System Integrity

Every ship system in starmade has integrity except for reactor chamber groups and hull. Integrity is a measurement of how much health an individual system has. If a system's integrity drops below 0 then the system will explode. This is especially true of large system groups, so care must be taken to ensure that they are built correctly.

Building For Integrity

Schine Integrity Chart

Building for system integrity is relatively simple. The first thing that you need to know is that the integrity of various systems can be found either in the advanced buildmode menu to the left, or on the cursor when placing a system. Shields and power can be found in the buildmode menu while the integrity of thrusters, weapons, and stabilizers can be found on the buildmode reticule when placing those systems. However, integrity is calculated slightly differently for shields and thrusters than for the other types of systems.

The basics of how integrity is calculated is as follows from the January 20th, 2018 developer news post:

For each group of systems, there’s a starting value of 200 integrity which will go up or down depending on how many blocks each block touches within that group. The penalty only applies if your integrity goes below 0, so small ships generally don’t have to worry about it at all.

• Touches 0 blocks: - 10 integrity
• Touches 1 blocks: - 8.5 integrity
• Touches 2 blocks: - 7 integrity
• Touches 3 blocks: - 4 integrity
• Touches 4 blocks: - 2 integrity
• Touches 5 blocks: + 0.5 integrity
• Touches 6 blocks: + 2 integrity

The integrity mechanic applies to all usable systems, but not hull.

There are a few special groups worth mentioning:

• Thrusters will be considered as the same group, they all share the same integrity value.
• Stabilizers group if close enough, get combined into a single group. This can easily be seen when looking at their outline in build mode with a stabilizer block selected in the hotbar.
• Shield integrity will take the lowest integrity of both rechargers and capacitors within a shield radius. A shield with low integrity will also receive damage on a shield hit, which means that this is the only module where integrity is an absolute necessity.

What integrity rules entail is that for each system that uses integrity it is better to build them with high depth and width when compared to the length of the system. However with thrusters integrity is shipwide so integrity is nearly a non-issue. With shields however, the stability within a shield bubble is limited by the group in that bubble with the lowest integrity. So, shield capacitor groups with low integrity can drastically weaken your vessel's shield system.

The chart to the right published by schine provides an illustration of how integrity is calculated.