Wrong Way Down

Space Engineers Survival Challenge

First episode thumbnail

Wrong Way Down (WWD) is an epic Space Engineers coop survival stream by the Zebra Monkeys. From part 3 on, Splitsie is joined by Capac and Texfire, and from part 4 on, also W4stedspace. The series was broadcast on Splitsie's YouTube channel, as well as Capac's and W4sted's Twitch channels, throughout the second half of 2019. Starting on 28.06.2019, thirteen episodes were live streamed, each 3-4 hours long, culminating in a Christmas-themed episode on 13.12.2019. The series coincides with Capac starting his own Twitch channel.

## The Challenge

The goal of this series was to drive from the EarthLike Planet's north pole all the way to the south pole, through hostile territory, and over even more hostile terrain. They limit themselves to *wheeled vehicles only*, no thrusters allowed.

The vehicles built on screen in survival mode are wilderness themed, for example Paul Bunyan/Ox (the anonymous blue rover in episodes 3-6), Splitsie's spiderlike Bird Eater (in episodes 6-13), W4sted's Mine Roo speederbike, Tex' caterpillar-like cargo tank CowTexPillar, and several other long-legged utility vehicles.

If one could drive halfways around an Space Engineers planet in a straight line on flat ground with a constant speed of 20m/s = 70 km/h, the 188km long journey would take only 2.6 hours. But since the planet has NPC drones, cliffs, craggies, crevasses, and mountains, actual progress is much slower, and commonly interspersed with bridge building and ramp jumping.

## Special Features and Mods Used

The Full mod list is available on Steam.

The most important mods:

* Lucas/Meridius' Modular Encounters Spawner (MES) mod combined with its Assertive Installations, Surface Occupation, and Assertive Air Traffic modules.
* Build Vision
* High-powered spotlights
* HUD Compass, and more

One special feature was the Wrong Way Down Map LCDs mod provided by community member Bravada Cadelanne: The weekly-updated mod included custom maps of the planet with auto-generated way markers indicating the path that the Zebra Monkeys had taken in the previous episodes. It relied on Remaarn's (private?) automatic GPS tracker mod. The maps were very popular because, this way, the audience could easily get the big picture whether they made progress or had to backtrack due to an unsurmountable obstacle.

Another popular custom mod, Decoys... Probably, was created by community member Kham in July 2019 after getting the idea to reskin decoy blocks as Capac in episode 2 of WWD. The decoys are functionally identical to vanilla decoys but they look like player-sized Space Engineers statues and they play a sound clip of Capac saying "ow" while damaged, which was donated by Splitsie to Kham for this purpose.

And, for the first time, the playlist featured three recap videos: The best scenes of the first three episode were summed up in under 20 mins for viewers who didn't have time to watch the full 4-hour episodes. The videos have the same thumbnails as the respective episode, just with cartoonish caps added to the characters (because they are re-caps).

## Episodes

* Wrong Way Down - Part 1 (Space Engineers Survival Challenge)
	+ Recap of Wrong Way Down Part 1
* Wrong Way Down - Part 2 (Space Engineers Survival)
	+ Recap of Wrong Way Down Part 2
* Wrong Way Down - Part 3 (Space Engineers Survival Challenge)
	+ Recap of Wrong Way Down Part 3 "Splatsie, deCapacitated and Lagfire"
* Wrong Way Down - Part 4: Bringing in the big guns (Space Engineers Survival)
* Wrong Way Down - Part 5 (Space Engineers Survival Challenge)
* Wrong Way Down - Part 6 The Spidering... (Space Engineers Survival Challenge)
* Wrong Way Down - Giant Bird Eating Spiders (Space Engineers Survival)
* Wrong Way Down - On the road again! (Space Engineers Survival)
* Wrong Way Down - The mountain pass
* Wrong Way Down - Are We There Yet?
* Wrong Way Down - Is it racing time yet?
* Wrong Way Down - Ramming Speed!
* Wrong Way Down - Lucky number 13! The End?