Second issue/unrealism:
Many of the ores in Space Engineers are wrongly colored. Space is a vacuum, but it seems like Keen as well as most mod developers ignore this fact when creating ore textures... because the ores are given textures as if they were oxides. The game suffers from the "color-coded for your convience" trope... but maybe this is also a result of assuming the familiar terrestrial ores are duplicated in space, while failing to research ore genesis in nature.

Iron is not rusty-colored IRL in asteroids; it is metallic iron-colored, and usually alloyed with nickel as plessite[en.wikipedia.org], or the less-pure sulfide pentlandite[en.wikipedia.org].

Nickel is not green. I can find no evidence that any oxydation state is green, so this color choice is a complete mystery and extremely unrealistic.

I'm suggesting a replacement of most vanilla iron & nickel ore with a metallic-colored "nickel-iron" ore, that would yeild both materials when processed (now that we know that trick is possible). Alternatively, both ores should be recolored to be more metallic; requiring an ore detector or exploratory drilling to find the one you want would be an interesting new gameplay mechanic, and certainly much more realistic.

Copper is not oxidized green in space. It would be commonly found as native copper[en.wikipedia.org], or found as a sulfide such as the brassy-colored copper-iron-sulfide chalcopyrite[en.wikipedia.org].

Uranium is not yellowcake in space. Nor is it urantite (as Keen textured it), or any other oxide ore as normally found on Earth. In space, it would probably be found embedded in volcanogenic granite, as it is incompatible with magmas... or it would occur in minute quantities mixed in with other ores and stone... or as the elemental metal.

Almost all ores in the game have unrealistic oxide-based or hydrothermal-based textures, rather than the more realistic volcanogenic-based ores... though some textures are better than others. Personally, I would rather have the textures be realistic and need an ore detector or drilling to identify ores, rather than have them all be crazy technicolors and identifiable by sight alone... but maybe I'm the only one who feels that way.


If you are unwilling to alter the ore textures, can you please give me instructions on how you did it? I'm quite willing and curious to get into modding, but I haven't found any documentation on how. I would like to try making my own ore re-texture mod, if it's not too complicated.

Realisim isn't really a goal. Getting a bit more realistic is part of it but there are trade-offs and I understand why Keen did it like that. Mostly its a fun vs tedium call. If it was realistic everything would be greyscale with differeing levels of shiny. You woudn't be able to tell stone from ore. It would be impossibile to do anything without mining every bit of every asteroid hoping to get a few Kg of some metal you needed to make a toothbrush. Most players want to build ships and smash stuff, not become geologists.

Your assumption is that we are looking at asteroids that formed in space when they could have previously been parts of torn apart planets or moons in which case the oxidized and hydrolized ores make perfect sense.

The only reason these are here to begin with is that My tech progression mod needed more variety to support unlockable Tiers of equipment.

If you want to make some, download one of my single ore's from my workshop and look at the files inside. Its pretty straight forward if you understand XML and Texturing.

I wonder if it would be possible to create "nebula" asteroids. Changing the texture to be cloud-like and perhaps changing the clipping setting (not sure if thats possible?) Then you could collect some of the gaseous elements that way, instead of in an ore. Just an idea, it would also add some eye-candy to space, and if they are dense enough to hide in.....

New Concept. Keen has introduced the idea that gasses wold be kept in seperate, specialized tanks..

Many of the materieals here are gas. Instead of using the standard containers to keep these gasses, just duplicate the concept of KEENS Ox storage. Gasses kept in specialty tanks.. one for each gas. And instead of refineries, us gass processors simmilar in functionality to the Oxy generator.

Ralism handed to you by KEEN.

He, H, N, and Clorine tanks.

What do you think?

I already looked into it. Unfortunately the "Oxygen" part is hardcoded into the game rather than gasses. There currently isn't a way to do other gasses without scripting, and even then maybe not.

Cr*p.. Ok... I should have known you would have had this idea already.

Ok.. I'd suggest making a suggestion to KEEN and cross your fingers.

Best we can do...

" add Aliens in UFO,s ..

Great mod. But since I've installed it, I've an infestation of spiders spawning all the time. Is it due to some modification on ur side or spiders are supposed to spawn over mine field(which u added a lot)?
PS : i'm running a survival game on the Earthlike and have landed on the ice part