This is a story-driven scenario that will include building, investigation, combat and a decent amount of interaction with the world. The goal of this scenario is to find out what happened to the colonists of the world you are orbiting. You will join one of four factions, the Houses, and take a starting vehicle from the science cruiser in orbit down to your designated starting zone. The science cruiser will drop building tasks in the form of drop pods that contain blueprints that you are supposed to collect and build.
You will start with a basic production camp and then proceed to build faction specific bases to help you advance the mission as well as small grid projects.
The scenario is customizable! You can change the settings and add mods at any given time, the scenario should still work with a lot of them.
Light Casts Shadow” can be played by up to 12 users but can be played in single player as well. This scenario has a designated single-player mode.
This is a scenario for the experienced Space Engineers player with survival experience. If you do not know how to save GPS coordinates or how to properly manage hydrogen fuel consumption, this scenario might not be (yet) for you.
In the vanilla experience, this scenario is also NOT PVP.

The AIVR Nikha III. is an Viator Class Science Cruiser that is in orbit around Volentia II. You start your briefing here, join a faction, launch the projects for your faction and take your faction hover craft from orbit to your designated landing zone. The Nikha III. will send drop pods with projectors into your general area of operations from time to time. They are tasks you are supposed to fulfil in order to support you in your mission.

ATTENTION: LEAVE YOUR STARTING FACTION AND JOIN THE HOUSE FACTION YOU WANT TO PLAY IN BEFORE TRYING TO START THE SCENARIO.

You will gather the 8 drop pods that land around your base camp location and construct a fully functional outpost from them. Once your respective faction building is finished, press a prepared button within the building to inform the ship in orbit about your status.
After that you can continue to investigate the nearest former settlement.

Reactivate what is left of the systems, read the screens, find datapads and start to find out more about what happened on Volentia. You will find additional GPS markers that you can advance to in order to find what happened to the colonists – and to a special group that held out longer than anyone else.

Every faction has their own sub-tasks – but this is a wholly cooperative scenario. Share your resources and your intel. For the sake of this scenario, you are free to switch factions as often as you like, they are here as a flavour to the scene.

There are four factions in the scenario that each have distinct building projects. They are designed to work in cooperation – a building project might very well be vital for the rest of the players and should not be hidden away.
Factions should coordinate with each other when it comes to building the settlement and it is perfectly acceptable to ask for help and trade resources with each other.

House Nija
The security specialists will be responsible for keeping the teams safe. They carry hacking equipment to hack the old buildings without lowering your reputation.

House Aforian
The House of engineers and architects will be responsible for mining, building and scrapping.

House Erinienhet
The House of scientists is tasked with collecting relics like important art and the IDENT chips of former colonists. They carry the equipment for other teams and collect texts.

House Licoran
The House of healers is tasked with finding out what befell the colonists. They collect samples from the deceased and analyse them in their laboratory.

In the beginning of the game, there will drop three types of pods to the surface – Outpost pods, House Pods and small House project pods. They all contain blueprints that need to be build for this scenario. They will drop around the area of the Base Camp GPS marker. Collect them with your hovercraft (or with the scout ship if you are playing single player) – and build them at the Base Camp coordinates. This is important as they will need to be in range of the com signals of the ship in orbit.

Build the pods in this order: outpost pods, small grid projects, House pods.

Outpost Pods
There are four outpost pods that provide infrastructure: assembler, refinery, barracks, energy.
Build them first so you can easily use their abilities to build the rest. You can connect them to each other so they benefit from the energy unit.

Small grid projects
These small grids will help you to carry out your mission. For example, House Erinienhet will get a ship that can reach the Nikha III. In orbit and deliver the found paintings via mag plate. House Licoran will receive an AI drone that can follow the player and is a mobile respawn and healing platform.

House pods
House pods are specialised buildings that are important to the scenario. Each building is tailored to the role of the respective house. Once you built them, find the button that sends out an information to the Nikha III. that you have made progress. It will advance the mission.
A lot of the house projects have deactivated LCD screen when built – DO NOT ACTIVATE THEM ON YOUR OWN, they will switch on once the mission progresses and inform you about new tasks.

