EarthWorks — Terrain Engineering (Alpha)

EARTHWORKS — TERRAIN ENGINEERING

DIG IT. MOVE IT. SHAPE IT.

EarthWorks brings hands-on excavation, material hauling, ore separation and working earthmoving machinery to Space Engineers. Dig real voxel terrain with the shovel and pickaxe, reshape slopes, carry soil in loader buckets, grade with dozer blades and process excavated material in the Powered Ore Hopper.

SHOVEL & PICKAXE — ORIGINAL TERRAIN TOOLS

• Shovel: Broad excavation and filling, plus approximately 3 m terrain smoothing.
• Pickaxe: Smaller, precise digging and filling, plus approximately 1 m smoothing.
• 8 m³ carried-material bank: Excavated material is stored and tracked with an on-screen fill percentage. Deposits use material you actually collected.
• Slope-aware smoothing: Smooth rough terrain while following the existing hillside rather than forcing everything flat.
• Large deposits: Place more of the carried material at once; material that cannot be safely placed remains stored.

Hand-tool controls

• Left Click — Dig / collect terrain.
• Right Click — Deposit a smaller amount of collected material.
• Shift + Left Click (hold) — Smooth the targeted terrain.
• Shift + Right Click — Large deposit / bulk dump.

The mod includes suppression of unwanted vanilla welder effects while the EarthWorks hand tools are equipped. Proper custom hand-tool swing animations are still in development.

POWERED ORE SEPARATION HOPPER

The Powered Ore Separation Hopper is a 3×3×2 large-grid machine that takes verified EarthWorks-excavated material and separates it into usable gravel and ores.

• Requires 0.8 MW from a powered grid. Separation stops when insufficient electricity is available.
• 24 m³ raw-material queue, with a visible fill level that rises and falls as material is received and processed.
• Accepts excavation from the shovel/pickaxe by depositing toward the hopper, or from loader buckets by pouring into the open hopper mouth.
• Processes stone and ore-bearing terrain into gravel and appropriate ores, including iron, nickel and silicon outputs for stone.
• Conveyor-connected storage: Processed ore and gravel can flow to vanilla conveyor-accessible inventories.

Setup: Build the Powered Ore Separation Hopper, supply grid power and connect its conveyor output to storage. Excavate soil with EarthWorks tools or buckets and unload it into the hopper. Processing and output then run while power and storage are available.

Useful chat commands: /ewhopper status shows hopper status. If you have an old legacy hopper containing saved material, aim at the new Powered Hopper and use /ewhopper migrate to transfer it.

MACHINERY PATCH 1 — VERSION 0.8.1

NEW LOADER BUCKETS

Standard small-grid buckets: 5×3×3, 7×3×3, 8×3×3, 9×3×3. High-capacity buckets: 5×5×4, 7×5×4, 8×5×4, 9×5×4 — approximately triple the capacity of the matching standard bucket.

Scoop native voxel terrain as the bucket moves, carry visible material, then tip the bucket to unload it. Deposit onto supported terrain or grid surfaces, including dump beds, or pour directly into the Powered Ore Hopper.

NEW DOZER / SMOOTHER BLADES

Three sizes: 7×3×2, 11×5×3, 15×7×3.

Curved, paintable blades displace soil ahead of the cutting edge while grading the surface below. Swept-contact digging and slope-aware smoothing help maintain terrain coverage as the blade moves.

MORE MATERIAL-HANDLING FEATURES

• Custom native-voxel excavation, displacement and deposition driven by the equipment's working area rather than a vanilla drill cutter.
• Connected soil piles on supported grid surfaces and visible material inside buckets.
• Direct bucket unloading into the Powered Ore Hopper.
• Custom size-labeled build-menu icons for the new machinery.

WATCH EARTHWORKS

EarthWorks Mod Reveal — YouTube

EARLY ALPHA & COMPATIBILITY

• EarthWorks is an evolving Space Engineers 1 Workshop mod. No external plugin is required.
• Back up important worlds before updating. Voxel editing permanently changes saved terrain.
• Current new-machine support is intended primarily for single-player. Multiplayer and dedicated-server behavior are not yet fully qualified.
• Older loader-bucket block subtype IDs are retained for saved-world compatibility but hidden from the new build menus. Existing saved-world migration has not been exhaustively tested.
• Grid-carried loose soil is a simulated material load, not fully physical native voxel debris.

BUILD IT. MOVE IT. SHAPE THE WORLD.