Space Engineers, a sci-fi open world sandbox game, has been in Steam Early Access for over five years. The developers announced last week that the title would finally leave Early Access on February 28, and sure enough, it's now officially a finished game. To celebrate, Space Engineers is now 20% off on Steam, and it's free to play for the next three days.

If you're completely unfamiliar with it, Space Engineers describes itself as an "open world sandbox game defined by creativity and exploration." You can build space ships, outposts, space stations, wheeled vehicles, and more—in both creative and survival modes. It received a major visual overhaul earlier this month.

You can buy Space Engineers right now on Steam for $15.99, 20% off the original price. There's also a four-pack available for $47.99 (also 20% off), if you want to build crazy contraptions with friends.

Space Engineers, one of the best space games on PC, is finally leaving Early Access after more than five years and 200 updates. The stellar sandbox will reach 1.0 on February 28, accompanied by a major survival overhaul. It will be one of the biggest overhauls it's seen and, according to Keen Software's Marek Rosa, Space Engineers will evolve from a sandbox into a game. 

The update will bring with it new blocks, including hydrogen engines and wind turbines, a progression system that will help orient new players, a new spawning system and scenarios. The latter, says Rosa, is a feature's he's particularly proud of, giving players new challenges to overcome. The game will launch with two of them, but more are planned. You can see more of what's heading to Space Engineers here. 

Leaving Early Access is apparently just the beginning of Space Engineers' journey (five years is a long time to get ready) and additional scenarios, blocks and more are in the works.  "We’re going to take Space Engineers to exciting places when it comes to gameplay, immersion, and challenges," says Rosa. 

It's been quite a long time since I last played Space Engineers, but it's still provided me with lots of entertainment. Messy co-op was where it shined, and my fondest memories are of building weird space robots and smashing them into my buddy's weird space robots to see who would win. Many of them sadly ended up hurtling into the void of space after the collision. Thanks, physics!  

I'm looking forward to smashing more things in space come February 28. And judging by the many update videos, I've got a lot of catching up to do. 

Co-op build 'em up Space Engineers, one of the best space games on PC, just received a major new update that overhauls the graphics and changes the way that surface vehicles work. A video for the update, above, shows that the game indeed looks better than ever, with lots of new particle effects and a freshly polished colour palette.

On the visual side, the changes really are substantial. You can read about them all in this blog post, but in short there are new textures, lighting effects, an optional cinematic mode, eye adaptation to sunlight, more lighting contrast and camera shake. The update has been a year in the making.

Most of the audio changes, which you can also read about in the blog or in the full change log for the update, tweak existing sounds to make them more impactful (you now hear a heavier sound when your character falls to the floor, for example), adds new sounds and changes the way the game prioritises sounds based on the distance of their origin from your character.

The changes aren't all on the presentation, though. Guns are more precise, players move faster, and gravity behaves more realistically. Some of the biggest changes have been made to surface vehicles (or "wheels", as the developers calls them). Players will now find that they're easier to handle, and you can hit a button to perform a suspension jump—handy if you get stuck on the environment. 

Again, all the changes, including a long list of bug fixes, can be found here. 

The patch note is an underappreciated art form. Among the dry details of damage buffs and bug fixes are occasionally brilliant puns or revelatory details about the absurd complexity of videogames. Dwarf Fortress is the undisputed king of unintentionally hilarious updates ("Cleaned up the bear situation"), but we've also written about some of the all-time greats from Ark: Survival Evolved, Rust, and World of Warcraft.

Absurdity is always with us, though, and the good gods know we've needed every laugh we could find in 2017. To find the very best ones, I dove through the 2017 community updates and patch notes from all kinds of games. Deep, open-world survival games are always good for a laugh. After all, they model systems like pooping and sleeping, and a mention of "shitting the bed" is already 90 percent of a joke.

H1Z1

12/13

• Blood effects have been changed back to the classic mist effect. 

12/7

• Toxic Cargo Pants have been updated to be more consistent 

11/15 

• Shooting from a passenger seat should no longer result in hitting a teammate in the backseat. 

8/29 

• Old rocks have been removed and replaced with new, varied rock formations.
• Players should no longer fall out of their parachute. 

