Dimidium Roleplay

Even though the faction system that we had, had nice aspects (such as a clear focus of your faction). It also had downsides, mainly because it could limit you somewhat in the type of roleplay you engage in. Next to that, the closed faction configuration is quite broken, which makes it hard to maintain such a closed faction system. Therefore, we’re going to stop with the limited factions mechanic entirely. However, there will be one open faction that is free for everyone to join. This way, you don’t have to create your own faction when starting.

We want to avoid one-player factions that are only focused on building their own stuff, and not engaging in roleplay. This is especially true when players are completely self-sufficient and don’t need other players to thrive. Our view is that the most important limiting factor is not the amount of ores you can find in the solar system (because of the nature of Space Engineers, this is basically limitless anyways), but the amount of time you have to refine it and produce components that you can use to build blocks. Therefore, our philosophy is (and always has been) to limit the time you have to refine the ores and produce the components you need to build blocks, in order to increase roleplay (such as trade).

In the new season one player will have the possibility to build one high end production block, so this is either one refinery, one assembler, or one high end H2/O2 generator (modded). The block limits for the basic refinery, basic assembler, and vanilla H2/O2 generator will stay the same. This limitation will be in place because this way you need other players in order to grow as a faction, either by trading with other factions, or by recruiting additional members to your faction. In any case, starting your own single player faction, and not relying on other people will make it quite hard to thrive.

Prototech blocks will be excluded from any block limits. Having a limitation on Prototech blocks kind of defeats the purpose of raiding Factorum bases, so we won’t include those blocks in block limitations.

The first season, we’ve experimented with Orks and Imber, those factions were too aggressive and led to players mostly defending their own stuff, decreasing the amount of roleplay in the server. This season, we’ve tried to balance that some more through admin-controlled factions. However, this had some serious downsides too. It takes quite some effort from the admins to engage in RP from the admin MES factions, but most importantly, it makes the world feel quite empty. Especially when there are no admins online, or when the admins do something else. In order to make the server feel more lively, we will introduce two custom MES factions.

The custom MES factions will be neutral to the players by default, and will be hostile towards each other. You can choose to get hostile towards one MES faction (or both), either by attacking them, or by engaging in hostile RP. If you want to stay neutral towards the custom MES factions, that is possible. In that case it is required to not attack them and engage in friendly/neutral RP towards those factions of course.

We will have more events that are straightforward and not really storyline driven. Storyline driven events take quite some preperation, and especially with all the possibilities with Factorum, the new MES factions, and planetary encounters, it is quite easy to do low-key events that are focused on acquiring Prototech, destroying grids, or gaining control over grids. We will still do larger events as well, since that could really lead to some new interesting developments in a storyline. However, the focus for this season will mostly be low-key events.

Factorum events will not gain any additional rewards (next to potentially gaining Prototech). Other events could be found at Underground Contract Stations, and could gain money, but it could lead to negative reputation changes with NPC factions. In that case, that will be communicated clearly beforehand.

Lastly, we won’t stop with organizing events the same way as we did last seasons, so an event could still be planned in Discord. Bigger events are still a thing in the next season, but next to that, there will also be low-key events that don’t require a lot of preperation.

There will be several Trade Stations at which you can trade in the new season:

• Economy Trade Stations: These stations have been available in season 2 as well, but that was quite limited. In the new season, we will have those stations on all habitable planets.
• Admin Trade Stations: We can’t say much about the way we’re going to implement this, but admin trade stations will be available in the new season, just like last season.
• Trade Operators Coalition Stations: The Trade faction of MES will be present in the new season, so these stations will be available as well.
• Underground Contract Stations: These stations have been present in season 2, but they haven’t been found. We will add them in this season as well, and actively share the location so people can contracts in the underground criminal world of this solar system. Next to the underground contracts, you could also start missions from this stations, and find additional lore that could be interesting. So, in that regard, Underground Contract Stations will be very important as well.

We will not remove any mod from the mod-list, except for some planets. We are still testing some of the mods that were suggested on Discord. A selection of these mods could be added in the new season. Which mods we will add will mostly depend on whether or not we see this as a good addition for the server, and whether or not it affects stability. An updated mod-list will be shared once we’re done testing.