When it comes to space exploration games, there isn’t much that gives the freedom that Space Engineers does.
The game even provides a creative mode where you can basically enable unlimited resources and instant crafting, essentially letting you do anything you can imagine. It’s The Sims, but for outer space.
Between the creative and survival modes, there’s a whole galaxy to explore. And even more than that, developers actually released the source code for the game, and with code comes a prolific modding community.
With the the right kinds of mods, you’re sure to squeeze hours upon hours of fun out of this game.
And here are some of the best mods you can get to take your space exploration experience to the next level.
35. HUD Colors
Let’s start with a few quick and easy visual improvements to give Space Engineers some new life.
Exploring the depths of space can feel pretty pointless at times. Especially when you’re all alone in the vast unknown.
That HUD really isn’t helping either, as it’s pretty dull in itself.
So why not throw in a bit of color?
HUD Colors does exactly that, adding colors to the otherwise washed out blue HUD elements in vanilla.
34. Colorful Icons
Colorful Icons is a great pairing for the HUD Colors mod, taking things a step further in giving more “life” to the game.
I’m not sure why they decided to keep everything in that washed out blue color scheme, but thanks to these mods you can change things up.
Colorful Icons gives you complete freedom, letting you choose which icons will be changed, and includes colored icons for ores, ingots, components, and more!
33. Space Just Got Real
Another questionable visual choice by Keen (in my opinion) is how they colored the atmosphere here.
I mean really, the typical galaxy milky-way coloring?
It oftentimes feels like you’re starting out into a child’s space painting instead of outer space itself.
Space Just Got Real is a quick and easy way to make the game much more immersive, making the unexplored depths of space look more realistic.
Based on actual NASA photos, modder Dr. Novikov plays around with shaders, shadows, lighting effects, and other visual properties of the game to make everything appear as real as possible.
32. Animated Interaction
Here’s a mod to make the game just a bit more immersive.
Animated Interaction may not seem like much, but actually goes a long way.
All it does is add some animations to player actions, so when you have your engineer do something, he actually does something.
He won’t just be standing around for when you’re scrolling through menus, clicking, or pushing buttons.
31. BuildInfo
While there are the few mods that make the game look better, most mods out there make the game easier to manage.
Which is always a good thing!
Space Engineers is a complex survival and building game, and I can’t think of many things that get more complicated than space exploration.
So to start us off on this topic you’re going to want to get the BuildInfo mod.
It’s a simple mod that gives you more information about blocks once you aim at them or have them in your hand.
30. Easy Inventory
As building and crafting is a huge part of Space Engineers, you’re definitely not going to regret installing Easy Inventory.
The mod is so good that Keen themselves took from it, with the modder’s permission of course.
All you have to do is select the block you want to build, and with a quick click, all required materials will be transferred to your engineer for easy building.
I need a “that was easy” button, stat.
Not only will this save you the trouble of having to select each piece needed for each build, but it will save a lot of real-world time as well.
29. Taleden’s Inventory Manager
While there are mods that add functionality and data displays to aid your space exploration, there are lots of useful scripts that let you automate certain commands as well.
Taleden’s Inventory Manager is a great example, automating inventory actions so you don’t have to do things manually all the time.
With the mod installed, you’ll be able to sort your inventory items into different containers, depending on how you want them organized.
Plus the mod gives you options to prioritize certain materials, so everything is arranged exactly how you want it.
28. Phils_Ship_Diagnostics
Phil’s Ship Diagnostics is another undeniably useful mod, and is considered by many to be essential for any run at Space Engineers.
The script allows you to enable a simple LED diagnostic display that shows health percentages from parts of your ship.
It appears in an easy to understand green and red color scheme, showing health percentages of your hull, systems, gyros, thrusters, and more.
What’s even more useful is that the mod lets you set alarms, so you’re notified when parts reach a certain health level.
27. Floor Plan Script Mk1
You can make building ships a bit less tedious, with the right mods.
For that you’re going to need the Floor Plan Script by Alysius.
This is especially useful when building larger ships, but can be used for whatever ship size you’re building.
It simply gives you a drawing of the floor plan layout in a ship panel, providing a quick overview of what everything looks like.
The layout also provides you simple manipulation functions like zoom and panning to make for easier navigation of your blueprints.
26. Red Alert-Condition Red Script
The Red Alert script is a useful tool that adds a bit of realism to the game (which is always nice!)
It gives you complete control of all the lights on your ship to work as an alarm system for when something goes wrong.
It’s a simple mod, really.
When something’s wrong with the ship, all lights will start blinking red.
As we all know from our childhood cartoons, that means something’s wrong. Otherwise the lights stay green.
25. Battery Status Script
The Battery Status Script is another one of those mods you’ll never want to play without.
It simply adds a battery symbol to LCDs and text panels, giving a quick visual of how much energy they’ve got stored.
Once you have it installed, you’re sure to wonder why Keen made things harder for you to begin with.