7 Days to Die

via reddit user u/nettech09

10/26 

• Some general improvements to zombie jumping
• Fixed: Snakes are fireproof

8/31

• Fixed: Businessman Zombie when killed can have his head dislocated when he falls backwards 
• Fixed: Vultures can fly underwater
• Fixed: Bears and wolves walk on water 

8/04

• Fixed: Wrong open sound on eviscerated remains
• Fixed: Dysentery description does not mention that it is lethal 

6/06

• Added: Moldy Bread is a science crafting item
• Changed: Fat zombie cops are bigger
• Changed: Zombie soldiers are less generous with the rocket launchers
• Fixed: Breaking down a car on the sloped road will create a hole in the world 

Oxygen Not Included

10/5

• Stress vomiting Duplicants infected with Hypothermia should no longer vomit "Hypothermia germs" 

8/31

• Fixed a crash that could occur if a Duplicant died while using a wash basin 

3/02

• Algae distillery has a much longer conversion interval
• Duplicants no longer use the massage table during red alert 

Ylands

12/9

• Horse is no longer perceived as a threat when sleeping 

Medieval Engineers

via reddit user u/zacrynix

12/12

• Fixed a crash when you walk on the exact north pole. 

11/28

• The Janitor will now clean up any static grids in the center of the planet. 

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

via reddit user u/beerye 

12/27  

• Fixed the issue where the falling speed meter text was showing abnormally in Portuguese 

12/11

• Fixed the issue where player's footstep sound was silenced when player moved diagonally or wore particular shoes 

12/8

• Fixed the issue where while vaulting in FPP, player could look inside own body 

Lone Echo

8/30 

• Repeatedly punching the dummies will no longer result in a crash. Swing away. 

Prey

via reddit user u/everypostepic 

8/2

• Fixed crash when mimicking bass guitar in the Yellow Tulip.
• Player can no longer bypass ceiling collision by mantling GLOO. 
• If the player manages to fully GLOO the greater mimic while it is in mid-lunge toward the player's face, the facegrab animation will no longer play and trap the player. 

5/31

• Superfruit no longer appears shrunken and flat when fully grown.

As I slogged deeper and deeper into the year, dozens of tabs open across three monitors and a laptop, I started to get a little delirious. It was in this moment that I fell in love with the long-suffering community managers and blog writers who compile patch notes. These poor people cry out for help with little quips, "just to see if anyone is still reading this." My friends: I see you, and I love you. 

Astroneer

12/18

• Fixed a few other instances of Client players getting stuck in a wheelie while driving a Rover in Multiplayer games. 

10/12

• Fixed an issue where Rovers would fly into space when loading a save from a rover seat 

9/15

• Fixed a rare crash, that according to engineers was “super weird, and something that should never occur,” involving the game trying to access non-existent Rover wheels.
• Fixed an issue where items would go on a beautiful journey into space if not collected from an dead Astroneer before a second death occurs. 

Hitman

via reddit user u/newbzoors 

7/13

• We've fixed an issue that could cause the toilet in the Marrakesh school to behave erratically after 47 kicks it onto Zaydan. This could occasionally result in 47's death. Seriously. 

Total War: Warhammer

via reddit user u/flavahbeast 

10/25

• FIXED an issue with the AI proposing peace right after entering a war with the player
• FIXED a staircase in Lothern Siege battle map which would cause chariots to spontaneously combust
• FIXED CA Cinematics Team’s obsession with slaying High Elves. May require further testing…
• FIXED Spearmen unit in Tor Elithis Rogue army T-Posing
• Skavenslaves: more salt added to diet; now 25% more delicious 

8/9

• Under-Morking no longer automatically leads to over-Gorking, and vice-versa. The waxing or waning of Morrslieb may affect this. Or it may not. 

This article was originally published in PC Gamer issue 302. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US.  

In a Steam sale long ago, on a whim, Samuel picked up the sandbox and construction game Space Engineers. For this feature, he and Phil teamed up to build a spaceship in it, to leave Earth in that spaceship and to fly it to the Moon—all without knowing how the game actually worked, or paying any attention to its tutorials.

Finding each other 

Phil:  I launch a creative mode server, spawning in a base on Earth. Samuel joins, and... Sam, where are you?

Samuel: I’m 66km away, Phil, having spawned in the Earth’s atmosphere, and I’m in a landing craft which means I’m essentially falling with style rather than actually controlling where I’m going. You can’t just spawn next to a co-op partner in this game straight away, which is a bit annoying. But damn it, I want us to build a spaceship together.

