This was me with Space Engineers.

Fucking loved that game until I got to the moon. I was doing 10-hour sessions I loved it so much.

I played a scenario where I start in a planet, and there’s a space station orbiting the planet, and whenever I’m ready I can go to the space station and hit a button and then it’s basically zombie defense except it’s robotic drones.

Well, I started on the surface and my first thing was I had no water to make hydrogen and there were mountains on the horizon with ice caps on them so the first like 50 hours of gameplay was me building a rover and finding a path around a canyon to those mountains.

Finally I had a source of ice, hence hydrogen, hence fuel to get off the surface and into space.

After a few attempts I got a flying craft into space. Bare bones basics on it: survival kit, basic refinery so I could make repairs to my ship, and I started exploring outer space.

I tried the station with the defense thing and died instantly. So I decided I’d build up my ship, get more weapons, and try again.

So I cruised around, my ship grew, got more and more features including tons of turrets. I went and did another run at the drones and got through like 10 waves instead of 2. Then I decided to go check out the moon. This was a long journey (30 minutes at max speed as the crow flies) and I stopped many times along the way to expand my ship, so it was actually days of journeying to the moon.

Then I got to the moon, and landed, and it was cool and then … flop. All my motivation and fascination died all at once.

Apparently it’s quite common with Space Engineers. I really wish there was some major sequence of goals.

The drones goal isn’t beatable, I don’t think. And it’s the only goal like that. The reason it isn’t bearable is there’s infinite waves. I think.

What would even make it cooler is a series of challenges that you have to pass. At locations, each with their own difficulty level.

I mean there’s contracts where you can get money to trade like 50 steel plates for some space bucks.

I tried multiplayer servers but none of the worlds persist. Either the servers themselves are persistent - but the world is wiped every 6 hours - or the servers themselves are just rented servers that are up for a few days then gone.

I wasn’t able to find any public servers with long-term persistent worlds using the in-game browser.