24. Oxygen Status | Room-Pressure-Info
Another useful text display script, this time giving oxygen and pressure information for each room of your ship.
You can set up displays for each room of your ship. But what’s really cool about this mod is it allows you to create a sort-of “master hub” which displays the values for every room.
With the master set up, you’ll have a quick overview of oxygen levels for each room of the ship, displayed in bars and percentage values.
Easy peasy.
23. My Buddy – Follow Companion Drone AI
Yes, there’s even a neat script for your very own space buddy.
Now don’t expect too much here. You’re not getting an actual human being as a companion.
The My Buddy mod lets you create a companion out of a drone, having him automatically follow you around wherever you go.
The mod gives you options that you can set, like how far you should be for the drone to start following you, how far a drone will stay away from its target, and a quick toggle switch to make the drone stop following you when you don’t need him anymore.
Surprisingly handy, definitely give this a try.
22. Rdav’s Fleet Command MKII
Rdav has created some of the most original scripts out there.
And I highly recommend giving these next two mods a try.
He actually takes inspiration from real-time strategy games to give you easier control of units in Space Engineers, with Fleet Command MKII targeted specifically at controlling ship fleets.
From an LCD within your own ship, you’ll be able to control movement and actions of a separate fleet as you would in an RTS game.
Point and click to tell them where to go, and what to do, simple as that.
21. Rdav’s AI Autominer Script
Similar to Rdav’s Fleet Command mod, the AI Autominer Script allows you to do pretty much the same thing.
Except this time, geared towards mining resources instead of combat.
The script allows you to convert any vessel into a mining ship, which will automatically travel to and from mining sites gathering resources.
If you’re familiar with StarCraft, this basically lets you create drones/SCVs as you see in the game.
20. Nanite Control Facility
To automate things even further, you may want to install Nanite Control Facility.
It allows you to build a large ship block specifically designed for creating and controlling nanites.
Nanites are actually tiny robots, and in this case, they can be programmed to cover a variety of tasks.
You’ll be able to let them take care of some of your work for you, including construction, repair, and building functions.
There’s much to do in Space Engineers and I’m sure no one’s going to turn away a helping hand.
19. DeepOres
While there are mods and scripts that make the game a bit easier to play, there are those that aim to make things a bit more challenging too.
The challenge I’m talking about here is the good kind, of course.
If you feel that Space Engineers isn’t as exciting as it used to be, you might want to give DeepOres a shot.
The mod is simple: it makes ores spawn much deeper in the ground, forcing you to work harder to get resources.
While ore will be more difficult to get to, deposits will be much larger, making mining stations far more useful overall.
You’ll have to think of more creative ways to gather resources with this mod installed.
18. OKI Grand Weapons Bundle
While combat is barely the primary focus of Space Engineers, fans of Star Wars or Star Trek might like the idea of building large battleships.
With that, there are some mods that make combat more interesting.
Like the OKI Grand Weapons Bundle.
The pack includes a number of turrets and cannons to play around with, along with mounts and casemates, depending on what you need for each of your ships.
17. Battle Cannon and Turrets
If you’re looking for a weapons pack with a bit more oomph, this Battle Cannon and Turrets mod might be just what you’re looking for.
In addition to the typical guns and turrets, the pack includes a few larger cannons to blast enemy fleets out of space.
The biggest cannon in the pack is called the “Big Bertha”, which holds only one custom shell per reload, but can shoot as far as 50,000 meters.
Yes, that’s pretty far!
16. Star Wars XX-9 Turbolaser Cannon Mod
If the previous weapons options still don’t do the trick, this one’s sure to give you the firepower you need.
How about an actual weapon from the Death Star?
That’s right, the XX-9 Turbolaser seen on the actual Death Star can be placed on your ships.
This mod even comes with six different variants, so you’ll be able to place them at different sizes too.
15. Zombie Replace Wolves
Space can get lonely pretty quickly.
Especially if you don’t have friends to play with along the way.
The silence can be daunting, yet what better way to remedy that than with some new friends?
Again, not talking about human friends here. Instead, we’re giving you zombies.
This mod replaces wolves with zombies, so you’ll be fighting off hordes of undead instead of rabid beasts in outer space.
Come to think of it, I’m not really sure these are “friends” to play with…
But they do come in astronaut suits, which explains how they made it to outer space in the first place.
14. Air Traffic
Adding a little trace of life around the galaxy can go a long way to making the world feel alive.
The Air Traffic mod makes randomly generated cargo ships appear around the atmosphere, giving you some opportunity to interact with other characters in the game.
You could treat them as friendlies and let them fly by.
Or you could put your XX-9 to good use and shoot them out of the sky.
That’s completely up to you, of course.
13. More NPC Encounters
If the social aspect of the game is really valuable to you, then you’re probably going to want to install More NPC Encounters from modder superhappyalien.
While the game does provide a few chance encounters, there really isn’t much to look forward to.
This mod simply adds a bunch of new random encounters for you to enjoy, as you’ll be seeing a lot more NPCs from cargo ships to pirates.
