. That and smooth voxels all the waaay

I have used so many different combinations of mods from my over 200 mod pool for different playthroughs so it's hard to pick what is my essential mod for my every playthroughs so here's my list of favorites. Resource & stuff mods (Gravel Sifter) wish you had more use for gravel? well with this you can transform your gravel into little bit of everything, there is many this kind of mods, some are more balanced and some are pretty OP, stone only challenge when? :D (Resource Nodes) too lazy to mine your resources? don't want to make your world full of holes? infinite resource veins? well this is mod for you, you just need to find ore vein and place your static drill down and watch as the ores starts flowing, best part is that it doesn't cause changes to voxels so there was some technical upside too. (Industrial Overhaul) ohh where do i even start? i remember when this came and it was my instant favorite mod of all time, this is probably one of the biggest mod there is, progression too simple? tired of one assembler to build them all? well no more as this really overhauls everything, with this mod you really want to go industrial big. Buildables (Tiered Tech Modules) need more powerful thrusters? power production? ship tools? even bigger cargo? it have it all but you have to acquire some tech components from unknown signals, buy it from npc trade stations, or if you have mods that add PvE then you can find loot from those too. (Elite Dangerous: FSD Supercruise) it's like jump drive... but it works very differently and is more fun, also is configurable to work in planets. (Pipelines) long range item transportation without moving parts, works well with (Resource Nodes) (Extreme Lights) why build many lights when you can have one big lamp to light your whole base? PvE enhancing mods (Aryx Weapon Enterprises) Guns... lots of guns (Defense Shields & NPC Defense Shields Provider) Make your PvE experience little bit more interesting. (Suite Combat Balancer) now you need more than just grinder to take over enemy base (Hostile Takeover) less hassle to take over enemy base (Personal Shield Generators) makes you whole lot more durable but not quite invincible, you can take few shots from those interior turrets and walk it off. Colorful mods (Color Hud) gives little color to your hud (Colorful icons) more color (Recolorable Thrusters) tired of that old yellow hydrogen thruster color or that blue ion thruster color? now you can make it any color you want! works even on atmo thrusters. Other (Improvised Experimentation) goes well with (Advanced welding) since you can pickup and move your grids with your character. (No Inventory Full Sound) yes yes i know my inventory is full (Sleep Mod) now you can sleep in the night and wake at the morning :) (Configurable Parameters) does many things but my favorite part in this mod is that you can chance economy quite bit with this like npc trade stations buy/sell amounts and refresh times, it really makes npc economy more viable when you want to go big. (Blåhaj - Shark Plushie) also last but not least the best mod ever :D

i love space engineers. but the universe always felt so emty. crew enabled is fucking game changing. i might actually come back with this one.

A mod that has become a must in my mod list is "Configurable Parameters" it can replace many other mods and is configurable in the game. I use it primarily instead of sneaky sounds as it can also reduce many more sounds than just the tools (like large grid thrusters, I find them horrible when travelling at high speed in space) and also to change the max speeds. I try to stay away from mods that just boost the vanilla blocks like "Configurable vanilla +", I prefer a system where if you want more from a block like the welder you need a better type of welders that need more resources to build. an example of this is my own ship tools+

Two mods that I like and don't think that they're cheaty is Gravel Sifter(It consumes gravel and gives you ores, even special ones(uranium, platinum and more)) the only reason I don't think it's cheaty is because the yield is very low, to the point where a single uranium meteorite has way more uranium than tons of gravel. The second is configurable parameters, it's like yours but it's on a in game GUI and per world instead

I'd note that the production quota and mechanical keybinds have alternatives in form of scripts, with Isy's Inventory and PARK respectively, and in both cases the scripts come with more functionality than the mods.

This is actually a really good mod list! Definitely gonna use this for my space engineers play through

VCZ Elevator 2.0 is one of my most essential mods to add. It adds a series of elevator blocks. Can even add cheesy elevator music and a string of Christmas lights to the elevator car. It’s a “should be vanilla” mod.

The 2015, DX9 compatible, Arrakis spice corporation's "overstuffed chair" is a must-have for any instance of space engineering. Speed mods are also pretty cool.

My go-to (other than the ones you listed here, those are on the top of the list as well) include Eyes Just got Clear, Automatic Ore Pickup, Autofill bottles, and Zero's Tweaks mods. Obviously ;)

Love your mod videos! I would love a video about your favourite mods for a single player PVE experience. Searched so long but didn’t found something appropriate.

There’s a mod I’ve been messing with called guided missiles which makes the vanilla rockets track its target. The dependency for the mod also allows the fireworks to be used as flares to evade rockets. Add that with extended vanilla combat and the ship combat gets much more interesting

Still remember that Colorful Icons were a plugin before, which was much better. Advanced welding could be also used for batteries, so you don't need to grind them down and lose parts, just easily snap them to your base and recharge.

A very good video! Several of these (like Build Vision) should be in the vanilla game IMHO!

Крутое видео. Спасибо что хоть кто-то делает хороший контент по SE.

In my unbiased opinion TIO Industries Weapon Pack is the most essential mod on the workshop.

Gah leaks were driving me nuts. My mod stopped showing the find feature. Thanks for pointing out it's been separated into its own mod. Also thanks for adjustable thrust. It's always annoyed me having to pepper my builds with dozens of thrusters for planetary flights. Honestly if someday a mod comes along that has anti grav I'll ditch them all.

