Space Engineers 2 is a game about building ships, rovers and bases out of blocks, then flying them around a planet where any block can be shot off again. On Monday, October 19, 2026, Keen Software House released Hostile Encounters, a major Alpha update that adds the game’s first combat NPCs. Space Engineers 2 is in Early Access on Steam for Windows at $29.99.
Hold it out of the Friday poll for now, because Space Engineers 2 is still single-player. Keen’s update post calls multiplayer “an important milestone” and says the plan is four-player co-op with player hosting first, with dedicated servers later. There is no date for either. So the enemies got here before your friends did.
How the Renegades handle a base you can take apart
There are two enemy types so far. Renegades are outlaws and pirates on the planet Verdure, and Boatmen are the heavier leaders inside Renegade groups. They have no jetpacks yet and stay inside Verdure’s atmosphere. They patrol, take cover, retreat when hurt, warn their group about threats, and attack both you and anything you built. They can walk through player-built interiors and open doors, and they are also supposed to notice when their cover has been destroyed.
Keen says the NPCs “need to understand and react to an environment that can change around them at any moment.” In most shooters the wall stays a wall. Here you can grind it away, park a rover across the corridor, or dig the hill out from under them. I would want to see the Renegades handle that last one before I trust the claim.
The rest of the update backs the fighting up. Your aim is now better when crouching and worse when jumping, moving or hurt, and the Automatic Rifle kicks upward. There are 19 new blocks, including an Interior Turret, cables, pipes and Armor Slabs. The opening tutorial on Almagest has new Contracts and Locations, and some of them only show up in a new save. Experimental NVIDIA DLSS is in for RTX cards.
The first game sets the bar for the multiplayer. The original Space Engineers entered early access in October 2013, left it in February 2019, and has sold more than 5 million copies. It runs dedicated servers with crossplay across PC and console, and local hosting goes up to 32 players. Our server ran it for a long time, and a sequel that starts at four players will have to grow fast.
For now, buy Space Engineers 2 for the solo builder in your group, and keep the old server up for everyone else.
