Space Engineers 2 Dev Diary: May 21, 2026

Lighting Improvements

I really love the VRAGE3 lighting system – but we are always trying to improve. We want to achieve greater overall realism by properly mastering distance fog, atmospheric scattering, and shadow coloration.

Here you can see some of our experiments – creating stronger contrast and elimination of a “whitish specular halo” on foliage. I want to make light and subsurface scattering on vegetation look more vivid and natural.

Snowy Flora, Savanna Bushes & Planetary Stations

Mirko Bartolini, Art Team: “Implementation of snowy flora for tundra and high-mountain regions. Snow is procedurally applied through the material based on the biome/region. Flora distribution is built from five “altitude and position-based” layers, with tree density generally decreasing as altitude increases.”

And behold – a shrubbery!

The Designer Team is making more and more stations and encounters so we can populate the Almagest system when NPCs and Factions come.

Renegade Base on Kemik:

Refinery on Caligo:

NPCs React and Shoot Back!

For months, we’ve been building the foundations, but now I’m finally getting to the truly exciting part: teaching our NPCs how to fight back and think for themselves. Making an AI that not only sees and hears you but also reacts intelligently – seeking cover, peeking out, and returning fire.

I want to share the first successful steps we’ve taken with visual and sound alerts, and how we are using behavior trees to bring their combat maneuvers to life.

Visual Alert NPCs feature a visual alert meter. If a player is fully spotted and then hides, the NPC will eventually return to an idle state here.

Sound Alert NPCs can investigate sounds, such as gunshots, even if they cannot see the player. Like visual alerts, they return to idle if silence persists.

Cover and Combat Maneuvers NPCs can now utilize low or full cover. They have the ability to peek and shoot from either the left or right corners of their cover.

VRAGE3 Editor Combat Behavior tree nodes now include settings that allow developers to define what an NPC should prioritize.

Flight Navigation Experiments And here you have a sneak peek of our ongoing 3D flight navigation project – here you can see navigation testing within a complex, but still static environment.

Full Dev Diary: https://blog.marekrosa.org/2026/05/mareks-dev-diary-may-21-2026/

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