Started playing about 3 days ago. After completing tutorials, I jumped straight into survival - Asteroids.After several hours of exploring and looking for all minerals, a little disc mining, then set down and build my 1st ship - a welder - to help with small inventory:front:back:Once that completed, I build a mining ship and quickly realized that I need a grinder too and that small thrusters are worthless. Well unless you use a million of them.

Anyway, welder design evolved:back:With the help of 'WG' ship, I quickly started to tear and modify the 'bumblebee', morphing it into a vision of madness and efficiency. I came up with the following set-up, after watching hours of youtube videos, none of which contained the efficiency and economy of materials i was craving for.- front -back-The space is not fully filled, only 2 out of eight gigantic cargo containers are laid. The space also will take 8 refineries, 4 arc furnace, 4 assemblers, oxy tank + generator, 2 small reactors. Everything is hooked into a conveyor system, any cargo can reach any factory and the design is modular, you can repeat this section as much as needed. Also there are two empty spaces of 2x1x2 that can be used either as walking access, filled with more assemblers/furnaces or simply with hull.Color code:-blue: arc furnace and oxy tank+gen-green: assembler-red: reactors-black: conveyors and hull-grey: refinery - can't change the color for some reason-yellow: cargo containersEnjoy and tell me what you think. Nice work, looks like you're off to a good start and having fun.

Small thrusters were in a better place before last week, when the weekly patch made the contents of cargo containers affect the ship's mass, so you may see a lot of old designs with what is now insufficent thrusters.If you're an efficiency fan, I should point out that you may want to reconsider using arc furnaces. Currently, a basic refinery turns 100 kg of iron ore into 56 kg of iron ingots, and an arc furnace will turn the 100 kg of ore into 63 kg of ingots, but a refinery with four effectiveness modules attached will turn 100 kg of ore into 100 kg of ingots. Originally posted by:What exactly are effectiveness modules?Modules:Effectiveness modules are only used on Refineries.Along one side of the refinery, you will see 8 square ports. That is where modules attatch to on the refinery.The effectiveness module gives you more ingots per KG of ore refined.

(does not increase power consumption)The productivity module refines the ores faster, but doesnt give you any extra ingots, and each of these modules increases power consumption.The power efficiency module cuts power consumption.Again, the Effectiveness module is ONLY for the refinery, the other two work on Refineries and Assemblers. I'm glad to see you built lots of refineries to start. I though 4 would be enough, but I did the math and a single refinery can take like 80+ hours to refine (1x) a single small ships large container (1x) worth of some ores. I think it averaged out to 36 hours per cargo load, assuming you're evenly grabbing cargo loads of each type of ore.So ya having 10-20 refineries and upgrading them with effectiveness or productivity is probably a good idea.Also I'm only getting like 25,000kg of processed material per trip. I assume that's fairly comparable to ship weight. So a 3million kg ship will take me 100+ trips.

Hmm my 4 drill small miner probably isn't gonna cut it for the larger projects. @ Maddo yeah, my poor 4 drill miner doesn't cut it NOW. Well, it kinda does, I just have to fix teething problems: connector on the top, amid ship (not the back end), larger drill print (current config leaves a small strip of rock at top and bottom) and better handling at full load.Thanks for mentioning the modules, looked them up and realized I have to redesign the whole thing lol. I didn't knew that large ships large components take many hours of refining to get the parts, I just like to have at least 1 refinery for each type of material, at minimum. They are quite costly to build early stage, but I already have 4 working assemblers, 4 furnaces and a miner that can haul 150 tons of iron every 5 minutes, so getting 1k steel plates is quite easy.

Originally posted by:@ Maddo yeah, my poor 4 drill miner doesn't cut it NOW. Well, it kinda does, I just have to fix teething problems: connector on the top, amid ship (not the back end), larger drill print (current config leaves a small strip of rock at top and bottom) and better handling at full load.Thanks for mentioning the modules, looked them up and realized I have to redesign the whole thing lol. I didn't knew that large ships large components take many hours of refining to get the parts, I just like to have at least 1 refinery for each type of material, at minimum. They are quite costly to build early stage, but I already have 4 working assemblers, 4 furnaces and a miner that can haul 150 tons of iron every 5 minutes, so getting 1k steel plates is quite easy. I would suggest hving one refinery each for silicon, magnesium, silver and gold, and at least 2 for uranium, and at least 4 for platinum, and 5-10 arc furnaces for your cobalt, nickel, and iron., this setup should keep your materials coming quick enough to build even large ships, and for modules, efficiency on everything except platinum, you want productivity for platinum. Originally posted by:i would suggest hving one refinery each for silicon, magnesium, silver and gold, and at least 2 for uranium, and at least 4 for platinum, and 5-10 arc furnaces for your cobalt, nickel, and iron., this setup should keep your materials coming quick enough to build even large ships, and for modules, efficiency on everything except platinum, you want productivity for platinum.With only 2 platinum deposits and 1 gold deposit for 20 km in any direction, I doubt I want productivity for those two, more like efficiency.

So I guess the vanilla sorters are supposed to make sorted refineries possible (they haven't beend implemented when I last played) I set. May 18, 2015  The Refinery setup I’ve wanted since practically the start of Space Engineers. And those lovely Conveyor Sorters make it all possible. But during its first iteration, the sorting wasn’t happening at all: the ores were filling up in the usual way – send ores to one Refinery.

Originally posted by:i would suggest hving one refinery each for silicon, magnesium, silver and gold, and at least 2 for uranium, and at least 4 for platinum, and 5-10 arc furnaces for your cobalt, nickel, and iron., this setup should keep your materials coming quick enough to build even large ships, and for modules, efficiency on everything except platinum, you want productivity for platinum.With only 2 platinum deposits and 1 gold deposit for 20 km in any direction, I doubt I want productivity for those two, more like efficiency. 20km is nothing, and once you try building largeship largethrusters, you'll know what i mean, but its just a suggestion, born out of over a thousand hours experience.