Medieval Engineers

The player controls a single character, the engineer, and builds structures, from small shacks to entire castles and even towns, using pre-defined building blocks. Blocks may be structural, functional, interactive, or aesthetic, and are grouped into two basic types: large and small. Large blocks such as walls, roofing and palisades determine structural integrity and may collapse under their own weight if not built carefully or if damaged in an attack. Small blocks such as timber, wheels for carts and siege equipment, furniture and crafting workstations serve aesthetic, interactive, and/or functional roles.

The small block items, and particularly the torsion bar, rope drum, axle (called a catch block), hand crank, projectiles, and rope ends are key features of Medieval Engineers, as they enable siege warfare. The player may combine these along with other small-block items to create battering rams, catapults, trebuchets, and siege towers, which use realistic physics based on mass, density, tension, and inertia. In a multi-player world, individual players may each claim territory, or share claimed territory, create "houses," build castles and defenses, then create siege engines to attack other player's or house's castles. As a sandbox game, win conditions are not defined but can be arranged separately by the players involved.

Medieval Engineers was developed and published by the indie video game developer Keen Software House based in the Czech Republic. It is a sandbox game built on Keen's own voxel-based game engine, VRAGE 2. The volumetric approach is what allows for realistic physical behavior.

The game is a follow-up to Keen's Software House's earlier Space Engineers, which is also a sandbox game based on the VRAGE 2 engine. The core difference in gameplay is that Space Engineers is set in a zero-gravity environment, whereas Medieval Engineers, taking place on an earth-like planet, uses gravity extensively. Space Engineers continued development in tandem with Medieval Engineers which offered technological feasibility and evaluation of capability to aid in the development of Space Engineers, for example compound blocks, spheroidal landscape, mechanical blocks, "Voxel hands," structural integrity, and procedural terrain generation. Medieval Engineers also benefited from some advancements introduced into Space Engineers, such as multi-player, physics, Steam Workshop integration, and a modding SDK.