Vermillion Online vs Space Engineers

At a glance

Multiplayer: your server or everyone's server

This is the biggest difference, and it decides most of the others.

Space Engineers is a sandbox. You play alone, host a game for friends, or join a community server. Each server is its own world with its own rules, set by an admin. Some run PvP with economy plugins, some are peaceful build servers, some wipe every month. That freedom is a big part of why people still play it seven years on.

Vermillion Online is one world. Everyone connects to the same server and plays by the same rules. The server decides every hit and every trade, and clients only send inputs. It also only tells your game what your sensors can detect, so you can't mod your way into seeing a ship hiding behind an asteroid. That's the trade: you give up control of the rules and in return the market, the danger and the other players are shared and persistent.

If you've searched for a "Space Engineers MMO" because you wanted one persistent world instead of a server list, that's the gap we're trying to fill. Just know how early we are: one EU server, and so far a handful of pilots per playtest.

Building: two ideas of what a block does

Both games build ships from blocks and both care where you put them. The goals are different.

Space Engineers gives you a construction kit. Conveyors, pistons, rotors, hinges, connectors, programmable blocks, projectors and welders. People build mining rigs, cranes, walking mechs and printer walls. In survival you grind, weld and assemble it all in the world, piece by piece.

Vermillion is narrower and goes deeper on the parts that fight. You design in a Ship Designer at a station, in 1 m blocks: 68 armour shapes in Steel, Aluminium, Titanium, Iridium composite and Glass, plus about 140 functional and structural parts. Systems are assemblies, the way From the Depths does it. An engine is a core plus cylinders plus coolers. A cannon is a firing piece plus barrels, clips, autoloaders, gauge increasers and recoil absorbers, and you pick its gauge anywhere from 12 to 300 mm. Bigger assemblies perform better and cost mass, heat and space.

You can test-fly a design straight from the designer before spending anything, then fabricate it at a station from refined materials. There are no pistons, rotors or scripts. Turret rings are the one moving part. If you love mechanical builds, Space Engineers has far more to play with.

Flight and combat

Both games use Newtonian flight where thrust comes from where you mounted thrusters. A ship with weak reverse thrust stops slowly in either game.

Space Engineers caps speed at 100 m/s unless you run a mod. Vermillion has no cap. Top speed falls out of thrust, size and mass, and most ships land around 150 to 300 m/s. Flight assist can be switched off.

Damage is per block in both. Space Engineers deforms blocks and splits grids that lose their connection, and it does that well. Vermillion fires shells as simulated projectiles that chew through blocks until their penetration runs out, and destroyed blocks split hulls into drifting pieces. The difference is what the game is built around. In Space Engineers, combat is one thing you can do. In Vermillion, combat and its fallout drive the economy, so the damage model is tuned for PvP between player designs.

What losing a ship costs

On most Space Engineers servers, you respawn and the ship stays where it died. You can often go back for it. Some servers add rules on top.

Vermillion is full loot. When your ship is destroyed, half the cargo is gone and the rest spills into the wreck for anyone who gets there. Other players can salvage the hulk. Everyone aboard dies with the ship, and your character drops a body bag with everything you carried, half of it destroyed. You always get a free Rookie Ship, so you're never stuck.

The rules depend on where you fly. Secure space allows no damage. High security lets attacks land, but the attacker turns Criminal and is destroyed by police after 20 seconds. Low security has no police. Lawless has no rules. The ore that pays best sits in the dangerous tiers: Titanite only in Low security, Iridium only in Lawless.

Economy: trade stations or a player market

Space Engineers added NPC trade stations and Space Credits in its 2019 economy update. On community servers, a lot of player trading runs through mods and plugins, so it varies a lot from server to server.

In Vermillion the market is the point. Every station has its own order book with buy and sell orders, escrow, a 2% tax and price history. There is no global inventory: an item exists at one station, so moving goods is a job, and a risk. Courier contracts with collateral let someone else haul for you. NPCs set price floors and supply pirates. Players do the rest.

Where Space Engineers is better

• Planets. Gravity, atmosphere, rovers, bases on the ground. Vermillion is space only, between asteroid fields and stations.
• Mechanical freedom. Pistons, rotors, hinges and scripting open up builds we don't support at all.
• Consoles and cross-play. It runs on Xbox and PlayStation. We're Mac and Windows only.
• Mods and the Workshop. Years of community blueprints, scripts and mods.
• Polish and population. It's a finished game with a big community and many servers to pick from. We're a playtest.
• Your rules. Want PvE only, or a private world with three friends? Space Engineers does that. Vermillion doesn't.

Who should play which

Pick Space Engineers if building is the game for you, if you want planets, or if you play with a fixed group of friends on your own terms.

Pick Vermillion Online if what you've wanted is the same kind of ship, designed by you, in a world with other people's ships, a real market and real loss. Especially if you've already done the "join a PvP server, it wipes, it empties" cycle a few times.

They don't really compete for the same evening. A sandbox with friends on Saturday and a PvP shift in a shared world on Tuesday works fine.

Space Engineers questions

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