The developers at Keen Software House have come up with a plan to get their goal of infinite space in Space Engineers working. To add the thousands of new ships and stations required to populate the game world, Keen would have to put hundreds of designers to work, either producing ships from scratch or creating a software system that would randomly generate them.
Or they could use the designs of the thousands of community members Space Engineers has accumulated. There are 50,000 of them sitting there on Steam Workshop, afterall.
Talking about the studio’s plans on his blog, developer Marek Rosa said: “We could use what the SE community has already created – more than 50,000 creations on Steam Workshop. We would browse all ships/stations/blueprints and decide which ones get included into Space Engineers.”
“We like [this] option the most and I hope you will too. The Steam Subscriber Agreement allows us to include all workshop creations into our game, but since this may be a big thing for some people, we decided to ask what our community thinks.”
A survey has been set up to ask how the community feels about the move. Any creation included in Space Engineers would have its designer’s name added to the game credits. The creations in question must be ships, asteroid outposts, hidden stations, mining operations, semi-automated drones, and other similar space equipment. They need to work with the vanilla game without mod support, and can’t be based on other IP (sorry, no X-Wings or Battlestars here).
Quite a clever move from Keen to inject Space Engineers with a huge chunk of content quickly. But will the community approve?