Phil: I create a new faction, the PCG Space Boys, in the hope of getting a permanent waypoint marker for Samuel’s location. That doesn’t work. Instead, because I had to leave my original faction, my entire base becomes hostile to me. I flee to a nearby hill, set a manual GPS marker and wait. Then I build a sign, because what else are you going to do when you’re stranded alone on a hostile planet?

Samuel: Phil fiddles around until he finds out how to set a waypoint, and now I have to get to him. This means fitting atmospheric thrusters to my landing craft, which makes it just about fast enough to leapfrog across the world to where Phil waits for me. It’s fast enough to get me there, but not so fast that I can actually take off from the ground for more than ten seconds. When I reach my destination, I see a HELP sign very cleverly made out of spaceship parts. “I’m on top of the E,” Phil tells me. We meet at last.

Phil: We need a flat location to construct our ship, but we’d be building around machine gun fire if we did it back at my base. Instead we head to the valley below, and hope the ground is even enough to facilitate the construction of a spacefaring vessel. I bet NASA never had to deal with this shit. Another problem is that I don’t know how to play this game. Even building that HELP sign took longer than I’d care to admit. I plop down a cockpit, but sideways, embedding it in the ground. This won’t do at all.

Building a spaceship

Samuel: This is a PC Gamer ship, so damn it, we will build it out of red and black bricks. Phil’s cockpit is purple—and sideways. I start by placing a new cockpit and attach it to a block, so that the vague shape of a spaceship begins to take form. We agree that the ship needs two cockpits, because there are two of us, so we stick those together. I add two reactors, so the ship can actually take off, and then we start fitting thrusters onto it, which should—in theory—allow us to touch the stars. I also attach a couple of gyroscopes. I don’t know what they do, but they should probably be there, because science possibly.

Phil: While Samuel builds an impressive looking frame, I muck around in the background figuring out how things work. I place a couple of massive floodlights near our build to improve nighttime visibility—both to learn how electrical systems function, and because it sounds like the sort of thing a helpful, knowledgeable co-op partner would do. Samuel is fiddling with power sources and gyroscopes—all things I don’t understand—so to further mask my incompetence, I jump in and add thrusters. Lots and lots of thrusters.

Samuel: To be honest, on the quick play of Space Engineers I had before this, I basically just taped loads of thrusters to a cockpit and hoped for the best. So really, Phil and I are just as incompetent as each other. Who better to reach the Moon than us? 

Phil: The ship isn’t very aerodynamic-looking, but the sheer number of thrusters should count for something. As a final touch—because I appreciate the majesty of space travel—I strap a couple of seats to the top of the ship, creating an ad-hoc viewing platform. Again, it’s not scientifically advisable, but we seem to be invulnerable in creative mode, so what’s the harm?

Samuel: These seats, I should point out, are not in a contained environment, so humans probably shouldn’t sit on them on a moving spaceship. I sit down anyway and prepare for lift-off.

To the moon

Phil: The view from inside the cockpit seems weird, making it hard to get my bearings. I press W and nothing much happens. I press the spacebar, and we start to build some momentum. We reach an impressive height, but I’m navigating entirely with the altimeter because I can’t tell what’s happening outside my window. It almost looks as if the atmospheric engines are at the bottom of my viewscreen. But that would mean I was upside down, and perpendicular to the bottom of the craft. Surely not.

Samuel: Hmm, what design error could possibly have caused that? I’m not sure. It feels oddly rewarding to see our piece-of-crap spaceship break out of the Earth’s atmosphere, though, and to see the world behind us vanish. Hang on a minute. When I started the design of the ship, did I accidentally attach the cockpits so they were looking upwards instead of forwards? Is that what I did, Phil?

Phil: I think that’s what you did, Sam. That would explain why pressing the up key makes us go forwards. On the plus side, we’re 10,000 metres up in the sky—that’s basically space. On the down side, getting to the Moon would mean doing the entire journey looking 90 degrees away from the Moon. I don’t think I’m that good of a pilot.

Samuel: How did I not notice this during the test flight? I did wonder why you kept saying “the ship’s upside down!” when from my perspective in the cockpit it was clearly the right side up. You can’t muck about when it comes to the Moon. I decide to get off my chair in the middle of space and sort it out. It turns out this is a terrible idea—I float away uncontrollably.

