How to Install Space Engineers and Join a Server

Your first serious ship will come apart. Not in combat, and not because a meteor hit it — because of a rotor you attached slightly wrong, which decides three hours into the build that it would rather be a spinning cloud of debris than a docking arm.

The community named the phenomenon after the noise it makes. Clang, capitalised, spoken about as a minor deity with opinions about your engineering. Space Engineers puts every block you place through a physics simulation that does not round off the awkward parts, and when a structure is under stress the game does not quietly forgive it.

That is the whole appeal. There are 12 servers listed here, which is a small population by any measure, and each one is a persistent world where somebody else's badly-braced piston arm is a live hazard alongside yours.

What the game actually is

You build things out of blocks, in space and on planets, and then the things have to work.

Everything is made of two block scales. Large grid is for stations and capital ships — anything you want to walk around inside. Small grid is for fighters, rovers, mining drills and the little utility craft you actually spend most of your time in. A block placed on one scale will not attach to the other without a connector between them, and working that out on your own costs most people an afternoon.

The loop underneath is mining and refining. You cut ore out of asteroids or dig it out of a planet, feed it into a refinery, turn the refined material into components in an assembler, and weld those components into blocks. Ice is its own thing entirely — it becomes oxygen to breathe and hydrogen to burn in thrusters, and a ship with hydrogen thrusters and no ice supply is a very expensive paperweight.

Creative mode removes all of that. Blocks are free, you fly without fuel, and whole ships can be pasted in from a clipboard. Survival is the mode the servers run.

What you need before you start

Space Engineers is a paid game on Steam. Install it the ordinary way, through the Library. If Steam itself is new to you, the guide to installing Steam covers the account side and, more usefully, securing it before you own anything worth stealing.

The hardware note is not the usual one. Graphics matter less here than processor speed, because the thing eating your frames is the physics simulation working out what several thousand blocks are doing to each other. A large multiplayer world with four active bases and a dozen ships is a heavier load on a CPU than most shooters are on a graphics card. Machines that run modern games comfortably still stutter in a busy Space Engineers world, and that is normal rather than broken.

Disk space is modest by current standards. Save files grow, though, and a long-running world you host yourself will keep growing.

Learn to build offline first

Start a creative world before you go anywhere near a server.

Twenty minutes in creative teaches you things no server will have the patience to teach you. Place a cockpit, put thrusters on all six sides, add a gyroscope, then try to fly it. Discover that you left out the gyroscope and cannot turn. Add a battery, discover the difference between a battery and a reactor, and then discover that your small grid welder cannot reach the large grid block you wanted to repair.

Two tools do most of the work in survival. The welder builds a block from its skeleton up, and the grinder takes it back down into components. Grinding is also how you take somebody else's ship apart, which is worth knowing before you leave anything unattended near another player.

The other thing to try offline is a rotor with a piston on the end of it. Attach one, put weight on the far end, and watch what happens. Now you understand Clang, and you will design around it for the rest of your time with the game.

Server settings change the game more than mods do

Two Space Engineers servers running no mods at all can still be radically different games, and the settings that cause it are all visible before you join.

Inventory and refinery multipliers. A server running everything at the base rate is a slow, deliberate game where a single large ship is a project measured in weeks. Multiplied rates compress that to an evening. Neither is wrong; they are aimed at different amounts of free time.

PCU limits. Every block carries a performance cost, and servers cap how much of that budget each player gets. A generous cap means capital ships. A tight one means the server has decided that everybody flying frigates is better than two people flying dreadnoughts and nobody else getting a frame rate.

Block limits. Separate from PCU, and aimed at the specific blocks that hurt — whichever weapon or thruster arrangement the admin has had trouble with before.

Whether other people can grind your things. This is the single question that determines what kind of server you are on. Some worlds are entirely cooperative and treat theft as a bannable offence. Others treat your unattended mining rig as a resource deposit with pre-refined ore in it.

Read the description on a listing before you commit a weekend to a base. Our notes on what makes a server listing trustworthy apply here more than in most games, because in a building game the cost of picking wrong is not a wasted match — it is a wasted month.

Mods, and why the first join takes a while

Space Engineers uses the Steam Workshop, and servers advertise the mods they run. Joining a modded world downloads that mod list before it lets you in.