House Erinienhet
House Erinienhet has an office building that has additional information on satellites in the orbit that will shed light on what transpired on the surface. You will be able to call for the scout ship (already there if you are playing single player!) and has the coordinates for a support tools supply drop.

House Nija
House Nija’s building will activate a screen with the coordinates for a military equipment supply drop.
The base comes with some small turrets and a lot of space for weapon storage. They have a lot of action relays and com units for you to customise your base.

House Licoran
Has a medical laboratory. It has an analysis processor that will only accept organic samples (labelled “organic” in the game) – that are samples from remains of former colonists that can be found. Once it has enough samples, it will find out what the infection was that plagued the colonists, display an analysis and unlock the advanced laboratory on the Nikha III. In orbit.

House Aforian
House Aforian has an assembler, a basic refinery and a vehicle repair bay. Pressing the completion button will call for additional build projects during the course of the missions.

After building your outpost (possibly after building all projects if you want to finish them first) you can progress to investigation. If you are playing in a team you can of course also split up to build and investigate at the same time.

Your goal is to find out what happened on the colony and how to avoid it in the future.
Approach the first settlement and investigate it. Find structures, rebuild their power supplies and read their screens – if you want to access them, you might need to hack them (hacking them with the hacking mod will not make the old colony faction go hostile).
Have a loo through cargo containers and other containers as well, they might contain datapads or resources.

Find additional GPS coordinates and proceed to the next settlement. You may find the logs of a group of survivors as well that will present a parallel but slightly different path to progress.
You will need to dig up and search deceased colonists. House Erinienhet is looking for IDENT tags so they can bring them back to their distant relatives back on the home world. House Licoran is looking for organic samples and prototech components to build a medical assembler in orbit.
House Erinienhet is also looking for the portraits of the most important house members of the colony at the time that were commissioned by the crown back during the founding of the colony.
Once you have enough material to complete the medical assembler, the final mission to neutralise the thread deeper in the system will become available. You can still follow the colony storyline to see what happened to the colonists if you want.

LONG TERM TASK
If you like this colony and would like to make it a part of the empire again you can prepare it accordingly and instead of scrapping and looting the colony you can try to rebuild it to its former glory, repairing and completing the ruins and giving them a fresh paint job.

The AIVR Nikha III. is an Viator Class Science Cruiser that is in orbit around Volentia II. You start your briefing here, join a faction, launch the projects for your faction and take your faction hover craft from orbit to your designated landing zone. The Nikha III. will send drop pods with projectors into your general area of operations from time to time. They are tasks you are supposed to fulfil in order to support you in your mission.
The Nikha III. It is located in geostationary orbit above the base camp site and will be able to supply you with reserves, a scout ship, new building projects and background information.
Do not move the Nikha III. or dismantle it or change anything on the systems that is not part of the scenario as there is a great chance that the scenario will not work properly after that!
During the endgame of this scenario, the autopilot of the ship keeping it in place will disengage and you will be able to use the ship to jump to your final mission.

Every team will get their own designated hovercraft that is designed to help them to carry out their mission. All have a survival kit and supplies and come with advanced equipment to help you set up a base. They will enter the atmosphere with a hydro-sled that it will ditch automatically if it expends the fuel or gets near the surface.

Be careful while piloting the hovercraft out of the hangar, as it can take damage on the roof or from colliding with the mag plate.
The Hovercrafts have an antenna to keep you in contact with the rest of the team and ship in orbit.
Each hovercraft has an adjustable friction setting for the hoverbed that allow it to decelerate and park.
Each hovercraft has an action relay tuned to a specific frequency that tries to trigger old imperial ID chips on colony equipment. They will work a few times each before finally giving out, giving a slight idea of what to expect in a settlement if you ping them within range.

Nija – Onager Class HovercraftThe Onager class is designed for recon and mobile coordination and the militarized version has been in service with the Imperial Army for twelve years now as a mobile squadron coordination post. It is the only starting craft to be armed and has a laser antenna so it can keep in contact with the Nikha III. even on longer distances. It has sensor units that can track enemy installations and a radar unit to scan for underground items and structures. The Nija Class has a designated hydro tank to help fill up hydro bottles during a mission. It comes with hacking equipment and more weaponry than the others. House Nija uses their ping to identify ammunition in the vicinity.

