Component

Components are the building blocks from which all constructables, or constructs, are made. There's quite a few different kinds of components, but the big ones are the blocks which serve as both the structural backbone and armour of whatever you're building, the propulsion components which keep your constructs moving, the weapons whose purpose should be obvious, and the Power systems which, you guessed it, power the propulsion parts, as well as some of the weapon systems, although most guns just use raw resources. Speaking of which, you'll need some resource storage blocks as well.

A ship's wheel or some other part from the Control category may also be useful to help you keep your craft moving in the right direction, and you should probably also put a remote weapon controller nearby while you're at it so that you can aim and fire your vehicle's weapons without having to leave the steering wheel unattended.

Once you actually bring your creations into Combat however, you may find that armour blocks, while useful, will only survive so much punishment. Eventually, you'll encounter enemies so powerful that you'll need to start building defence systems to make it harder for the enemy to actually hit you.

As you build more constructs (In case you're wondering, it's the game's technical term for ships, fortresses, airplanes, and such), you may also want to add some AI components to your creations so that they're able to drive around and fire their weapons at stuff all on their own.

That last part is optional, but trying to turn every rudder and aim every gun on every ship in the fleet, all at the same time, well... it's a good recipe for a headache if nothing else. And besides, even once you have an AI mainframe or three for every ship, you can press the C key, disable the AI's movement routine, and take the wheel just like before.

Blocks
The core building blocks, beams, slopes and corners.

The "full set" of shapes includes the basic block, 2m, 3m, and 4m beams, 1-4m slopes, diagonal 4m slope, 1-4m left and right square and triangle corners, 1-4m inverted triangle corners, 1-4m wedges, 1-4m poles, and 1-4m front and back wedge slopes.

Water
Components specific to ships and submarines.

Air
Components specific to planes, hot air balloons and space ships.

Control
All of the components required to control your vehicles, spin blocks and sky fortresses as well as other components such as chairs and fire control computers.

Resource
Resource gathering, processing and storage components.

Engines
Engine components as well as electric engines and generators.

Misc
Various things that allow for repairing, spawning and re-spawning amongst other things.

Simple Weapons
A variety of one-component weapons.

Missiles
Everything you need to make missiles, torpedoes, mines and depths charges.

Decorations
Doors, stairs, lights, etc.

CRAM Cannons
Ballistic projectile weapons.

Laser
Laser and anti-missile projection systems.

AI
AI components used to make autonomous vessels

Subobject
Subobjects are attached to spin blocks or turrets. Entire subobjects may be saved, and then later loaded in a single step.

Prefabs
Allows loading and saving of large chunks of a vehicle.