Phil: I know it seems like I’m leaving you stranded in space, Sam, but this ship doesn’t have brakes. I turn off the engine and we both plummet back to Earth—me in the ship, Samuel in nothing but the astronaut suit he spawned in. Fortunately, we land only a couple of kilometres apart. We fix up the cockpit so that it points in the right direction, and, now that I can see where I’m going, we make it easily back into space. The Moon is quite some distance away, though, and even after we stop on an asteroid to add yet more thrusters, reaching it looks like it could take some time. I press W and wait.

Samuel: I have to go to a boring real-life meeting, which lasts for ten minutes. The Moon seems miles away when I leave. The second I come back, Phil is about to collide with the thing. We did it! We went to the Moon! What happened while I was away, Phil?Phil: I alt-tabbed out to do some work. Space travel is pretty majestic.

Beyond the infinite (Mars)

Phil: Sam, I’ve found a thing in the construction menu called a ‘jump drive’. If it works, I reckon we could reach Mars. Either that or it’ll go horribly wrong and we’ll be stranded forever in deep space. Either way, it could be a laugh.

Samuel: Originally, I wanted us to reach the Moon, and even that seemed unlikely to me about 30 minutes ago. But we did it! Fuck it: let’s go to Mars. It’s right over there. How far away can it be?

Phil: I suspect that Space Engineers doesn’t model most of the forces that would prevent our ship from getting off the ground. Plus we’re on the Moon now, and there’s basically no gravity. What I’m saying is let’s just awkwardly bolt the warp drive to the bottom of this ship. We use about six nuclear reactors to power it all, but it seems to work. This is exciting! I punch the warp drive. “Jump drive is only 11.26% charged.” This is going to take a while.

Samuel: Crikey. If the other bits of the ship are space Lego, this is space Duplo. It’s gigantic. This is one ugly-ass vessel, and I’m still sitting on top. Will going into hyperspace not destroy my body? 

Phil: We fell to Earth and survived, so you’ll probably be fine. The power charges, I point at Mars and punch that drive. I’m told off by the game for trying to warp into a gravitational body. Why does breaking physics have this many rules? I aim off to the side, and try again. A box appears asking me to confirm the ‘blind jump’. Yes, dammit! Don’t question my orders. Finally, we jump, and arrive... not on orbit around Mars. 

Samuel: I’m alive! Mars is bigger now, but no, we’re not exactly there yet. Going there manually could take forever. Can we jump again to get closer? Phil’s been in the pilot seat for a while now, so I’m basically a passenger, beholden to his expertise.

Phil: We could always swap seats, but this thing still doesn’t have brakes. Anyway, I’ve found the button for decreasing our warp distance. We can’t jump into a planet’s gravitational pull, but I can reduce the distance until we’re at the point closest to its gravity field. After that, it should be a reasonably short trip to the surface. I do, and it is. We’re on Mars!

Samuel: It’s a surprisingly impressive version of Mars, too—the texture of the planet looks very realistic as we enter the atmosphere. We take pictures of each other in front of our crappy-looking, house-shaped spaceship, like rubbish astronauts. I celebrate the freedom of being on Mars by spawning some gigantic wheels in an effort to build a big space car, a surefire sign that I’m procrastinating and that we need to switch the game off and write about our journey to Mars. Kudos, Phil! I feel like I was slightly useless for basically the entire back half of that trip. 

Phil: Your moral support was an invaluable contribution, Sam. And so were your screenshots.

Welcome to the thirty-second episode of the PC Gamer UK Podcast, home of possibly the longest tangent in our history. Around that, you’ll hear about Samuel and Phil’s slapdash adventures with Space Engineers, find out whether Phil understands what’s happening in GoNNER (no), and learn why Samuel isn’t a music journalist. Also, we answer a bumper crop of your questions – as asked by our Discord community.

You can get Episode 32: ...But one final point on Hard-Fi here. You can also subscribe on iTunes or keep up with new releases using our RSS feed.  

Discussed: GoNNER, Space Engineers, Oxenfree, Reigns, Elite Dangerous

This Week: Samuel Roberts, Phil SavageThe PC Gamer UK Podcast is a weekly podcast about PC gaming. Thoughts? Feedback? Requests? Get in touch at pcgamer@futurenet.com and use the subject line “Podcast”, or tweet us via the links above.

