Stellar Engineering

[aurreth]

Random musings on my ongoing project of creating my own star system.  Because I'm Starborn dammit, respect my gravitic powers!

Ok, more notes on what I've found as far as customizing planets and stars.  There's a lot of trial and error involved, and you get some hilarious results at times (such as duplicating entire star systems).

Planet biomes are semi-customizable.  You can pretty easily make alterations for any planet that has it's own unique biomes; not so good for something like Frozen Craters, that are shared across dozens of worlds. 

To completely edit ANY world, you need to be able to edit the biom files contained in Starfield - PlanetData2.ba2.  Somebody really needs to figure that out lol

BUT, discovering the existence of biom files, cloning planets becomes possible.  You can make a copy of Jemison, and replace Earth with it.  This is not a safe process, however, as it seems the mod data is loaded after you are place in the world.  If you quit the game on a cloned planet, when you load the save you load into a location that doesn't yet exist.  Basically you end up in a black void falling endlessly, and any attempt to get out locks up the game.  You don't have a location (cell) so you can't be moved someplace else.  Trying to change your cell, entering your ship or using the console or whatever, locks up the game and you'll have to force quit it.  That save is borked, you won't get it back. 

So copying planets is possible, but you have to remember to take off in your ship before saving.  Never save on the surface, only in orbit.

Tabled that for now.  Others have managed a much better job of biomes, but the tools for actually creating a new planet don't exist yet.

You can rename them though.  And stars.  It's a bit finicky, since the name appears in 3 places and if you change more than one you screw it up.  I've got an entire star system and it's planets renamed... and I created a new faction and assigned the system to it.  That faction name shows up in the space map just like Freestar, UC or Crimson Pirates.  No logo though, not sure where that is stored.

And, lastly, I have just moved that system across the galaxy to a better location (for me anyway).  Yup, I can move stars!  Starborn, hell yeah!  lol

 

 

Edited December 2, 2023 by aurreth

[aurreth]

Star coordinates seem to run from -10 to 10.  It might be a bit more than that, -12.5 is definitely off the edge of the map.  X is left and right, Z is up and down, Y is toward and away from you (and is pretty imperceptible unless there are other stars nearby).

Z works how you'd expect, but X is reversed, positive numbers are to the left of the origin, negative numbers to the right.  The origin is (more or less) Sol (t is slightly off in one direction by like .1).

If you want to move a star down the map, you subtract from Z.  If you want to move it left, you ADD to X.  I haven't really played with Y; it will change the jump distance, but you probably won't notice a visual change on the map.

 

[aurreth]

At the moment you don't seem able to change a star's type or color.  I tried to make a neutron star by changing one to a white dwarf (type WD0) and making it almost black, but nothing happened. 

There's a lot of cross linking in the star and planet records, so "obvious" changes frequently don't change a thing, or cause strange things to occur, such as creating two identical star systems.  There's only one there, but two show on the map (both go to the same place).

[aurreth]

There are CSV files in Starfield - PlanetData.ba2 that are readable with a spreadsheet program (I'm using LibreOffice).  They read more like dev notes than actual data.  Coordinates don't match star records in the ESM, and Bel does not have a gas giant orbiting a gas giant.  Tau Ceti I does not have constant lightning with no rain.  It's interesting to see what they wanted to do though, for example a planet that is only habitable at the bottom of giant canyons (this terrain does not exist in the game).  Obviously they wanted a more interesting universe and got stuck with PCM instead.

Oh, the actual names of some of the stars are in there.  Nemeria is the star 71 Herculis, Newton is 100 Herculis, and Serpentis is actually Alpha Serpentis. 

I'm hesitant to make changes to them without knowing if they actually do anything, because creating a mismatch with planet, star and location records could cause systems to disappear or be duplicated.

 

Edited December 4, 2023 by aurreth

[worm82075]

Not trying to rain on your parade here but it behooves me to see this much effort being given to solve a problem that will disappear the moment the CK releases. Seems to me your time would be better spent on something tangible that will not evaporate in the very near future.

[aurreth]

Eventually there will be a cure for cancer, so everyone should just stop working on it until then.  Their time will be better spent on something else.

It's my time, I'll spend it how I like. 

 

[aurreth]

Star records have a DNAM - ID containing a number.  There is a matching Star ID in the planet records.  These IDs are also in stars.csv.

The question, then, is whether or not altering the ID and coordinates of a star is sufficient to create a new one, or if a new entry needs to be added to stars.csv as well.

 

[HeyYou]

I would expect you would need a NEW record there for a new star system....

[aurreth]

9 hours ago, HeyYou said:

I would expect you would need a NEW record there for a new star system....

Well yes, duplicate a star record and change its Form ID, then Star ID to make a new system.  Unfortunately it doesn't work, even if you add a new line to stars.csv.

 

[HeyYou]

Gotta be missing a trick somewhere.....