This is a one-time cost per mod, not per session, but a heavily modded server can push a serious amount of content the first time. The loading screen will sit there looking stalled. Leave it alone.

Mods in this game are rarely cosmetic. They add block types, change progression, add scripted NPC factions that fly around and shoot at you, or rework how the economy behaves. A server's mod list is a genuine description of what it is, and skimming it is faster than reading the server's own advertising.

There is a second layer below mods: the programmable block, which runs scripts written by players. Servers choose whether to allow them. On a server that does, a fair proportion of what you see other people flying is doing something clever that a script is driving — automated docking, inventory sorting, displays that report on the ship's state.

Finding a server and connecting to one

There is no matchmaking. You choose a specific machine belonging to a specific person, which is the same arrangement that every game on this site uses and the thing most modern players have to unlearn.

The in-game join screen separates dedicated servers from worlds other players are hosting from their own machines. Both work. Dedicated servers stay up when their owner goes to bed, which is what you want for anything you intend to build in.

Two habits make this easier. The first is the friends and favourites tabs — once you have found a world you like, save it, because the list re-sorts every time and finding the same server twice by scrolling is miserable. The second is the Steam client's own server browser, under the View menu, which keeps a favourites list of its own and accepts an address directly.

The list on this site queries each server rather than repeating what its owner claims, so the player count you see is measured. Copy the whole address including the port. Servers running on a port other than the default are completely ordinary — one machine frequently hosts several worlds, and they cannot all share a number.

Region matters more than it looks like it should. Physics state has to stay synchronised between you and the server, and a high-latency connection to a busy world produces a specific kind of misery where your ship appears to be somewhere it is not. If you have a choice, pick something close; where a server is hosted is worth as much as its rules are.

Sim speed is the number that matters

Every Space Engineers server has a simulation speed, and it is the honest measure of that server's health.

At full speed the world runs in real time. When the physics load exceeds what the machine can process, simulation speed drops below one, and everything slows down together — your ship, the drills, the timers, all of it. It is not lag in the networking sense. The world is genuinely running slower than the clock.

Causes are predictable. Too many active grids, too many moving subgrids, a player who has built something enormous, or a wrecked ship nobody cleaned up that is still being simulated block by block. Good admins run cleanup on debris and enforce PCU limits precisely because of this, and a server that does neither will degrade over a few weeks no matter how good it looked on day one.

If a server feels sluggish, ask in its chat what the sim speed is. Regulars will know, and their answer tells you whether you are looking at a temporary spike or a world that has been quietly dying since last month.

Problems worth expecting

Your ship drifts after you leave the seat. Inertial dampeners are the setting you are looking for, and whether they are on when you exit the cockpit is a habit you will develop after losing one ship to a slow drift into an asteroid.

You suffocate in your own base. Airtightness depends on a sealed hull and a working air vent, and a single missing block or an open door ruins it. The game will show you which rooms are pressurised.

Blocks refuse to place. Usually the wrong grid scale, sometimes a block limit the server has set, occasionally clearance you do not have.

Your ship survives the build and dies on the first landing. Landing gear does not always attach where you expect. Test it somewhere you do not mind losing it.

Everything you own has been ground down while you were asleep. That is a PvP server, and it was in the description.

Hosting your own

The dedicated server tool is available on Steam and the game will also host from inside the client, the same way most sandbox games do. A client-hosted world dies when you close the game, which is fine for an evening with two friends and useless for a base you want to still exist next Tuesday.

For anything persistent you need a machine that stays on. Renting is the ordinary answer, and what that costs is worth reading before you commit, because Space Engineers wants more processor than a typical rented slot advertises. Undersize it and you will spend your evenings watching simulation speed sit at 0.6.

If you do stand one up and nobody arrives, the reasons are usually mundane. We wrote about why nobody joins your server, and the Space Engineers version of it is almost always a mod list so long that joining takes fifteen minutes.

If this appeals but the setting does not

The building-and-physics itch has other outlets, and several of them have healthier populations. Empyrion covers similar ground with a stronger campaign structure. Satisfactory points the same engineering instinct at production lines rather than spacecraft. Starbound does exploration and colonies in two dimensions.

None of them will tear your ship apart because you put a hinge in the wrong place. That is either the reason to leave Space Engineers or the reason to stay.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Space Engineers servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page, and Space Engineers's own numbers — servers online, players now, activity by hour — are on its statistics page.