Keen Software House recently updated the beta branch of Space Engineers, as well as the stable branch of the game. The development branch basically consists of stabilizing the gameplay, squashing bugs and improving performance. The stable branch release actually makes some nice changes to the QOL features, including the ability to check the chat history.

Over on the Space Engineers Steam page Keen Software House did a short post indicating that stable brand update 1.149 was out and available for those following the progress of Space Engineers. One cool update to the latest build is that they’ve improved the use of meteors, as well as how they’ll interact and impact your game session.

A six minute video was put together to cover some of those features and show them off in action. You can check it out below.

One of the other things that they’re working on is upgrading the appearance of the blocks and how they can be utilized in the game. Redoing all of the blocks will give the game a more visually appealing look for all of the modded ships and structures made for the game. I just hope it’s all optimized well enough not to kill the user computers in the final rendering pass.

One of the other exciting additions to the game comes in the form of a mod by user rexxar.

The block degradation mod slowly whittles down the integrity of blocks until they’re destroyed. According to the mod description…

“[…] this mod will cause blocks on your ships to gradually wear down and require repair. The mod will damage blocks until they reach a minimum build level (again configurable in chat commands). By default it won’t damage grids that have no owner, or grids whose owner is offline.”

That’s actually pretty cool. It means that you’ll need to consistently keep your equipment repaired, especially if you’re playing on a role-play server.

You can download the mod right now for the current version of Space Engineers by visiting the Steam Workshop page.