Engineering

The engineering window contains everything you need to build structures, repair your own ship, scoop fuel and perform impact mining. At the top of the window, the current surplus energy for the system is shown as a quick reference.

Blueprints

The build section allows you to browse blueprints by category and build the structure if appropriate, if you can build the structure the build button will be active. Clicking through gives you details about the structure including the build criteria. This build criteria section helps you understand why you might not be able to build the structure. To build a structure you must be in a construction role ship, have the structure components needed in your hold, meet any skill requirements for the structure as well as have enough energy in the system and a suitable body to build on or around. Any build criteria with a cross mark indicates you fail the given criteria. The components required to build the structure are also listed in the details, along with if they are present in your hold or not.

The bases group provides a mechanism to build a pre-defined set of structures in one action, allowing you to quickly establish a suitable presence in your current system.

Structure components themselves can either be purchased or fabricated using a factory. The consumables required for the fabrication are listed in the recipes group, allowing you to browse what you need to fabricate which parts for a structure.

Fuel Scooping

If you have any fuel scoops fitted, you can use the fuel scooping section to scoop fuel from a given body. A fuel scoop can only scoop from a specified body type, the bodies you can currently scoop fuel from with your current loadout are listed for convenience, along with the fuel statistics of your current ship.

Impact Mining

Impacting mining is a skill that allows you to mine asteroids for consumables, using your ships weapons.

To start impact mining, first orbit an asteroid field and then open the engineering window and select impact mining.

You will see asteroids listed you can impact mine, and to begin mining them select their name. Impact Mining involves slowly and methodically using your ships weapons to destroy areas of an asteroid to expose consumables to space, so that they can be recovered. Every time you remove an area there is a chance collateral damage will occur that might destroy whole sections of the asteroid by mistake (including consumables). The consumables available (if any) are listed and their location present on the grid.

Areas you can fire at will have a target icon and be labelled to indicate the grid block can be mined. Grid blocks with consumables present will have a gold target icon and labelled with the consumable quantity and name. To get to the consumables you must create a path so that the consumable grid block has destroyed blocks (exposed to space) adjacent to them.

The asteroids and the consumables within to do replenish, so you will only get one chance to retrieve the consumables. You will need to find new sites for impact mining, which are also listed in the impact mining section.

A higher impact mining skill will reduce the change of collateral damage.

Repair

Lastly, if your ship requires repair as it has damage to its hull or systems you can start repairs using the repair section. Repairing is an idle activity that will take time and will stop once all damage has been repaired. Shields cannot be repairs and will instead recharge slowly over time based on the available power your ship has.