Marek’s Dev Diary: August 27, 2026

News

27/08/2026

Meet the Renegades – hostile NPCs and space pirates who are starting to appear across the Almagest System and make it a much more dangerous place. They are being built to fight back when you cross their path.

In our latest combat test, you can see a player taking on the first few brave Renegades directly. This is an early look at how NPC combat is coming together as we continue developing their behavior, reactions, and combat encounters.

NPC speed is the main thing we are solving right now – most likely will end up with a separate animation controller for the NPCs, with variable speeds, and animators will redesign the animations, to feel more grounded, heavy, realistic. The same for shooting animations or death animation.

Alice Vescio, Space Engineers 2 Character Artist: “My goal for Renegades was to create a grounded, threat-focused tactical asset. I focused heavily on material separation (contrasting worn metallic armor plating with heavy-duty fabrics) to give the gear an authentic, battle-tested feel.

While the emissives were originally blue, shifting them to red strongly reinforces the hostile “renegade” faction identity and improves gameplay readability. I love how visual storytelling touches, such as mismatched, scavenged armor pieces, spray-painted details like the skull decal, and etched tally marks, sell that improvised pirate/rebel warrior vibe and help establish character lore at a glance.”