Licoran and Aforian -Vestigator Class HovercraftBoth House Licoran and Aforian prefer the versatile Vestigator Class Hovercraft. They come equipped with larger cargo holds and make use of them as they carry construction equipment to the surface as well as more personnel equipment. House Licoran uses their ping to identify bio samples in the vicinity.

Erinienhet – Arator Class HovercraftThe Arator Class is actually a design variant of the popular Agricola Class but it sacrifices their survival kit for a crane that it can use to load up heavy equipment or relics onto their mag plate holding platform. The crane can be controlled via a remote control unit (and WASD controls). The Arator will ping for old chips used in important imperial documentation computers.

The INA Khorytos AKH-5-2577-A is a Relthoir Class Expedition Vessel. It will be able to support you on your missions away from the base camp.
It features limited production and refining capabilities and a survival kit for respawning.
The ship has an h2/o2 generator so you can recharge other grids that need hydrogen. It has the only mobile large grid ore detector, making finding resources much easier.

The scout also features to search lights that will try to spot neutral and hostile grids.
The Khorytos has batteries only, so you will need to recharge the ship regularly at base camp or you will need to upgrade it with a reactor.
Be aware that the scout ship has very limited side-thrust capabilities - use pitching and rolling to support movement with your main up-thrusters.
The Khorytos has two parachutes that need to be filled manually with canvas from within the cabin.

It is perfectly fine to play this scenario alone – there is even a setting for it that will immediately drop the scout ship with their basic refinery and assembler units and their large ore scanner to help you build all those mission buildings (and yes, you need to build them). As a singler player, you should use House Nija’s hovercraft as it has the hacking equipment. Be aware that you’re still asked to fulfil all missions that pop up.
It is also recommended to up your personal carrying capacity by one level if you are playing alone.

The blueprints and preplaced grids in this scenario almost all use DLC blocks to a varying degree. If you do not own any or only some DLC, this scenario is still playable for you. You can activate the projectors and build non-DLC blocks instead of the DLC version of them. The only time when you would need to rearrange some blocks would be when the conveyor setting would be different, as for example with the DLC assembler or different DLC cockpits.
If you play with other that have the DLC you are missing, you could also ask them to weld something up for you.
However, YOU DO NOT NEED ANY DLC for this scenario to be downloaded and played.
Be aware that I tried to only use non-DLC blocks for mission critical infrastructure. If something is missing because you could not weld it, tell me and I will correct for it.


This scenario should work with a plethora of different mods, from new blocks to new mechanics. It has, however, not gone through extensive testing.

Mods that should be perfectly fine: block mods, QOL mods (build vision etc.)

Mods that could work but interfere: block modification mods, mods that would possibly make the scenario not work properly: mods that degrade or damage blocks, like environmental threats, re-entry heat, etc. – everything in this world is pre-placed manually and does not spawn in, so it can be damaged even if you are not around – speed mods will possibly cause the pods to speed up too much during descent and crash into the ground.

The game will start with grid clean-up disabled. This should give you more time to find drop pods even if they have run out of energy. The host can re-enable it at any given time.
The game will start with progression disabled.
The game has random encounters, economy and freight ships turned off and is not balanced against this. They can be turned on, though and should work.
The game has programmable blocks enabled and uses scripts during the game. Turning them off will make the scenario buggy.

The Akhinnae Empire is a single-species realm that has been spacefaring for three hundred years now. Fifteen High Houses control most of the Empire’s day-to-day business and answer to the Emperor or Empress of the High House of Fayal.

The Volentia System was supposed to be the second colony after the Gautus system had been settled. But roughly 4 years after the initial colonisation contact broke off.
You can find more lore about the Houses and the Empire aboard the Nikha III. - speaking of that name:

Nikha III. was the Empress that has the distinction of making the Akhinnae Empire interstellar by initiating a colonisation program that would be responsible for founding the first four colonies, Gautus, Ithreb, Narsut and Volentia. She reigned from 1147 to 1220 and many important discoveries were made during her time. She also is responsible for restructuring the Imperial military to focus more on the Space Fleet, making the modern Imperial Navy possible.