Tutorials

Basic tips for building a ship in Dual Universe

This is Dual Universe Trailer

When it comes to building a ship in Dual Universe, there are a lot of things to be aware of. The game fully models physics and motion for the ships, so you have to consider that when designing things.  So how do you build a ship in Dual Universe? Let’s talk about some of the finer points.

Keep physics in mind when building and placing components. Putting too many engines on one side of the craft will muck with its center of gravity and cause it to be unstable in flight. Also, be sure to mirror your design in most cases. Balance is key, so if you make a change to one side of the frame of a ship, press U to make those changes to the other side.

You can also check to see the performance of your new ship via the Atmospheric Flight Engineer screen. This will display the amount of thrust and other attributes your ship is capable of producing and sustaining.

You will also need a large quantity of Quanta, which is the currency for Dual Universe. Having cash on-hand to buy the engines, components, raw materials and other items you will need is vital to getting a ship built. With the materials in stock, it’s time to talk about the actual building process.

Elements galore

Elements are the actual components that you build your ship out of. They come in two main categories: Voxel Elements and Mesh Elements. From within these elements you will pick both the basic shape of the craft, as well as other items like the engines and electronics.

Voxel Elements are pre-created or player-created complex shapes that are used to build the superstructure of the ship. Think of these as the basic blueprints for the hull and wings. These can be saved and alter by players as they choose, allowing for some decent streamlining of the process.

Mesh Elements are pre-created functional components such as engines, control consoles, sensor arrays, weapons, and anything else that has a predefined shape and statistics attached. If something has a designated role, it’s a mesh element.

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Tools of the trade

The player has access to a bunch of different tools when building a ship in Dual Universe. Since ships and other items in the game are comprised of basic shapes at the lowest level, you have a variety tools for altering and adding shape, texture and more to your designs.

The basic creation tools revolve around Ghosts. Not the spooky kind, but of a more ghostly outline kind. When you work on a ship design, you will see a basic outline of the design, and as you alter it or add elements, the color of the outline will change.

  • A blue ghost indicates that the action will complete as intended.
  • A yellow ghost indicates that placing such a shape is possible, but certain factors, such as rendering scale, will cause it to display abnormally.
  • A red ghost indicates that placing such a shape is not possible, and the player will be given an error message that explains the problem, such as insufficient resources or attempting to place voxels outside of the build zone.

You will have things like smoothing or paint tools to alter the color and overall sleek nature of a ship. These will allow you to turn a colorless boxy design into something more elegant and unique. Make sure to complete the design before creating your blueprint master from it. And when using that blueprint, you can simply slap down a new ship of the same make.

As more and more complex designs are added to the game, this feature will get more interesting to fool around with. So feel free to experiment and see what you can find.

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