Space Engineers Platinum Guide: Where to Mine It and How to Use It

Space is mostly empty, but Space Engineers occasionally rewards persistent prospectors with materials worth the trip. Platinum sits near the top of that list. It is rare, easy to miss, and gates a long list of endgame equipment.

What Platinum Looks Like

Platinum Ore is a base resource with a smooth, faintly lustrous surface. Visually it falls between Silver and Silicon: less reflective than the first, less grainy than the second. The material exists in two forms, ore (what you mine) and ingot (what you refine). You will need plenty of both before you can build anything interesting with it.

Where Platinum Spawns

Unlike most basic ores, Platinum is not found on planets. It only generates inside asteroids and on moons, and even then it does not appear on every one of them. Worse, its pale gray tone blends almost seamlessly into the surrounding rock, so deposits are easy to walk straight past during a survey. Expect to scan a lot of dead asteroids before you find a productive node, and bring an ore detector with decent range if you want to keep your sanity.

Refining Platinum Ore

Processing is simple once you have raw ore in storage. Drop 200x Platinum Ore into any Refinery and you will get a single Platinum Ingot in roughly 3 seconds. The conversion ratio is brutal, but the refining speed is one of the fastest in the game, so the bottleneck is always the mining, never the smelting.

Recipes That Require Platinum Ingots

With ingots stockpiled, head to an Assembler to build endgame components and gear. Platinum unlocks the following items:

• Thruster Components: 30x Iron Ingot, 10x Cobalt Ingot, 1x Gold Ingot, 0.4x Platinum Ingot
• Elite Hand Drill: 20x Iron Ingot, 3x Nickel Ingot, 3x Silicon Wafer, 2x Platinum Ingot
• Elite Welder: 5x Iron Ingot, 1x Nickel Ingot, 0.2x Cobalt Ingot, 2x Platinum Ingot
• Elite Grinder: 3x Iron Ingot, 1x Nickel Ingot, 1x Cobalt Ingot, 2x Silicon Wafer, 2x Platinum Ingot
• Elite Automatic Rifle: 3x Iron Ingot, 1x Nickel Ingot, 6x Silver Ingot, 4x Platinum Ingot
• Rocket (called 200mm Missile Container in versions before 1.202): 1.2x Magnesium Powder, 0.1x Uranium Ingot, 0.2x Silicon Wafer, 7x Nickel Ingot, 55x Iron Ingot, 0.04x Platinum Ingot

The Thruster Components recipe is the one most builders feel first: every large-grid ship eventually leans on Platinum just to keep moving. Stockpile a few hundred ingots before committing to any serious fleet project.