Creator Spotlight: Benokt

“I don’t think it’d be hyperbole to say that Space Engineers was my gateway to all of modern gaming, and even really the modern internet as a whole. It was Space Engineers that convinced me that I needed a Steam account and a better computer, and it was my incredibly surprising success on the Workshop some years later that got me curious about the community I’d mostly neglected.

I first encountered Space Engineers in 2014, at the height of the early-access-survival-sandbox boom. I was already a fan of Roblox and Minecraft, so I thought I’d branch out a bit and try something new, and a bombastic trailer depicting the building, flying, and spectacular crashing of a blue spaceship caught my eye. I did grumble a bit at having to sign up for this strange “Steam” service, though.

To say that my decrepit work laptop was ill-equipped to play Space Engineers would certainly be correct but wouldn’t really articulate the severity of that experience. The framerate was something like one per second; to get anything done, I had to learn how to move, build, and fight with a significant amount of guesswork and prediction. (In practice this mostly meant I did everything at a snail’s pace so as to not splatter hours of work against an asteroid.) Yet while I’d consider any other game unplayable in this state, Space Engineers was so enthralling that I played like this, one second at a time, for over a thousand hours. So enraptured was I with Space Engineers that it was among the chief reasons for my building a new, much more powerful computer to let me see more of it in a given second. This new hardware, intended just for one game, combined with my growing experience with Steam to finally free me from my comfortable little cell of aging classics. (Though the lion’s share of my time still went to Space Engineers, naturally.)

I also credit Space Engineers for exposing me to my first real online community, one that is now very dear to my heart. I still recall trawling the red-and-white forums, excitedly opening Drui’s Thursday update posts announcing shiny new things, curiously scrolling through the tales of space dragons, and rallying with strangers against the terror of exploding dogs. Watching planets grow from a simple suggestion to a flashing countdown at the top of the screen felt like I’d not just witnessed history, but maybe even helped make it. Years later, my first success on the Workshop would lead me to the description of a very kind YouTube video about one of my creations, where I found the link to my first Space Engineers Discord server. From there, I was catapulted by my own curiosity into a friendly, thriving community where players and programmers felt closer and more personable than I’d ever experienced or even expected, and I loved it.

For most of my 8000-odd hours in Space Engineers, I didn’t really build much of my own. Most of my time was spent hijacking cargo ships in survival mode (which I still find immensely satisfying, if a bit repetitive) with a crude rocket launcher (later railgun) setup slapped onto my lovely yellow starter dinghy. A bit after the release of jump drives and PCU, I finally decided to take a whack at building something of my own; I had wanted to explore planets for a while, but had long been held back by the fact that there were no atmospheric cargo ships I could commandeer to assuage my fears of building the dreaded “brick.” From there, I knew I wanted to make something different. The result was a ship I called Chaturanga, the intersection of building methods I’d learned in Minecraft, my affinity for unconventional colors and shapes, my amateur interest in South Asian culture, and my pathological urge to avoid mining at any cost. Satisfied with my first ship I wasn’t ashamed of, I took the only logical next step and put the game down for about six years.

I returned to Space Engineers sometime in 2023, finally having overcome whatever malaise had kept me away, to find a very different experience than I remembered. A much, much better experience. I adored the block variety, the armor skins, and the new weapons, all things I whose absence had let me grow bored of building. I remade Chaturanga, swapping brown paint for rust, reveling in my newfound ability to make my creations “lived-in,” scrappy, and personal. Chatruanga became the Queen of the Wastes, which then somehow stole the top spot on the workshop for a week and thrust me, bewildered, into an irreplaceable hobby and community.

Thank you, Keen Software House, and thank you to every one of my subscribers and followers that motivate my need to create.“