This week’s music is from Oxenfree.

After three years orbiting Steam's Early Access initiative, Keen Software's Space Engineers has entered its beta phase. 

Following on from a pretty hefty update last week, the ever-expanding space-set sandbox game sees new features such as a total block redesign, new multiplayer netcode, and a tutorial campaign installed as part of its stable launch.  

"This update also marks the transition of Space Engineers moving to Beta phase," says the developer's head honcho Marek Rosa in a blog post. "The most important thing to remember with this announcement is that there is still more content, improvements and many optimizations to come. As an example, we can confirm that one of the things being worked on currently is a new HUD which should significantly increase your immersion in the game. Beta simply means that we feel the game now has a solid foundation." 

We've got two trailers for you now in light of all that. First, one which explores the new features the Space Engineers beta brings with it: 

And second, a dedicated beta trailer which shows off some flashy first-person gunplay and interstellar battling:

The Space Engineers beta's full list of new features—which includes the likes of Magnetic Boots, voice chat, and customisable fonts, among a host of other things—can be found over here.

We talked about the Middle Ages construction/destruction sim Medieval Engineers a bit last year, in part (speaking for myself, anyway) because it's so much fun to watch great stone structures get smashed into little tiny pieces. That doesn't necessarily make for a great game, though, and so developer Keen Software House has rolled out a major update that "re-launches" the project with a multitude of new features including a more detailed planet, an improved rendering engine, and the ability to claim territory and ally (or go to war) with other players.

"Having a planet in Medieval Engineers creates a play area that is many times bigger than the flat worlds that we had before. The planet can have many plants, animals and barbarians with plenty of room for players," studio founder Marek Rosa wrote on his blog. "We ve designed areas of the terrain so that players can build fortifications to defend their territory. The planet and all of its settings can be modded and shared through the Steam Workshop."

Player may also create their own customized banners that can be used to identify themselves or mark off territory, and like most of the rest of the game's content, they can be modded and shared with others. Smaller improvements to the game include the addition of doors, new particle effects, a wardrobe, and the ability to play as a female engineer.

Taken together, the update sounds like it will bring Medieval Engineers into a much more game-like state than it was previously, and that's reflected in the new gameplay trailer, too. Whether it will be enough to satisfy the recent Steam commenters who have decried the game as abandoned is another matter entirely, but at the very least it looks like a good start. A full breakdown of the changes is available on the Keen Software House forum.

Thanks, Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Bundle Stars has launched its biggest ever sale which is live right now until August 22.

With timed deals and sale-length discounts alike, the Summer Sale includes a mix of contemporary hits and old classics offering discounts on certain games (via Steam keys) at 90 percent and more.

The F.E.A.R. bundle includes the original game, Fear 2, Fear 2: Reborn, and Fear 3 with 90 percent off, meaning you can snag all four games for 3.26/$4.99. Rocket League 4 Pack is also going at minus 47 percent for 31.49/$41.99, while Space Engineers is 5.69/$7.49 until 10am BST/2am PT August 12.

New deals are added on a daily basis, however other highlights include:

• Saints Row 4 -80%: £2.99/$4.99
• Mad Max -70%: £7.49/$11.99
• Tropico 5 Complete Collection -75%: £7.49/$9.99
• Goat Simulator + GoatZ DLC -75%: £2.75/$3.75
• LEGO Batman Trilogy -66%: £7.49/$12.49
• Broken Sword Complete Pack -83%: £6.75/$8.99

Buying anything from the sale grants you automatic entry to Bundle Stars HTC Vive prize draw information on which is detailed post-purchase.

The Bundle Stars Summer Sale runs from now until August 22. Browse the full list of bargains at your leisure by heading this-a-way.

Space Engineers is, in the words of its developer, "a sandbox game about engineering, construction, exploration and survival in space and on planets." You can build space stations, planetary outposts, and pilot ships.

"Space Engineers is inspired by reality and how things actually work," they say. "Think about modern-day NASA technology extrapolated 60 years into the future. Space Engineers strives to follow the laws of physics and doesn't use technologies that wouldn't be feasible in the near future."

As well as a 50% off sale on Steam this weekend, the game will also be free to play. Check your Steam library and it'll be sitting in there waiting for you. It's an Early Access game, but packed with features, including the recent addition of moddable, destructible planets. You can read all about that here.