Survival Reborn: Spacewalk

A survival-oriented overhaul of character movement, suit resources, and the jetpack. Also serves as a balanced anti-hydroman mod for PVP.

Survival Reborn: Spacewalk

While Keen has given us a nice physics sandbox to play with, survival gameplay lacks a certain touch. My Survival Reborn series of mods aim to provide that touch. Spacewalk, the first of the series, revamps and balances character movement and suit resources.

In the vanilla game, your suit battery runs out faster than your oxygen in space, characters experience double gravity, and the jetpack is not balanced for survival. The character's movement speed also affects the game's sense of scale in an off-putting way, and movement feels jerky. Worse, the jetpack outperforms any space ship, meaning there's no functional reason to build a scouting craft.

I've balanced the character's suit resources to make them more fun to manage, fixed some annoyingly unrealistic aspects of character and jetpack physics, and balanced the jetpack so that it isn't an alternative to building a vehicle. I also smoothed character movement and reduced the default "jog" speed to something more reasonable, while keeping the convenient 10 m/s sprint we're all used to. I even changed the jetpack's flames so that it matches the color of other hydrogen thrusters in the game.

For players who enjoy PVE survival, Survival Reborn aims to offer a more interesting experience without being too punishing. For the PVP community, SR:Spacewalk's balanced jetpack and increased collision damage make it an excellent and fair way to deal with the "hydromanning" problem. Movement smoothing makes strafing/dodging in gunfights a little less arcade-like.

Features:

• Suit Resource Balance: Battery use in vacuum is reduced and suit gas stores are balanced. Oxygen is now relevant during EVA. Open your helmet indoors to refill your air slowly.*
• Jetpack Balance: The jetpack is less powerful, carries far less fuel, is more dangerous to use on planets, and doesn't cheat physics to make you stop on a dime. Jetpacks must be powered off to refuel from bottles and thus aren't useful for extended flight.**
• Character Movement and Gravity Fix: Removed double gravity from characters. Walk and jog speeds are reduced, while sprinting speed is unchanged. All on-foot movement is smoothed a bit to make it feel less jerky and make the jump easier to control.***
• Custom collision damage: The gravity changes made the characters insanely resistant to fall damage, so I've corrected that by making collision damage kick in at lower impact speed.
• Yellow-orange jetpack flames: The jetpack now visually matches other hydrogen thrusters in the game.
• Adds no new blocks or items! This mod is easy to add or remove from your game.
• Per-world configuration file for customization****

* Air will still refill at a negligible rate with your visor shut. You won't suffocate if you forget to open it. ** Tip: If you're having trouble gaining altitude, remember that 2cos45° = 1.4142... For the non-engineer, this means you get up to 41% more lift by leaning forward or backward up to 45°. *** Tip: You can take advantage of the run speed ramp-up time to control how far you jump. Try standing still, then jumping just as you start to move forward. Experiment with timing to get the hang of controlling your jump. **** Located inside your world save file in %appdata%/Roaming/SpaceEngineers/Saves/[your steam ID]/

Science Notes

The jetpack in Survival Reborn uses autogenous pressurization to feed its rockets. (Look it up!) High pressure in the fuel tanks prevents fuel flow from simple gas bottles while the rockets are primed to fire.

Compatibility Notes

• The character gravity fix and movement smoothing are applied per-world and removed on world close. They affect all characters, including custom characters.
• Custom collision damage is applied to all characters in the world, including custom characters, and should work on NPCs too.
• The jetpack refueling restrictions work on all characters regardless of what gas their jetpacks run on. If you make a custom character that uses a different gas for jetpack fuel, it should work fine with SR:Spacewalk.
• The rest of the changes (suit resources, jetpack stats, walk/jog speeds, etc.) are SBC and will not affect custom characters.
• Includes a custom sbc definition for the LargeBlockSlideDoor door subtype that doesn't bite as hard. Recommend setting opening speed to 1.0 if you override this.

If you want to make a character mod specifically to work with Survival Reborn, you just need to start with my SBC files instead of the vanilla ones. From there, just proceed as though you were modding vanilla. Set SR:Spacewalk as a dependency if you want to make sure your custom characters get the smooth movement, correct gravity, etc. from this mod. If you use my code, please credit me and explain any changes you made - see the license for more info.

PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE BUG REPORTS IN THE COMMENTS SECTION. You can report bugs on my GitHub page or the discussion thread right here on Steam. If you run a server, keep an eye out for any caught exceptions or other error messages. Please include your FULL LOG, not just the stacktrace or error message.

Feature wishlist

No promises, but I might add these later!

• Suit battery rework
• QoL: Nudge player to floor and disable jetpack when exiting seat (if there is a floor)
• QoL: "Press and hold" option for inertial dampers (won't replace toggle)
• Expansion/improvement of configuration features.

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