I can't decide really. I wait for more things to do in the game. I've put over 440 hours into 100% survival space engineers, and literally been working on the same ship in survival this whole time as the game's evolved with updates. Keep in mind I’ve never played this game in creative. And the ships I talk about here is all I’ve ever made in this game.
I started out with the super basic platform with no ships, no conveyors or any of that stuff. Back then I think they gave you the classic platform with refinery, assembler, small reactor, medical bay, 3 large landing gear, gravity generator and a control chair.
I hand drilled and gathered ore from the starter asteroid probably way longer than I should have. Built up the platform a bit, built my first mining ship. Then built a larger one not long after. Next I built a welding/grinding ship that I still use to this day and it's been extremely useful. I figured I would have replaced it long ago, but it works so damn well I never found a reason to build anything better.
I then started building the original base platform for my first large ship. Of course because I'm an idiot, I just kept building and making it bigger without putting any engines or anything on it, and I never locked it to the platform, so all it took was one small bump from my welder ship and I had to spend the next 8 hours manually pushing it back and forth and slowing its velocity so it didn't fly too far away from my platform while I mined like crazy to assemble all of the parts needed for 6 large thrusters and the large reactor to make it stop moving. At one point during this adventure I spent a bit too long mining and the next time I looked out to where my ship platform should have been, it wasn't there anymore. I flew out to my best guess of where the platform flew off to, and looked around for a good 20 minutes just looking for one pixel to twinkle on the screen. Thankfully it crossed over the moon texture and I was able to spot it, it was literally only like 2-3 pixels. Sooooo lucky. That platform eventually became the nose of my gigantic ship I spent most of my time building.
And so it began. What started out as a basic ship with wings, ended up turning into a giant space penis. But I had dumped so many resources into it, I couldn't stop now. You can see the reactor and thrusters still where they originally were trying to stop the ship from flying off into nothingness.
I later posted a sweet picture on this subreddit when I started putting the ceiling of the central floor on. After finishing the core structure and filling in all of the decks with random empty rooms and doors The original iteration of the ship was essentially complete.
I don't have any design skills whatsoever. It took me at least 200 hours to mine/refine/assemble/weld that ship by survival rules and I loved every second of it. Once procedural generated space opened up I realized I needed more space on the landing deck to assemble, and dock small ships. So essentially I widened the entire long nose of the ship to meet the width of the balls in the back. So it now essentially looks like a flying george foreman grill with a massively ugly bridge.
With all of the abandoned ships being added, I turned the bottom of the ship into a gigantic grinder connected to conveyors. So I can fly the gigantic tub around space, and then fly all the ships I find right into the grinders.
Right now I'm at a point where I really don't have much more to do. I have a gigantic ship, that can do pretty much everything I need to do in survival. I can tow all my small ships along with it without any major issues at max speed. I essentially just fly in a straight line and toss out a solar panel powered beacon every 50k or so.
I recently flew back to the point I started on my first procedurally generated map and slowly started filling in all the extra area of the ship with more useless empty rooms. I don't really know what to do next, but I'm hoping updates will give me another 200 hours of survival time.
Oh something fun to do. If you have a gigantic survival ship, where, if it happened to crash into something, you would probably have to spend hundreds of hours of time fixing it. If you take that ship and put it up to the game's new top speed, then get out of your bridge and walk to the nose of the ship and watch all the gigantic asteroids fly by, it's pretty scary feeling. Mostly because at that speed, it would just take one asteroid, and a question of if you could get to the bridge fast enough to stop the ship or jet the ship off course before hitting it. Very exciting.
tl;dr I've essentially spent over 440 hours in survival building the exact same large ship