Build info @ vision 100% needs to be in base game. Great vid. Thank you🎉

I would like to mention : Life'Techs Power mod, as it actually gives a way to get rid of gravel and turn that into power instead of tossing it aside, sure it is a bit OP but still a rather cool mod and could have a bigger purpose down the line

Thanks great stuff 👍

Edge Be Gone! (No armor edges) Survival Subgrid Projection Reset Spectator Less Drill Dust and Stone Particles [UPDATED] Easy Block Renaming Color Hud (1.200) Welder Eyestrain Reduction Autofill Bottles and maybe that one as well: 6-Way Conveyor Hub for Small Ships

bit of a self plug because i have my own fork of the mod but Automated Inventory Sorting

The mod "Slightly Less Magical Electric Lights" is great it make lights more immersive

Modular Encounter Systems, maybe its cave addon but defenetly a bunch of the others. Does Isys Inventory Manager count? Definitely Configurable Parameters by The_Ich it just covers most of what you would want to change that´s not too specific and it can be done on the fly, at least mostly seems a bit different in multiplayer. Radio Spectrometry and Seismic Surveying, go and find those pescie rocks of uranium and all the illusive gold veins. DSR Compass HUD with degrees especially for multiplayer just tell your guy a heading and whola you both see the same thing. Cargo Fill Level LCDs is hella neat and I will start a world where all my rovers will have tank tracks thanks to digi.

I like most of these, but the thruster multiplier and configurable vanilla plus DO seem a little cheaty to me, especially since we have mods like tiered tech that offer the same thing but in a more immersive progression, which feels a lot more rewarding as a goal (and lord knows SE benefits from having more goals to reach.) Some of these stand to replace some classic mods I've used for years; I'll have to try them for a bit.

Better stone (realistic ore) a resource mode that needs to be in the bass game

Nah I actually just discovered this amazing item called wheels I've been a thruster boi for the past year but I have recently found a love in rovers.

Ayy hope you're enjoying your vacation!

The Build Brothers listed first. As they should be.

I kinda just wish they would revisit thruster upgrade blocks. Let me add on a boost block that increases thrust at the cost of higher power. And let me stack them. That way I didn't have to have big internal thruster rooms in my larger ships and I don't have to have the back end of my ship be a giant block of all thrusters. A couple of thrusters all linked to some upgrade blocks would be so much better. Also a half block sized thruster would be nice for making super small ships.

some of the mods i have but some of the others are really useful

See what I mean, he’s getting crazier people!

my personal favorite is vector trust

space engineers without mods is like a peanut butter jelly without jelly

There's a couple new ones in here for me. I'm "guilty" of using the B&R mod, and its sister mining mod (That I can't remember the exact name of). I HATE building massive ships, in Vanilla, and only in Vanilla from a blueprint, and miss out on some hidden reactors that are behind 3 layers of heavy blocks, or, that hidden conveyor tube that just got missed by the ship builder. B&R is a saviour for that. If the AI bots can do the same, it'd maybe feel a little less cheaty since it's got to go back and forth to get stuff, but, the convenience factor of being able to tear down ships with B&R....

I didn't know build vision could copy/paste settings

I love space engineers but I also haven't played it in like.... a year? Crazy

There are some mods that it is a crime they are not actually part of the game i think outside of god sends mentioned in the video is Gravel Sifter so that you can do something with all of that gravel! Also.... i love nanobots ;P

We need build mode that aligns to planetary gravity. I'm okay with being all spinny in space but I don't want 6d controls in the surface when I'm focusing on building stuff frfr

Theres a mod called ARYX enterprise, it adds a tooooooooon of guns, its so frickin cool

On the subject of sneaky sounds... ya know what would be cool ? ... If your visor was up it was louder, if down, muffled and more quiet !

One mod that I've played with, but now can't seem to find, is one that let you break the speed limit by actively thrusting against it, but with increasing drag the faster you went. This gave a point to having more thrusters on a ship, because it would actually let you run someone down rather than just getting to the speed limit faster. (If anyone knows the name of a mod that does this, it would be greatly appreciated.)

Paint gun mod, I cant build anything without it without color without it

I built my AI Enabled Repair bot, but its kinda glitchy, just standing there with a map icon above its head. It looks like hes always re-equipping his welder. Whats wrong?

Could you make a mod video about 2025 mods pls?

I hope smooth voxels is on Xbox. Even with my huge ass wheels, the dam thing got stuck tons of times. Not to mention that my parachute to catch me from jumps doesn’t work if an edge hits the bottom of my vehicle.

Nanite control factory is a more balanced build and repair system.

"Monkey brain allows us to recognize colors faster than shapes" Laughs in colorblind

not really good at space engineers, in fact my ships look horrible and my base is a square but even still I like to sometimes go mess with mods and I just found out about power tethers, oh my god power tethers how many times have I built an aircraft that flopped into the ground due to lack of power, only for me to spend hours trying to get them high enough to dock into the base to recharge, it got so bad that at one point I build a rover to charge other ships that would fall, but that didn't work, so ... yeah power tethers

As soon as Colourful Icons get their colours right, I might give it a go. Green uranium?! Wtf?!

One mod is Aryx weapon enterprizes

So we have heard of space engineers but have you ever thought of space plumbers

I wish alot of these were in vanilla, not that I play unmodded SE (that would be heresy).

Skitzy_VA, MR GREG at 1:00 ?? ???

Unfortunately, they aren’t found on the workshop. I just tried searching for it on XBox (the ONLY OTHER entertainment system I have) and it didn’t appear.

build and repair systems mod and drill and fill systems mod

Does controller work for PC Space Engineers? I've been trying for 2 years to connect my xbox controller but it doesn't work

do these mods need to be added to a server or are some of them client-side?

to counting i go

12:51 I've called it years ago that you might just have the female engineer model and now It's been finally proven. Also, you forgot about the infinite speed limit mod