If you love Minecraft and space, you need to check out Space Engineers. Two things I want to warn you about before you do though. One, it’s an early-access game on Steam so this is a more like a pre-Mojang Minecraft experience, and two, it will suck you in. Seriously my Steam client shows 171 hours played.
Space Engineers is a game by Keen Software House about building ships, bases, and anything else you can imagine (for instance an AT-AT that walks) using armor blocks, thrusters, pistons, wheels, etc. It’s been integrated with Steam’s Workshop for a while for sharing maps with custom build, and just released full mod support on Thursday. The SE community has hit the ground running with 260 mod entries already. To me the most impressive thing about the game is how Keen has managed to keep up an insane schedule of releasing an update every Thursday with fixes and new features.
Not being an insane building genius, I’ve been enjoying playing in survival mode. This involved spawning into a single player map with a default ship, finding an asteroid to set up ship in, and then progress from manually mining ores to building a series of small ships for mining and constructing larger ships. All in the safe shadow of the asteroid I picked as I have meteors turned on, which means periodically a storm of rocks comes hurling from the sunward side of the map. On the bright side, meteors leave behind all kinds of nice deposits.
Day 11 of Blaugust