12. Starship Troopers
If zombies in outer space didn’t really make much sense, this might be a good alternative to try.
You remember the 1997 film Starship Troopers? I may be dating myself here.
What was most notable about that film (well for me at least) were those alien beetle things they were up against.
They might not have looked very cool, but they were pretty darn scary.
Well this mod brings those bugs to Space Engineers, replacing all spiders in the game.
Exploration should be much more interesting now that you’ve got giant space bugs to worry about.
11. Star Trek Enterprise co*ckpit
I’ve given Star Wars fan a little something to play around with, so now here’s one for the Star Trek lovers.
This mod adds a ship part for a large co*ckpit, which is actually a replica of the control center seen on the Enterprise.
Pretty cool right?
The co*ckpit can even be painted, so you’ll be able to choose what it looks like inside.
10. Star Trek Sounds
Now that you have the Enterprise co*ckpit in Space Engineers, why not take your Star Trek fandom even further?
You can do exactly that with this Star Trek Sounds pack from Alanzote.
The pack adds almost 50 sound samples to your sound block, all directly from the Star Trek series.
Sounds in the pack include beam up and beam down effects, a few Borg sound samples, and tons of other cool ship sounds from the show.
9. Cloaking Device
Other than the Death Star gun and Star Trek co*ckpit, the modding community has come up with loads of new parts for you to use to make your Space Engineers ships even better.
This mod lets you place a completely functional cloaking device on your ship.
Now that’s something to wrap your brain around.
If you’re looking to sneak up on enemy ships, or stealthily make an escape from battle, all you have to do is fire up your cloaking device and you’ll be completely invisible.
The cloaking device block comes in small and large variants, and they’re paintable as well.
So you won’t have to worry about it making your ship look bad.
8. Small Ship Mega Mod Pack
If you want even more ship parts to play around with, the Small Ship Mega Mod Pack is a fantastic place to start.
As the name suggests, it gives you over 50 new custom parts to use when building small ships.
The pack includes everything from walls, doors, antennas, and even weapons.
The mod is actually the result of a collaborative effort between 11 different modders, and according to them it should offer pretty much everything you could possibly need.
7. Star Wars X-Wing Modpack
For many people, Star Wars has become pretty much synonymous with space.
With that said, who wouldn’t want more Star Wars content?
If you thought the XX-9 would be difficult to top, here’s something even cooler.
The pack gives new parts that let you build your very own X-Wing in Space Engineers, based after the one Luke flew in Episode IV.
This should definitely keep you busy for a while.
6. Custom Universe
Taking modding beyond automation scripts and ship parts, you can even change the entire universe within Space Engineers.
Whether you feel like you’ve explored enough of the vanilla universe, or just want to check out some of the custom content available, there are loads of universe alterations out there.
Let’s start with this custom universe mod by Posivi.
One of the largest ones out there, offering a huge universe with five whole solar systems to explore.
The universe houses 35 planets, which are all randomly placed – so they won’t be appearing on your GPS.
5. Ravcor
If a completely new universe feels a bit too large for you at the moment, you could add some new planets to the current solar system instead.
Ravcor is a great example, offering a unique planet unlike the ones currently found in vanilla.
Ravcor is a hot lava planet, with lava rivers scattered across its surface.
The atmosphere is very thin, too, making thrusters virtually useless.
If you do make it on to Ravcor somehow, you’ll find that the planet is rich in Iron, Uranium, and Platinum.
4. Dead Sun
Dead Sun is another interesting universe. It’s built around the special planet of the same name.
The universe contains four planets, each with their own moons surrounding them.
Other than Earth, Mars, and one alien planet, in the top left corner of the universe is Dead Sun.
It poses a real challenge to get however, as the planet’s gravity is extremely high, and the heat makes it difficult to stay for extended periods of time.
It will be worth it to explore though, as Dead Sun contains some of the rarest ores in the universe.
3. Star Wars Galaxy
You can change the universe to reflect the entire Star Wars Galaxy with this mod from Kymac.
It’s a very impressive recreation of the Star Wars galaxy, with over 30 planets in their correct locations according to Star Wars canon.
Much of the information is from careful research, as planet locations and even sizes are based on official Star Wars records.
You’re definitely going to want to get this one if you’re a fan of the series.
2. Iron Man Reactor
These last two aren’t as big compared to other entries, but are more like bonus mods that showcase the endless possibilities offered in Space Engineers.
This particular mod adds a custom part that allows you to build your very own Iron Man reactor in Space Engineers.
Building one will cost you 1.67 Iron and 3.33 Uranium ingots, but will prove invaluable once completed.
Having your very own Iron Man reactor grants you infinite suit power in the game. Quite a valuable treat!
1. T600
Come on, the idea of having a Terminator T600 in any game is just cool as hell.
There’s really not much more to say here!
This just goes to show that anything is possible with modding, and I’m sure there’s still loads of interesting content to come for this game down the line.
