I'm consistently impressed with every new system i encounter in the game. When my friends and i started up the game and dove into a solar system, we self-prescribed our goal to be that of starting on a planet with just the drop pod to building a space ship that is both self-sufficient and big enough to park several smaller space ships within it, and we're 60 hours in after owning the game for maybe a full week, and it's so hard to put down.

All of the vanilla core systems and mechanics of the game are so solid, it's wonderful. Oh there's a weight system? That's nothing new. Oh wait, the suspension of my rover squats down when i throw my inventory into it??? Way cool. Oh there's hinge, piston, and rotor blocks? That's cool, nothing particularly new. Oh you can strap the mining drill onto a big extendo chain of pistons and bore holes into the earth??? It was impractical and ended up self-destructing, but it was so fun and engaging coming up with the idea and actually building it.

It's that cycle of realizing there's a mechanic/system in this game that you've seen in plenty of other games and environments, but then you realize this game has just done it SO much better, and that there's so much more going on that compliments that system and directly interacts with it that makes it so rich and worth exploring. Plus, for as deep as the game is, the depth is also very well paced (for the survival side of the game, starting on earth-like planet where nothing is too hardcore). Each set of tools and systems open up to you in a sequence that feels digestible without being too overwhelming, and the only real negative thing i have to say about that process is the start can be a little boring. Holding left click on rock voxels and carting inventories of stone back and forth got boring really quickly, but if you're ambitious enough, you can move past that stage quickly.

Another ****HUGE***** positive for me, as the guy in the group that always hosts the game on his pc for the group, is the server tool. The dedicated server tool that this dev team created for their game is hands down the most streamlined and straightforward tool i have ever used, and i would absolutely kiss them on their mouths if i had the chance. Especially after coming from trying to host an Ark server a couple months ago, which had one of the absolute worst server tools and networking i've ever seen in a video game in my entire life, every feature of the space engineers server tool makes me literally smile in real life. The port used by default is the mega common steam port of 27016, all of the world files are easy to find folders you can just Ctrl+C-Ctrl+V into the server's own folder and it autodetects, you can log into steam with the click of a button, which in turn syncs your friends list that you can whitelist/block/admin/etc with the press of a button, you can manage mods with your synced list of subscribed mods on the workshop that just enable/disable with one click, you have the full list of server parameters for the selected world save pulled up that have tooltips and everything, i can go and on about how absolutely fantastic this tool is for the end user experience. So again, from the bottom of my server-hosting heart, thank you so much SE dev team for your fantastic server tool.