Crossplay was recently added in Space Engineers to allow Playstation 4 and Playstation 5 players to play the much loved (or hated) game PC players have been raving about for years - however, it does come with some caveats.
How to...
In the Southnode Control Panel, to enable Crossplay - you will need to do two things in the SE - General menu under the Configuration menu:
- Enable "Crossplay Compatibility"
- Change networking type to EOS
- Change "Max Planet Types" to 3
Doing these things will enable crossplay - however...
Caveats...
There are a few things that crossplay does not allow:
Crossplay does not play nice with existing PC server worlds
The PC version (non-crossplay) generates many different planets such as Earth, Moon, Pertam, Titan etc. Crossplay does not allow for this many planet types, and you will need to remake your world if this is an issue. You will note the following error in the console if this is something the server comes across when crossplay is enabled: "Exception while loading world: World contains too many planet types and could not be loaded."
If this happens, the server will wipe all of your planets, and you will have to either restore from a backup, or create new planets (not exceeding 3 planet types)
Crossplay servers only support a maximum of 3 planet types
If your max planet type value is higher than 3 (in the Configuration menu under SE - Others), you will need to change it to 3 or lower in the SpaceEngineers-Dedicated.cfg config file (or in the Configuration menu under SE - Others). You may have to remove .vx2 files of the planets from your world save folder. You can have multiple planets of the same type - but only 3 or less types of planet - for example you can have Earth, Moon, Mars, Earth2, Mars2, Mars3 etc etc. You cannot have Earth, Mars, Alien, Moon, Petram and Titan all at once, as that would be 6 planet types.
Crossplay does not support workshop mods - at all
Workshop mods will make the server break in crossplay mode, as consoles do not support Steam - do not add them to a crossplay-enabled server. You will need to remove all workshop mods in your Sandbox_config.sbc before a crossplay server will work. Note that this may break your world - you may wish to create one brand new.
Servers with Crossplay enabled use EOS networking - not Steam - and cannot be queried
Given that Crossplay requires EOS Networking to be enabled as opposed to Steam networking, the query function of the server will no longer work. Bear this in mind if you utilise any bots to check server status.
Crossplay will show your server on the EOS list (the little E menu item in the Browser menu) - not the Steam server list (The Steam menu item in the Browser menu)
This catches people out. Bear in mind that a Crossplay server utilising EOS Networking will show up in a different menu.
Further Reading
