Engineering Tech-Preview Notes

I was able to try out the Tech-Preview for a bit before they shut the servers down. I didn't have time to extensively test engineering.

If it's not obvious, the image in this post is from CitizenCon. We aren't allowed to post any video/images from the test, but we are allowed to talk about our experience. Here are some of my notes.

The game didn’t run on Linux. I was getting an error code: 2147483905

Being able to turn on/off individual thrusters is back!
It's definitely useful for anyone who is flying a ship where thrusters have been damaged. You can at least try to balance out a damaged thruster by disabling the opposing thruster. I did not see a way to overpower any thrusters on the engineering console just yet.

It sounded like fire wasn't working in every ship, but it definitely did in the Corsair.

I couldn't start a fire by shooting the power plant directly with handheld weapons (I pumped a few magazines worth of ballistic and laser ammo into it). The shots seemed to just go straight through the power-plant and other modules. I attempting to repair them and it didn’t show any damage had occurred. Other players mentioned that they had success doing this in other ships (although they wouldn’t recommend using a grenade launcher to do it).

My backup plan was to turn off the coolers entirely, then use afterburners/ship weapons to overheat the components. This plan worked very well.

Initially I was given a Smoke Detected warning on my HUD. I ran back to the component room, but I couldn't see any fire, I could hear it though. Most likely the smoke effects aren’t in yet, and this is what I suspect caused other testers to think that fire wasn’t working.

I went back to the pilot seat and attempted to overheat the ship again. This time, when I returned to the component room, I was met with a raging inferno. It looked like the fire either started at the cooler, or at the power-plant. It was awesome.

The fire does damage the player, and the room temperature definitely spiked. Note: Fires at an outpost at Pyro did not give off any heat and I was not burned by walking through those fires.

A word of warning, the ship doors won't open with any buttons when the ship power is off. The only way to open them is to get the power flowing again, or to use an engineering terminal to override the doors. Hopefully they give us a way to force the doors open in a powered off state. I’m assuming they’ll have a fix for this before it goes out to the larger player base since it’s one of the top feedback items. I’m hoping they add in a new animation/tool for forcing unpowered doors open. Just letting the doors open/close as usual wouldn’t give the same feeling.

The fire did spread out to other parts of the ship. It eventually burned out the other components, but I was able to repair them with my multi-tool and bring the ship back to life.

I used the fire extinguisher to put out some of the fire, and for the rest I tested out venting the ship.

There was no explosive decompression when opening any doors, but you do notice the atmosphere/oxygen levels falling rapidly when a door is open.

On the corsair at least, the life support system was able to handle the side hatch being open. The immediate room with the hatch only dropped to about 70% atmosphere or so, but once the power was out and both the hatch and the rear cargo ramp were opened, the air was quickly vented out and the fire went out very quickly.

The pilot can see a quick overview of modules/items on a ship and turn them on/off. The engineering terminal, gives you a lot more control over individual items on each ship. You can click on any door to open/close it. It shows a bit of an indicator of whether a room has air or not. You can click on any weapon to toggle it on/off. You also have little indicators that you can hover over to see what fuses/power relays lead to what items.

I couldn’t tell if the fire burned out the fuses, or if the fuses were destroyed by disabling the coolers and overheating the ship. Either way, I would recommend having a few spare fuses on hand.